6 Avaline
This was January reaching up out of my own marrow, absolute zero blooming outward from the calcified thing behind my ribs.
Stand up.
My legs did not answer. The command hit the floor of my mind and died in a drift of snow.
Frost crawled over the backs of my hands, white lace tracing every vein, crystallizing along my knuckles where the Warden blood had already dried.
My breath came out of me in a thick plume of visible cold in a heated cabin.
The still-water mind—the pristine Scribe ledger that had kept all the names and dates—flickered, the ink turning to slush, the pages freezing shut at the corners.
His body hit mine like a downed power line.
I never saw him cross the cabin. My vision had already narrowed to a dark tunnel ringed in frost. One breath I was falling toward the diamond-plate deck and the next there were arms around me, and heat, tectonic and enormous, a furnace poured into the shape of a man—and my frozen wolf came up off the floor of me screaming.
Ours. HIM. Warm—
She lunged at the heat and the heat burned.
His body against my chest, frost meeting Founding fire and both of them tearing at each other across the boundary of my skin.
But beneath the frost, down in the animal meat of my lower belly, a slick, pooling fever erupted—an agonizingly sharp sexual hunger for the hard planes of his muscles that made my pelvis tilt involuntarily against his hip.
My spine arched against the gurney. A sound came out of me I didn’t choose—guttural, animal, a frustrated ruttle from a wolf who could see the sun through the ice of her cage and could not reach it.
I clawed at him, though my fingers felt like frozen driftwood, the nerves screaming with the prickle of a thousand needles.
My fists caught the fabric of his shirt and I dragged his heat closer, harder, into me, because the burning was better than the freezing, because even the pain of his solid, impenetrable body against mine was more than I’d had for two decades.
“Avaline—Goddess—” His voice sounded like a man shouting through three feet of packed snow. He was already tearing at his gear, ripping his shirt off, dragging bare forearms against my crystallizing skin. “Stay with me. Look at me, look—”
I looked, though my eyelashes were heavy with frost, sticking together with every blink.
The obsidian was gone from his eyes. There was only gold now, wolf-gold gone wild and terrified, and under the gold, so far under it—the boy. The one from the fence rail. The one who’d laughed and kissed the top of my head.
You did this. The thought surfaced through the gray static in my skull, cold and clean.
Twenty years ago your fire jump-started a heart that wasn’t ready and the Beacon lit the sky and the Wardens came—and then you left me for dead.
You let them drag me into a twenty-year hell.
And here you are again, your fire in my blood, and it is killing me again.
I hate you for abandoning me, you arrogant beautiful mountain, and I hate myself even more for how violently my body still wants you.
“It hurts,” I got out. My jaw locked in a chattering spasm, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek until copper flooded my tongue just to force the words past my teeth. “Reed. Your heat—it doesn’t— it makes it worse—”
“Then I’ll stop, I’ll back off—”
“No.” My stiffened fingers curled like claws into the meat of his shoulder.
Backing away would freeze me solid. I despised my dependence on his heat, despised the slick, shameful moisture pooling between my thighs, but survival was survival.
“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare leave me in the dark again. ”
Something broke in his face at that. Good. Let it break. Let him feel one crack of what I’d carried.
The transport banked hard, the roar of the engines vibrating up through the deck into my frozen heels.
Through the blur of my frosted vision, the cabin smeared into shapes of amber and shadow.
The women from Row Three sat huddled along the port-side benching, wrapped in emergency blankets.
Lynnea had her arms wrapped tight around Marisol, both of them staring with wide, hollow eyes at the man holding me.
The twins were shivering in the corner, clutching their improvised pipe-clubs like talismans against the dark.
Around them stood the hotshots. I could smell the wolves in them.
“Move your bulk, Alpha.”
The voice cut through the ringing in my ears—low, dry, and completely unimpressed by the desperate Alpha energy shaking the deck.
An older woman pushed through the wall of broad-shouldered hotshots.
I couldn’t sharpen my eyes enough to catch every detail of her face, but she looked like a tired old woman who belonged behind the counter of a laundromat—small, round-shouldered, wearing a faded knitted cardigan over a floral dress, with thick reading glasses swinging from a silver chain against her chest. Two younger women followed in her wake—chalk-runners by the look of them, wearing grease-stained canvas jackets and carrying earthenware bowls, bundles of dried elder-stalks, and blocks of soft white chalk.
