7 Reed #2
Say the rest. My wolf had gone quiet and terrible.
He was physically beside me in the Dreamscape now—a massive obsidian shadow towering over the grass, his fur sparkling with silver dew and his eyes burning like twin embers in the violet dusk.
He paced a circle around us, his massive shoulders working beneath his hide, his snout dipping low to catch the trail of her scent.
Say all of it. She kept every name. The least you can do is keep this one.
“They took Mia out of her crib from where I was bleeding,” I said, “and I heard her scream for me and I couldn’t get to either of you, and then I lived, Avaline.
I lived and I built a whole life on top of revenge for the two of you, and the worst thing—the thing I’ll answer for—” my voice broke clean through, “—I stopped looking. I believed you were dead. I lit a fire and I said your name to the moon every year and swore vengeance. I told myself that was loyalty and it wasn’t, it was surrender, and you were in the dark the entire time, and I stopped—I stopped—”
She folded down into the dust with me, and her hands came up and took my face, both palms hard against my jaw, hauling my head up until I had to look at her.
Her eyes were wet. But they didn’t waver. They never wavered. That was the whole terror and mercy of her.
“Look at me,” she said.
I looked.
“You were twenty-five.” She held my face like a thing she owned, like a thing she’d decided to keep.
“You were a boy who’d never been told no by the world, and you were wrong, and it cost everything, and I have hated you for it in the dark on nights so long you cannot imagine them.
” Her thumb moved along my cheekbone. “I catalogued my hatred the way I catalogued everything. I kept it perfect. I took it out and looked at it.”
“You should have—”
“I should have died.” Her voice dropped, and the still water underneath it moved, rippling with the first signs of a true storm. “That would have been cleaner. It would have been final. Instead, I lived in the dark, every single night, keeping your seat while you lit a fire and gave up.”
She pulled her hands away from my face, a severing of contact that left me reeling.
“You were arrogant, Reed. But underneath the boy who was arrogant, I thought there was a boy who worshipped me. I believed you would turn the earth inside out to find me. And I was wrong.”
“Avaline—” I reached for her, my hands shaking.
“Don’t.” She stepped back, the sky blue dress swaying around her calves.
The woman was rising now, fully eclipsing the girl I remembered.
“You do not get to come here and beg for absolution. I am not a fragile thing you have to spend the rest of your life kneeling in front of. I did not survive the dark to be your penance.”
She was fading. I could see it—the edges of her form beginning to blur and turn translucent in the moonlight, the astral projection of her failing as her physical body crashed back in the transport.
“Avaline, wait!” Panic seized me, raw and blinding. “Don’t go. Please. Let me fix it.”
“You can’t fix twenty years of the dark,” she said, her voice echoing as if from a great distance, the silver light around her sputtering. “But we started something in this grass. The rite is open, Reed. It’s draining what little life I have left. I can’t hold it anymore.”
Her outline wavered.
“If you want to save me,” her voice was a whisper now, barely carrying over the drone of the cicadas, “you have to close it. But you don’t get to do it for absolution. You do it because I demand it.”
And then she was gone. The space where she’d stood was empty, the honeysuckle scent immediately going thin and sharp.
“No!” I roared, surging to my feet.
The Dreamscape buckled. The sky darkened from purple to pitch black, the grass turning to ash around my boots. The tether connecting us pulsed wildly, a silver thread unspooling into the void, fraying at the edges.
She’s dying, the wolf snarled, his massive black head coming around, teeth bared, pure terror vibrating in his throat. She’s slipping into the dark and if she goes, she doesn’t come back. Follow her!
I threw myself into the void where she had vanished, following the silver tether down into the absolute dark of the Dreamscape.
I chased her through the collapsing architecture of her own mind, tearing through the astral vault, until I saw her—a faint, flickering light kneeling in the dirt.
I landed beside her, the impact sending a shockwave through the ground.
She looked up at me, her face pale and translucent, the woman and the girl stripped away to leave only raw survival.
“You followed,” she said, her voice barely a breath.
“I will always follow.” I dropped to my knees, catching her hands before she could pull away again. “I’ll spend the rest of my life following you. I’m here.”
She looked at our joined hands, and I watched the war tearing through her.
