7 Reed
The roar of the engines was deafening, but inside Maren’s chalk circle, the world had narrowed to the dying woman in my arms.
I kept my physical body locked over hers on the gurney—bare chest to her frozen back, heavy thighs bracketing her rigid legs, both arms crossed over her fluttering sternum.
I ran my Founding furnace at the disciplined simmer Maren had ordered.
Beneath the rumble of the aircraft, the two younger hedge-witches maintained their low, three-note working, the domestic hum of their chant vibrating against the diamond plating beneath my knees.
Dive into the dark and find her, Maren had said.
It sounded simple. It was anything but.
In wolf shifter lore, the Dreamscape was known as the Moon’s Threshold—the Goddess’ silver loom.
It was the shared, unconscious astral plane where the sleeping minds of her children, our wolf spirits, were meant to drift together.
Under normal conditions, an active pack entered the Threshold naturally during sleep, running across starlit silver pastures to reinforce bonds across hundreds of miles.
But I was a Founding Alpha. My magic was tectonic, forged in magma and bedrock, built for breaching blast doors and anchoring firelines, not delicate astral weaving.
Twenty years ago, when I had reached for her in the dark, I had done what an arrogant young Alpha does: thrown brute-force pulses of celestial fire down the mate bond from the outside, battering against the walls of her quarantine like a sledgehammer against stone.
To actually enter the Dreamscape—to step out of the meat and bone of my own skull and walk the astral plane—required surrendering the very thing that had kept me alive for decades: physical control.
For her, I would risk anything.
I closed my eyes. I pressed my brow hard against her temple, breathing in a trace of honeysuckle beneath the chemical frost. I forced my lungs to slow, matching the shallow, broken cadence of her failing heart.
Find the thread.
I sank inward, bypassing the roaring adrenaline in my blood, tuning out the shouting in the cabin and Del’s heavy boots in the aisle, hunting for the silver line.
There.
A filament no thicker than a spider’s silk, humming with a frequency so faint it was almost lost beneath the engine drone. The open solstice rite.
I took hold of it with my soul, and I let go of the earth.
The plunge was instantaneous.
It was the stomach-dropping vertigo of falling down an elevator shaft into a starless void.
Astral gravity caught me, dragging my consciousness down through layers of fog—the heavy, silver-binding residue of the Order’s aurum latens pooling at the edges of her mind.
The cold down here wasn’t from the temperature.
It was the absence of life, an absolute-zero pressure that crushed inward like deep ocean water.
My molten blood rebelled, the instinct to flare my furnace and burn the fog away screaming in my ears.
No, I commanded myself, grinding my astral teeth against the urge. Burn now and you detonate her marrow. Follow the thread.
I have her scent, my obsidian wolf snarled in the dark beside me.
He had materialized as a massive shadow running parallel to my descent, his hackles raised,, his broad snout tracking the faint line of honeysuckle through the astral ash.
She is below. She built a vault in the dirt. Keep your footing!
We tore through the final layer—
And the void cracked open.
My bare feet came down in warm grass.
Cicadas. That was the first thing—the deafening summer drone of them, thousands strong in the cottonwoods along the creek.
The roar of the transport was gone. The freezing recycled air was gone.
There was warm dirt under my feet and a sky the deep bruised purple of a solstice dusk, and over all of it, thick enough to drown in, the smell.
Night-blooming honeysuckle.
The whole farm had reeked of it that June, so sweet it made your molars ache, and my father had cursed the vine every year for choking the porch rail and never once cut it back because my mother loved the way it perfumed the dark.
Sun-baked cedar off the fence posts. Sweet dust rising off a path our pack’s bare feet had worn between the house and the barn.
Green sap and creek water and the clean nothing of open country at the far edge of the map, off-grid, out of reach, safe.
Home. My wolf made a sound I had never heard him make—not a whine, not a growl, something underneath both of them, the sound a starved thing makes when it finally smells food. This is home. She built us home.
I lifted my hands.
I knew what I’d find and I looked anyway.
My forearms were bare and brown and unmarked.
No pale raised ridges where the solstice magic had written itself into me deeper than healing could reach.
