8 Avaline
I felt the violent rupture of our lips parting mid-rite, the taste of dry lightning ripped out of my mouth as the sky cracked. But my spirit had remained in the Dreamscape, protected by his circle.
The dark gave way all at once, ripped back like a tarp—and my astral eyes opened onto a place I did not choose.
Cicadas. That was what I braced for. He’d sealed the rite in the grass, his young mouth on mine under the solstice moon, and every law I’d ever learned told me the sealing meant we’d remain in the Sanctuary, against the fence rail, the honeysuckle thick enough to drown in.
I reached for the warm dirt and the purple dusk and the smell of the place we’d been happy.
And I reached for him—for the solid, heavy weight of his body pinning me down, the scent of old earth and his intoxicating male sweat, the promise of his hard cock sliding into me until the twenty years of cold were entirely erased.
Instead, black shale cut into the soles of my bare feet.
I stood on a field of shattered stone, jagged as broken teeth, cold enough that the frost in my astral marrow answered it, like calling to like.
The sky overhead had gone the color of a body three days dead—that yellow-green-purple bruise that means something underneath has burst and started to rot. No stars. No moon. And the smell—
Lavender. Rotting lavender, gone to slime on the stem. Under it, ash, and under the ash, the flat scorched nothing of ozone before a storm. I knew that smell. The dark had taught it to me one draft at a time. Aurum latens, corrupted, drained wrong and put back wronger.
This was not my Sanctuary. This was the truth my mind had been painting over.
Of course it is, the still water said, level and cold as it always was. You didn’t think they left the inside of you the way they found it, did you?
“Reed,” I called into the Dreamscape, but wherever he had gone I did not think he could hear me.
I stepped to the edge of the field and Reed’s circle of protection moved with me. I looked out across the canyon and found the river that ran at the bottom of it.
Calling it a river was a mercy I didn’t feel like extending anymore.
It churned the pearl-white of the elixir they’d poured down my throat for two decades, that sick iridescent shimmer, thick as poured wax, throwing up a fine spray that drifted on a wind I couldn’t feel.
Wherever the spray landed on the shale it left the rock pitted and weeping.
This was the barrier. The thing itself, rendered in the only language a soul has—suppression anchored by the massive physical reservoirs of aurum latens harvested and stored out there in the real world, acting as a wall of moving poison between the two halves of me.
A wolf. My wolf paced the far cliff, white as the inside of a shell, white as the sight of the moon they’d taken from me, and even across all that dead air I could see her eyes and her eyes were mine.
Dark. Furious and taking in every detail of the woman who stood across the impossible gap and could not reach her.
Her mouth opened. No sound came out. The canyon ate it. But I felt the shape of it land in the center of my chest, in the calcified frozen place behind my sternum, and it was the frantic soundless ruttle of a thing that has been calling for years and never once been answered.
There you are, I thought, and the thought came apart in my hands.
I had catalogued so much. I had kept the names and the accounts and the dates and the exact register of every monster’s voice who’d ever discussed my body over my body. I had kept my hatred perfect. I had believed there was nothing left in me they hadn’t already flooded and drowned.
I had not kept a place ready for this. For the sight of her.
The ache came up from somewhere below the frost, below the still water, from the animal floor of me that no drug had ever quite reached, and it was not grief and it was not longing—it was lack, the missing weight of a limb I’d been carried away from before I ever learned to walk on it.
Mine. The word had teeth. That’s mine and they put a river of poison between us and I have been half a person my entire life.
I leaned toward her. The river’s spray caught me across the forearm.
Acid. White fire. It ate into my astral skin and the pain of it was real.
My knees buckled toward the drop. The river surged up toward the taste of me, a tongue of pearl reaching, and for one long suspended second I understood exactly how easy it would be to simply go over, to let the dam take back the drop of me that had escaped it—
A thud hit the shale behind me hard enough to crack it.
Hands closed on my shoulders and hauled me back, and the heat of them was the heat from the dark, an entire furnace poured into the shape of hands that dragged me off the ledge and around and against a chest that ran hotter than any living thing had a right to.
“No—no—” His voice broke over my head. “Not the edge, don’t you go near the edge—”
I looked up and it was him.
The Dreamscape had rendered him young again the way it had in the grass—twenty-five and golden and unscarred, the version of him that had believed his blood was a wall the world would respect.
But the panic on that smooth young face was a forty-five-year-old man’s panic, two decades deep, and his hands shook where they gripped me.
The contrast of it went through me like the spray had: his fever against my frost, his terror against my stillness, the living urgent heat of him wrapped around a body that had forgotten what warm meant.
Even through my numbness, the hard, unforgiving planes of his chest and the scent of green sap and old earth radiating off his skin sent a deep, agonizing pull straight to my core.
I flared with cold fury, disgusted that my biology was so eager to forgive a man who had left me for dead, but the animal underneath simply wanted to be claimed.
My wolf stirred, pacing her side of the river, whining for the touch of his hands on my hips and the possessive slide of his body over mine.
Beside him, materializing out of the silver shadow of his heat, was his wolf.
Massive. Obsidian-black, its hide thick and heavy, eyes glowing like twin coals in the rotten twilight of the canyon.
The beast paced the razor edge of our side of the river’s shale, its broad chest heaving, its head dipping down toward the white churning poison below.
It caught sight of my white wolf across the gap and let out a low, desperate whine.
The black wolf took a frantic step toward the edge, lunging down toward the water to reach her, but the moment its front paw touched the rising mist of pearl spray, the poison bit deep.
