6 Avaline #3
“Avaline... Goddess, Avaline,” Reed choked out, his voice a jagged rasp of pure agony, his tears scalding against my freezing cheek. “I can feel your body burning for it. Your scent is drowning me. My wolf is tearing my ribs apart trying to get to you.”
“Control your beast,” Maren commanded ruthlessly, pouring a fresh dollop of birch salve into her palm. “You’re a Founding Alpha, not a feral stray. You hold your line.”
“Then what do I do?” Reed pleaded, his forehead falling against mine in anguished despair. “If I can’t anchor her Heat, how do I keep her alive?”
Maren didn’t answer immediately. Her hands remained flat over my chest, her sharp hazel eyes narrowing behind her spectacles as the low, three-note hum of her hedge-magic vibrated through the metal deck.
Slowly, the tension in the old witch’s shoulders shifted. A sudden clarity settled into her weathered face.
“Twenty years ago under a summer solstice, you lit a fire you couldn’t control,” Maren murmured, her voice dropping into a quiet rasp that cut clean through the engine roar. She looked up from my chest, fixing Reed with a piercing stare. “And tonight, of all the nights—”
Reed’s jaw clenched, his eyes wild with terror. “I don’t give a damn about the calendar, Maren. Tell me how to save her.”
“You’d better give a damn, hotshot,” Maren snapped, tapping a chalk-dusted finger against his collarbone.
“Because it’s the only reason she didn’t turn to ice the second you touched her.
Tonight is the autumn equinox. The Harvest Moon is blazing at its full apex right outside this hull.
The scales of light and dark, fire and frost, are sitting in absolute celestial balance. ”
The two young chalk-runners behind her gasped, their hands pausing over their earthenware bowls.
“An Old-World bonding rite fractured at the summer solstice can only be counterbalanced and mended under its astronomical twin,” Maren continued, her gaze burning into Reed’s irises.
“The Goddess Moon has been watching over you tonight, boy. The alignment is live right now. But the window is razor-thin. When that Harvest Moon sets behind the western ridges, the equinox alignment breaks. If you haven’t finished the rite and brought her wolf across that poison before sunrise, the scales tip, the frost locks her marrow permanently, and you will likely lose her forever. ”
“Tell me what to do,” Reed demanded.
“There is only one way,” Maren said, her voice turning into iron command.
“The law that broke in the spirit must be mended in the spirit. You fight on two planes at once. Out here in the waking world, you wrap your body around hers. You run your Founding furnace at a steady simmer—not boiling, not surging, just enough constant surface heat to keep her physical flesh from freezing solid before we land. And while your body acts as her hearth out here... you send your soul down the tether into the Dreamscape where the Goddess Moon protects her children in the Loom.”
She gestured to the chalk circle the younger witches had drawn on the diamond plating.
“You go to that drowned canyon,” Maren told him.
“You meet her at the cedar fence. You take your Founding fire to the shore of that pearl-white river and you build the bridge she needs to reach her wolf. You finish the rite you abandoned. You join her soul to her beast on the other side of that poison, and once she is whole in the spirit, her body will know how to thaw without killing her.”
Maren’s gaze hardened, leaning closer so her breath warmed my frost-bitten cheek.
“And remember the ancient law of spirit and stone, Alpha. The poison river in the Loom does not flow from nowhere—it has living roots in the waking earth. What boils in their vats here in the physical world feeds the toxic current in the spirit-realm. If those three fonts keep pouring their poison, that river will rise up to drown your bridge no matter what blood magic flows through your veins.”
“I don’t care what they’re brewing out here,” Reed promised against my forehead, his breath warm and ragged. “I’ll lay obsidian across that river foot by foot. I’ll build her a bridge over whatever the hell they pour.”
A bridge, I thought, the concept flickering across the slush of my freezing mind. That has to be enough.
I spent the last ounce of my strength pulling on his collar.
“Do not let me drown in that river, Reed,” I rasped, my vision tunneling to black at the edges. “Find my wolf. Bring her to me.”
“I’m right behind you, Avaline,” Reed vowed, his arms locking around my shivering frame, his fevered skin pressing flush to mine, holding the line between my dying cold and his living flame.
“Her pulse is dropping!” one of the young witches called out, her voice sounding distant, muffled as if under deep ice.
The roar of the plane’s turbines faded into a distant, muffled hum. The amber cabin lights dissolved into silver mist.
“Go!” Maren’s voice sharpened into a battle cry. “Dive into the dark and find your mate’s wolf!”
The cold pulled me down, down into the roaring silence of the Dreamscape—where the drowned canyon waited, and the white wolf howled.