13 Reed
MOVE, my wolf howled, his claws tearing through the magma of my chest, MOVE! She is our soul!
My eyes fixed on Avaline, on the beautiful, unbreakable woman standing her ground against a god, and my blood roared with a savage, driving need to rip the clothes from her body and worship every inch of her pale skin.
My wolf and I became a single mass of muscle and magma, and my eyes—I felt it happen, the last gold going out of them, the obsidian swallowing everything until the world narrowed to one white throat and one set of necrotic jaws closing on it.
I hit the First Saint and the collision rang the whole Loom like a bell struck from the inside.
I took it broadside, all my astral mass into all of its, and I felt the god’s borrowed weight leave its line and go tumbling with me across the fused air—and my only thought, the one clean thought under the roar, was don’t strike.
Strike, my wolf snarled at me, both of us straining.
Every instinct I had wanted to close my teeth. The wolf in me had spent forty-five years learning one answer to a thing that lunges at his mate, and the answer was kill it, and the answer was right, and I could not use it.
Instead, I threw my blazing mass wide and I gathered them in—Avaline and her white wolf both—and I pulled them into the center of me, into the eye of it, and I closed the fire over them in a sphere.
A shell of magma, seamless, spherical, blinding.
A shield with my mate at the heart of it and my whole self as the wall.
And the First Saint, my little sister, slammed into the outside of it.
The cold hit the fire and the Dreamscape screamed.
A wrongness struck like lightning and went straight through the Dreamscape and down the tether—and into the far-off dark of the room where my real body lay wrapped around my mate.
My heart stopped.
I felt it. In the waking world, my physical heart stuttered and stopped, the cold pouring down the channel faster than the fire could answer, the freeze trying to climb into the source of me and put the magma out at the well.
Reed. My wolf’s voice cracked, vibrating with frantic terror. Reed, your heart—
I feel it. Hold. We hold.
The parasite clawed at the shell. Mia’s hands—no, its hands, wearing hers—raked down the outside of the magma, and I felt every rake, because the shield was made of me, and where the black ice scored the fire it bit down to the source and I shouted, in both worlds, my astral throat and my physical chest tearing open on the same raw note.
Let me tear the god apart, my wolf pleaded, throwing his weight against my restraint. We burn it to ash!
No. We don’t burn Mia—
But here was the thing.
I could hold the fire back. I could dial the magma down at the exact skin of the shell to stop the god without cooking the girl, and take the killing cold directly into my own chest. But my physical heart was already failing.
If I died on the mattress, the magma shield would drop.
And the First Saint would tear Avaline’s throat out.
To save my mate, I had to let the fire off the leash.
I had to burn my sister alive in the Dreamscape, but it would not stop there, it would reach her body in the real world.
You have to choose, my wolf said, low and entirely devoid of mercy, his black bulk pressed to mine inside the shell. The sister we lost. Or the mate we found.
In the waking world, my body arched off the mattress around Avaline and I gasped like a drowning man. My stopped heart took one enormous shuddering beat.
I choose her. I got my head up. Through the wall of my own fire, I saw Avaline holding the line against the shadow. I spoke to the ghost of the little girl I had failed long ago.
“I’m sorry,” my voice came out of the magma, cracking down the middle like the mountain itself. “Mia. I’m so sorry.” The cold drove another spike down my chest, and I stopped fighting it. “But I will burn the world to ash before I let the First Saint touch my mate.”
Mia looked at me with tears filling her eyes like she understood. Like she wanted the relief.
But the First Saint didn’t retreat. It fed on the fire. It opened Mia’s dead mouth against the shell and pulled, trying to drain my output before I could detonate.
It miscalculated.
You do not drink from a well that runs to the bedrock of a continent.
Not in the physical world. Not in the wolf’s Dreamscape.
It reached for a cup and it got the whole tectonic thing behind it, the deep old fire I’d spent twenty years suppressing so I’d never lose control again, and I let go of the suppression.
For the first time since the grass. I stopped holding it down.
I gave the god exactly what it asked for.
The magma answered from the floor of the world. It came up the channel in a column, more than I’d pulled in my whole life, more than the shield needed, a flood of it—and the parasite that had opened its mouth to sip could not close its mouth in time.
The First Saint blew backward off the shell.
It went screaming, tumbling end over end across the vaporizing air as the Dreamscape spat it out—hurling the First Saint out of the Loom entirely, and the last I heard of it was the sound of my sister’s stolen throat shrieking as the thing riding her lost its grip on the world and was gone.
And all that fire had to go somewhere.
The Drowned Canyon. Pearl-white poison pooled in the drop, the astral dam that had kept one thousand souls on the wrong bank of themselves—it took the full thermal detonation of a Founding Alpha who had finally, after two decades, stopped holding back.