Smooth skin, unscarred, a young man’s arms—and when I touched my own face I knew there would be no gray in the stubble, no weight of twenty years pulling at the corners of my mouth, no ache in a shoulder the First Saint’s ice-blade had punched through.
In the Dreamscape, I was the young man I’d once been.
Her mind had reached into some perfect preserved image of the solstice night everything ended and pulled me out of it whole, twenty-five years old and golden and undamaged, the version of me that had still believed his own blood was enough to keep the world at bay.
I don’t deserve to wear this face, I thought. I deserved every scar this night took off me.
Then I turned around, and I stopped thinking anything at all.
She stood in the long grass by the fence rail where she’d told me she was useless without her wolf.
She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in two lifetimes.
The gentle slope of her neck, the delicate curve of her waist beneath the dress—every part of her called to the deepest, primal parts of my wolf, demanding that I cross the distance and claim her.
The Dreamscape gave her to me all at once, layered, impossible—the nineteen-year-old and the woman both, holding the same body like light through water.
There was the girl I’d fallen for: the soft unguarded mouth, the dark hair loose down her back, the shy tilt of a chin that hadn’t yet learned it could command a room.
And laid over the girl, inseparable from her—the steel in the jaw. The stillness that had put thirty women behind her body in a burning bay. The terrible unbroken certainty in the eyes. The still water that kept everything and forgave nothing.
She wore a plain summer dress the color of the sky, the kind she’d worn on the farm, and her feet were bare in the grass, and there was no frost on her.
No blue in her lips. No plume of dying cold on her breath.
Her skin was warm-brown and whole and alive, her cheeks flushed with a heat that wasn’t killing her, and when she breathed, her chest rose and fell in an easy rhythm.
Warm. Whole. Unfrozen.
This is what they stole. My wolf pressed against the inside of my ribs, aching. This. Twenty years of this.
“You came,” she said.
Her voice went straight down into my marrow.
My eyes tracked the curve of her body beneath the thin summer dress—the soft swell of her hips, the bare skin of her collarbones, the dark hair spilling over her shoulders—and my wolf roared with a sudden surge of raw sexual possessiveness.
My cock throbbed against my trousers, my thighs tight and aching with the desperate urge to pull her down into the grass, to lift that sky blue dress and sink into her heat until the twenty years of waiting dissolved.
“I said meet me at the Sanctuary.” Her mouth curved—not quite a smile, but the country it bordered. “You were never on time for anything in your life, Reed Vásquez. I half expected to grow old here waiting.”
And that—that was so her, so exactly the woman who’d teased me sunburned and laughing across a hay bale, dropped inside the voice of the woman who’d kept my seat, that the last strut holding up the mountain simply gave.
My legs went out from under me.
Years of being the shield, the anchor, the immovable thing that stood between my pack and every fire that ever came hunting them—years of one word where other men spent a hundred, of a face that never moved, of grief packed down under so much control that the crew forgot there was anything under it at all—it came apart in the warm dirt of my youth, and the untouchable Founding Alpha dropped to his knees in front of her like a man cut down at the heels.
Even on my knees, my wolf’s instincts raged—a feral, driving need to bury my face between her thighs and taste every inch of her perfect, long-denied body.
The dust rose up around me, sweet, catching gold in the last of the solstice light.
“Reed—”
I got my hands in the hem of her dress. I couldn’t help it.
I fisted the soft fabric in both hands and I pressed my face against her knees, against the warm living reality of her legs, and I breathed her in—honeysuckle and clove and rain and the woman underneath it all—and the sound that came out of me was not a sound the Superintendent of a hotshot team had ever made in the hearing of another living soul.
“I’m sorry.” It tore out of me in pieces. “Avaline. I was arrogant. I was so—I thought my blood was a ward. I thought being what I am was enough, I thought I could stand in the open and dare the whole world to come for you and it would—it would just know better—”
My hands twisted in her skirt.
“I didn’t set the perimeter. One night. One rite. All I had to do was set the ground and I didn’t, because I thought I was a god, and they came through the treeline while you screamed, and I couldn’t—I was on the grass and I couldn’t lift my head and they carried you past me and I couldn’t—”