“Maren—” Reed’s voice broke, raw and shattered. He didn’t shift his body an inch, his arms locking me tight against his burning chest. “She’s crashing. Her blood is turning to ice. Fix her—”
“I don’t fix things that were broken twenty years ago with a snap of my fingers, boy,” the woman—Maren—said plainly. She dropped heavily to her knees beside the gurney, not even raising her voice.
She reached out with two chapped fingers, pressing them firmly into the hollow of my throat where my pulse was fluttering like a moth against a windowpane.
Her touch was rough and warm, smelling of lye soap, dried calendula, and woodsmoke—and beneath it, faintly, the uncanny, profound nothing of ancient concealment magic.
“Quiet your wolf before you blow the rivets out of the plane’s hull,” Maren murmured.
She peered over the top of her spectacles, her sharp eyes scanning the white frost crawling in fractal lace across my collarbones and jaw.
Behind her, the two younger witches dropped to their knees on the deck, instantly setting to work.
One began scraping a protective boundary circle of soft white hearth-chalk across the metal plating around our bodies, while the other began grinding dried birch root and elder pith into an earthenware bowl with a smooth river stone.
Maren unstoppered a small jar, scooping a thick, grey paste of tallow and crushed roots onto her chapped palms.
“Give her to me,” Maren commanded.
Reed shifted his weight with agonizing care, keeping his fevered skin pressed flush to my ribs while Maren laid her paste-covered palms flat over the center of my chest.
The moment her hands made contact with the frost, Maren went completely still.
Her reading glasses clicked against the buttons of her cardigan.
For three long seconds, the matriarch didn’t breathe.
The faint hum of her magic—that low, three-note vibration—sank through the calcified shell around my heart, reading the deep current of my marrow.
The two witches behind her picked up the three-note chant, their low voices weaving a steady hearth-ward into the engine drone.
When Maren looked up at Reed, her eyes were cold, dark, and heavy with judgement.
“You arrogant young fool,” Maren said softly.
Reed flinched as if she’d struck him.
“This isn’t a normal dormant purge,” Maren said, her voice dropping into the quiet cadence of an elder who has seen kingdoms burn.
“A dormant wolf shifter’s body burns hot to clear standard suppression drugs.
This body is freezing. There’s an open doorway in the marrow of her bones, and the cold is blowing through from the other side. ”
“She’s... She’s right,” I forced the words out between clattering molars, my throat so constricted by frost that every syllable scraped like broken glass.
Reed’s head snapped down to me, his golden eyes wide, frantic, his bare chest heaving against mine. “Avaline—don’t try to speak, don’t waste your strength—”
“In the Dreamscape,” I gasped, a cold spasm rippling through my diaphragm that stole my breath.
For a terrifying half-second, the metal walls of the transport seemed to dissolve, replaced by the shale and mist of the astral plane.
“Below the Sanctuary farm... There’s a drowned canyon.
I’ve stood at the cedar fence and looked down into it.
The elixir isn’t just in my blood—it’s a river in the Dreamscape.
A thick, stagnant flood of pearl-white poison. ”
Maren nodded slowly, her chapped thumb smoothing the paste over my collarbone, the herbs stinging against the raw cold.
“My wolf is on the other side,” I told Reed, fighting against the numbness creeping into my fingers as I dug my nails into the muscle of his upper arm.
“I’ve seen her. Across that canyon. She’s still pacing the far cliff behind the mist-wards, like before.
But now there’s a poisoned river that keeps me from her.
And she’s not the only one. Every dormant wolf ever dosed—every stolen soul across the continent—their wolf spirits are trapped on the far bank of that poisonous river.
They’re crying in the dark and they can’t cross. ”
Reed’s throat worked, his jaw clenching as he tried to process the horror of what I was describing.
Maren wiped a smudge of paste across my forehead, her thumb tracing the line of my eyebrow before turning back to Reed.
“You went into the Dreamscape twenty years ago, didn’t you?” Maren asked, her gaze boring straight into Reed’s golden irises. “Under a solstice moon. For a girl who’s whose wolf was still sleeping in the astral grass. You tried to jump-start her First Shift with your Founding fire.”