Her mind was a Scribe’s archive—still water that held every slight, every cold night in a cell, every hour she had waited for a rescue that never came.
The anger was still there, carved into the set of her jaw and the dark defiance in her eyes.
She had spent two decades using that as armor to keep from freezing solid.
But as my thumb traced the fragile bones of her knuckles, bleeding Founding heat into her numb flesh, something in her gaze fractured.
She wanted me.
I saw it in the sudden, shallow hitch of her breath, in the way her gaze dropped to my mouth and lingered with a hunger so sharp it made my throat ache.
Her rational mind was screaming twenty years of grievances, but beneath the logic, her soul remembered the boy who had worshipped her with his tongue on this exact grass.
She remembered the June nights before the world burned, the laughter across hay bales, the way I had looked at her and believed I was finally home.
She was fighting herself—fighting the urge to lean into my chest, fighting the undeniable, pooling heat that our proximity was stoking between her thighs.
She wasn’t ready to wipe the ledger clean.
But more than her anger, more than her pride, she wanted her wolf. She wanted to stop being half a person.
I would die to give her what she wanted.
Her fingers suddenly gripped mine with desperate strength, pulling my hands against her ribs. “You walk in here looking twenty-five and whole, smelling of lightning and rain, and my body acts like the last twenty years were a bad dream.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” I choked out, leaning in until our foreheads almost touched. “It was hell, and I put you there. I will never risk you again.”
I stood.
She rose with me, her legs shaking with exhaustion, but her chin remained high, unbending. Her hand slid from my jaw down to my chest, flat over the heavy thudding of my pulse, and the touch of her palm there steadied me the way nothing else ever had.
I looked down at the dark, open dirt between our bare feet.
There was no circle here. No warding. No boundary lines drawn to shield her soul from the storm.
Twenty years ago, I had laughed at the old prayers and dismissed the perimeter, believing my Founding blood was an invincible wall.
I had stood in the open grass and dared the dark to come for us, and the dark had answered by tearing my world apart.
Not this time.
“Wait,” I said, my voice low, gravel-rough with hard-earned discipline.
I gently eased her hands from my chest and dropped to one knee in the dirt at her feet.
She stayed in the center, watching me with those dark, unblinking eyes, the girl and the woman holding their breath together in the violet dusk.
I reached into the Dreamscape’s earth with both hands.
Magma-heat flared beneath my skin, a current of Founding fire.
I dragged my fingertips through the summer soil, etching a perfect, unbroken circle in the dirt around her.
I channeled the ancient hearth-ward geometry, scoring the four anchor runes at the cardinal points, sealing the perimeter with the silver-gold light of my blood.
Every mark was an apology. Every rune was a promise.
I built the boundary thick, dense, and impenetrable, weaving the ward tight, not a single spark could leak into the astral dark, and no god or Warden could ever breach the line.
Avaline watched every stroke. I could see the Scribe in her notice the difference—seeing that the wild, reckless boy who had broken her life was gone, replaced by a man who treated her safety as holy ground.
The lines glowed faint silver-gold in the dusk, humming with the tectonic resonance of bedrock. The old solstice moon hung fat and low over the barn, the honeysuckle breathed, and somewhere the cicadas built their steady wall of sound.
I stood up and stepped across the glowing threshold, entering the warded circle to stand before her.
The ground began to hum.
A vibration came up through my bare feet from the old earth of the place, and I knew it—Founding blood knows bedrock the way a wolf knows the moon—the tectonic thrum of a rite waking after twenty years asleep.
The lines brightened. The moon leaned closer.
The whole preserved world of my youth tuned itself like a struck bell toward the single note we were about to sound.
She stepped into me. There was no hesitation left in her posture, no retreat.
Her face tipped up. Her hands slid to my shoulders, her fingers digging into the muscle of my neck with a fierce, demanding possessiveness.
Her mouth was inches from mine, her breath coming warm and honeysuckle-sweet across my lips, and everything in her body leaned into mine like grass toward light.
She pressed her hips firmly against mine. The friction sent a jolt of arousal straight to my groin, the ache in my cock matching the slick heat I could smell through her dress. She wanted this. She wanted me with a raw, primal ferocity that stripped away every layer of trauma.
And I froze.