The wolf yelped, a sharp, high crack of pain, and scrambled backward, its claws tearing grooves into the black shale, smoke rising from its scorched paw. It whined again, desperate, pacing in circles, looking from Reed to me to the white wolf pacing the edge of the far cliff on the other side.
“You’re bleeding,” Reed said, catching my forearm, turning it up. “What is this? What is this place, this isn’t—” His head came up. His eyes swept the shale, the bruised sky, the churning white below, and I watched the hate land in his jaw and set there. “This isn’t our Sanctuary.”
“No,” I said.
“It’s supposed to be the Sanctuary.” He said it like a man arguing with a bad map. “We sealed it in the grass. Your mind should be—” His arm swept the ruin of the place. “Not this. How does the Dreamscape even build this? Is this your memory, or is this the magic?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, my voice tight. “The Dreamscape reflects the truth of the bond and the soul. We sealed the rite in the grass, but the physical world didn’t catch up. This is what’s under the grass. The poison our enemies sent into the Dreamscape didn’t disappear just because we kissed.”
“Then I’ll put the grass back.”
No, I thought, but he was already moving.
He set his bare feet apart on the shale and the ground answered him.
Of course it answered him.
He was the Founding blood and this was raw soul-country.
Warm dirt bled up through the shattered rock.
Green pushed after it, fast and forced, blades of grass shoving up between the black teeth of stone, and honeysuckle vine came climbing out of nothing to throw its sweetness into the rotten air, that ache-in-the-molars sweetness, the smell of the one summer we were happy—
“There,” he breathed. His hands came back to my face, cradling, and his eyes were wet and fierce and so, so young. “See? I’ve got you. I won’t let you stay in this dark, Avaline, I swore it, I will not let you—”
The river heard him.
It came up the riverbank, a tide of pearl-white poison rising against gravity, and it took the grass first. The green went gray and then went to nothing.
The honeysuckle blackened at the root and rotted up its own length in the space of a breath, the sweet smell curdling back to lavender-rot, the warm dirt drinking poison and turning to black shale under our feet.
It happened in seconds.
He stood in the wreck of his own miracle with his hands still framing my face, and I watched the arrogance collapse into complete confusion.
“I don’t understand,” he whispered, his hands trembling against my cheeks. “When the Founding magic takes hold, it reshapes the environment. Why is the Dreamscape rejecting it?”
“Because you’re trying to paint over a wound instead of cleaning it,” I told him, looking directly into his eyes.
“The Dreamscape isn’t a canvas for your fire, Reed.
It’s the architecture of our connected souls.
Of all shifters to their wolves. You can’t command a river of poison of this magnitude to vanish just by willing it away.
We don’t even know the rules of this place yet. ”
“Then we figure them out,” he said fiercely, grabbing my hands. “Tell me what you feel. What is the river made of?”
“It’s the elixir,” I said, looking down at the boiling white wax. “Corrupted aurum latens. Every warding spell the Order laid down in the physical world. To make this in the Dreamscape. If we try to jump it, we drown. If you try to burn it, it eats the fire.”
His black wolf padded back to us, its chest heaving, snorting as it nudged Reed’s hip. Reed rested a hand on the beast’s neck, his fingers sinking into the thick obsidian fur.
“So we try another way,” Reed insisted. “We build across it. Not grass—stone. Obsidian. A bridge, like Maren said.”
He stepped toward the edge again, dropping to his knees, thrusting both hands into the shale.
Magma flared under his palms. A ridge of black volcanic glass shot out, extending into the air over the river’s boiling white depths.
Watching him command the earth itself made my wolf whine with a desperate need to submit to that same raw, terrifying power, to feel him press me down against the shale.
For a second, the obsidian held.
Then the white spray surged up. The pearl-white poison lashed the underside of the obsidian span—not in random waves, but in a three-fold surge that vibrated the canyon floor.
Three deep currents rising in unison from the depths.
The glass shattered with a sound like a rifle shot, exploding into thousands of sharp black shards that rained down.
The backwash blasted upward, hitting Reed full in the chest. He gasped, thrown backward onto his back, his astral shirt smoking where the acid bit through.
“Reed!” I dropped beside him, my hands hovering over his chest.
His wolf howled, a harsh, jagged sound of frustration, circling us both as Reed pushed himself up, coughing astral ash.
“That failed too,” Reed gritted out, staring at the empty air where his bridge had been. “It’s reacting to the magic itself. Every time I try to force a way across, the canyon counters it.”
“You’re trying to hammer stone across an open wound all by yourself, Reed.”
“So how do we do it?” Reed looked at me, stripped of all his certainty, his eyes wide and searching. “Avaline... We don’t have a lot of time. I came in here to rescue you. I thought I knew what I was doing.”
I let my hand linger on his jaw, feeling the ragged beat of his pulse under my cold fingers. I had kept a perfect ledger of his failures, counting the days he didn’t come for me.
But looking at him now—stripped of his certainty, bleeding from his own desperate attempts to build me a bridge—the ink on that ledger began to blur.
He was here, and he was willing to bleed out on the shale for me.
I turned back to the river, letting his heat wrap around me as he stood up beside me, his wolf coming to heel at his left side, pacing, watching the white wolf across the gulf.
I leaned into his side, my breasts brushing against his hard bicep, a slick, pooling warmth settling heavy in my belly at the promise of what that powerful body could do to me.
I hated the surrender in it, hated that the simple pressure of his shoulder against mine made the years of solitary confinement feel instantly, terrifyingly fragile.
I was an army of one, and he was the one thing that could disarm me just by standing close.