The pearl-white river did not drain. It vaporized, all of it, millions of gallons turning to steam in the space of one breath, a white wall of it screaming up out of the chasm and into the bruised sky, and I hung there spent and blazing in the center of it and watched the poison that had caged her leave the world as vapor.
The fog burned off.
And under it—Goddess, under it—the chasm was gone.
The two cliffs that had stood apart, dead shale facing dead shale across a drop full of poison, groaned and settled and fused.
The drop closed. The dead rock ran together into one unbroken plain, warm earth where the void had been, steam curling gentle off it into air that no longer stank of lavender-rot, that smelled—I caught it, and my astral chest cracked around it—of summer grass.
Of the Sanctuary. Of a farm come up out of the ground where the poison used to be.
It’s healed, my wolf breathed. He’d come to my side, both of us swaying, both of us bleeding gold from the eyes with the cost of it. The canyon’s healed. She can walk right across.
She didn’t have to walk anywhere.
The far bank had come to her. The white wolf stood on solid ground not six inches from Avaline’s outstretched hand, no drop between them anymore, no river, no dam, nothing left but some open air.
I dropped to my knees in the healed grass.
My eyes swept the scorched space where Mia had stood a moment before. She was gone.
A desperate, fragile hope flared in the ashes of my chest. I had unleashed the fire to burn her, yes. But we were in the Dreamscape. The Loom had spat the First Saint out.
Wolf?
It is possible, my wolf whispered in answer to my unspoken question, swaying in the healed grass, bleeding gold from the cost of it.
The thought that the Dreamscape might have accidentally spared my sister was the only thing keeping my spirit from collapsing into dust.
I turned to my mate. The fire had gone out of me down to the well and my astral body swayed and bled. I knelt in the warm earth I’d made and I watched my mate stand at the edge of the thing she’d been reaching for her whole caged life, and I said the only thing I had breath for.
“Go on.” It came out wrecked. “She’s yours. She always was. I only ever held the bridge.” My voice broke and I let it break, kneeling there in the grass of a farm we had lost. “Go get your wolf, Avaline.”
She turned her head. Just enough to find me over her shoulder—the woman who’d put her frozen body between a god and my failure, who’d bound an ancient horror with the names of one thousand stolen souls—and her dark eyes were wet, and full.
The scent of her washed over me in a wave so intense my wolf let out a possessive whine.
The sight of her flushed cheeks and full, trembling lips, standing on the very ground we had just healed together, made my blood run thick with a savage hunger to pull her down into the warm grass, to bury myself inside her and never let the cold touch her again.
“We held the bridge,” she said. “You and I. Both.”
Then she met her wolf.
Her bare hand came down on the snout, palm flat against the warm fur, spirit to spirit, the woman and the wolf touching for the first time in the whole long dark of her life—
The merge went through her like a lightning strike run backward, spirit pouring up her arm and into her body, the white wolf dissolving into light and the light pouring home, and the old suppression that had held not just her but one thousand dormants on the wrong bank of themselves—
cracked.
I felt it go. A fracture line ripped across the entire Loom, silver light bursting up through it from horizon to horizon.
My wolf howled, his black head thrown back in pure ecstasy, the bond is live! The world is waking!
And then the tether snapped taut, and something enormous reached down the silver line and yanked.
I came back into my body like a man hauled up out of deep water by the throat.
The room. Dust raining through the dark, the whole mountain shuddering, the tremors spiking so hard the bed walked across the floor.
My chest heaved. My skin—I was drenched, soaked through, steaming, my temperature spiked so high the sweat came off me in a haze.
My heart slammed against my ribs like it was trying to prove it had never stopped.
And in my arms—
The ice was gone.
The bone-deep cold I’d wrapped my whole burning body around, the frost that had lived in her joints, the freeze that had crept up her throat every hour of the thaw—it flashed out of her all at once, out through her skin and into the air, and under my ruined arms her body went from frozen wreck to furnace, searing, blood-hot, alive in a way that arched her spine and pulled a sound out of her I had never heard her make.
Her eyes snapped open.
Dark. Wild. Ringed all the way around with a wolf’s gold that had never been there before—her wolf, home, merged, hers—and they found me in the shaking dark and locked on, and the smell that came off her hit me like the mountain.
It was the scent of a fully awakened mate, intoxicating and potent, pulling a harsh groan from my throat as my cock strained painfully, desperate to bury itself in her.
Not honeysuckle. Not rain. Under those, over those, drowning those.
Heat.
Her fully shifted eyes burned up into mine.
“Reed,” she said, in a voice gone low and rough and starving. Her burning hand fisted in my hair and hauled my naked body down. “Reed.”