7 Reed #3
The last time. The thought came up out of the deep water where I’d drowned it.
The last time your mouth touched hers under this moon, you fired your blood into a heart that wasn’t ready.
The beacon lit the sky. The Wardens came.
You are the match. You have always been the match.
You kissed her and you burned the world down.
My wolf reared back, black fur bristling along his spine, white foam at his jaws as he stood beside us inside the boundary. No. Not this. Do not stop now. Not an inch from her—
But the man was twenty-five again and terrified, standing exactly where he’d stood the night he destroyed everything, and my whole body locked against the memory of what my actions had cost.
“Avaline,” I breathed, my voice shaking with raw terror. “The last time I—I can’t be the thing that—what if it—”
Her hand left my shoulder. Her fingers gripped my jaw, her nails biting into my skin with unmistakable force.
“You gave me twenty years of the cold, Reed Vásquez,” she said, her mouth brushing against mine with every word, her eyes burning with an undeniable, intoxicating blend of desire, regret, resistance, and command. “Now give me my wolf.”
“Avaline—”
“This is not that night,” she declared, fierce. “That night, it happened to us. This—” her grip tightened, and she pulled me down into her. “This we choose.”
My hands fisted in her hair, my fingers tangling in the heavy, warm silk of it as I hauled her flush against my chest. The friction of her breasts flattening against my ribs sent a white-hot jolt straight to my groin.
My wolf howled, demanding the bite, demanding the wet slide of skin on skin, my hips pressing forward involuntarily until she could feel every rock-hard inch of my desire.
My mouth found her lips.
There is no word for it. I have looked, in the years since I lost her and the minutes since I found her, and there is no word in any tongue for the thing that happened when her lips met mine inside that circle.
It was not the young desire at the fence rail, though that was in it.
It was not the desperate hunger of a man starved two decades, though that was in it too.
It was alignment. Two things that had been torn apart at the seam sliding back together.
The plates of the earth settling into the shape they’d been reaching for since the world cracked them open.
I felt the first ancient layer of the old solstice rite unlock—felt the golden architecture flare and pulse inward.
A tether spun itself taut and singing between the center of her and the center of me, a line that ran underneath flesh, underneath blood, underneath the frozen glacier the Order had packed into her marrow.
It was not the end of the work—it was the re-ignition of the key.
There was still so much to complete, so many channels of energy to clear, but the foundational anchor had taken root.
Her soul against my soul. Hers. Mine. Ours, and the wolf sang it, his wild howl echoing through the astral space, and the boy wept it, and the man who’d knelt in the dust finally, finally stood inside a world that made sense again.
She made a small sound against my mouth. Wonder, and grief.
I pulled back just far enough to press my forehead to hers, the way I would in the waking dark if I ever got her there, and I looked into the eyes of the girl I’d lost and the woman I’d found and I opened my mouth to tell her—
The world went white.
The Dreamscape shattered like a windshield in a hard freeze, silver light blowing apart into shards, the honeysuckle ripped away, the cicadas cut to silence—and I slammed back into my body in the freezing dark of the transport as the bird hit the ground.
The jolt threw me against the harness. Red emergency lights strobed across a cabin full of shouting.
My shoulder screamed where the ice-blade had gone through it, the scars were back on my arms, forty-five years of weight came down on me all at once—and in my arms, crushed against a chest that had been golden and whole a heartbeat ago, was her frozen body.
Deathbed-cold. Lips blue. Trembling in a way that had no bottom.
“Avaline—” I got my burning hands against her face. “Avaline, I’ve got you—”
“She has a pulse!” Maren was on her knees over us, sleeves shoved to the elbow, bare palms flat to Avaline’s sternum.
Her voice cut through the chaos, and under the clinical crack of it I heard the disbelief.
“Reed—her heart started again. It stopped and it started. Whatever you two just did, the rite holds her soul in safety—”
Her hands moved, reading, and her jaw set.
“But her core’s still dropping. The bond saved her life and it did nothing for her body. She’s going into a deep hypothermic coma. The thaw hasn’t started. It won’t start on its own.” Her eyes came up to mine, black and certain.
The ramp dropped.
The crisp night air of the Northern California mountains rushed into the cabin, thick with the smell of tinder-dry ponderosa pines, parched dirt, and crushed mountain sage.
It was late September, the brutal heart of fire season.
Months without rain had turned the ridges into a powder keg, the daytime heat baking the timber until the air shimmered, giving way only now to the sharp, high-altitude chill of sunset.
Above the jagged silhouette of the pines, the autumn equinox moon hung massive and brilliant in the pitch-black sky—the Harvest Moon. A full moon.
Maren had said when that full moon sank below the western ridge at dawn, the alignment would break, and the frost would take her forever.
I scooped Avaline into my arms, cradling her freezing weight against my chest, and carried her down the ramp at a dead run.
Brann met me at the base of the metal gangway, stepping into my path under the floodlights. His sharp gaze instantly dropped to my left side, locking onto the dark blood soaking through my turnout coat where the First Saint’s ice-blade had punctured clean through my shoulder.
“Reed—your shoulder.” Brann reached for me.
“Ignore the goddamn shoulder,” I growled, side-stepping him with a snarl that made the air vibrate. “It’s nothing.”
I tore the radio off my chest harness with one hand and shoved it hard against his sternum.
Brann caught the radio, his jaw tightening as he fell into step beside me.
“We held the perimeter, but Conclave frequencies are screaming. Recon spotted heavy ward activity around the three booster sites Kenji flagged down in the valley, but we don’t have the codes or the ward keys to hit them without tripping the entire regional grid.
The Order’s strike team lost our transponder when Nadia blew the sensor array, but their scout birds are sweeping the ridge three miles out.
The Lodestone Underground is dropping boundary wards around us right now.
Levi’s securing the dormants. But if the main ward collapses, the Order will be on top of us within an hour. ”
Nadia and Maren came marching across the gravel, conferring in sharp, hushed whispers.
Nadia took one look at the pale, blue cast of Avaline’s lips, then spotted the ragged hole in my turnout jacket.
Without asking permission, the pack doctor stepped in, ripped the fabric aside, and slapped a thick, steaming poultice of crushed witch-hazel, elder-ash, and lye directly against the open puncture on my shoulder.
The salve hit the wound like liquid fire, sizzling against the frozen tissue and searing the flesh raw.
I grunted through clenched teeth, my knees nearly buckling from the blinding jolt of agony, but I didn’t stop moving.
“Hold her steady, Reed!” Nadia ordered, jogging backward ahead of me. “That poultice will hold the rot at bay, but you’re running on fumes—”