15 Reed
The cab of the crew truck was an iron furnace on wheels.
I shifted into third, the old diesel transmission groaning as the heavy tires bit into the washboard gravel.
The high-beam headlights carved two cones of amber through the black timber, illuminating dense stands of ponderosa pine and vertical granite cliffs, but keeping my eyes pinned to the dirt took every ounce of discipline I possessed.
Because the woman sitting inches to my right was burning alive.
The scent filled the cab like rising floodwater in a locked cabin. Sweet clove. Summer rain striking sun-baked dust. Wild mountain honey. And beneath all of it, rolling off her skin in shimmering, feverish waves, the intoxicating musk of a female in active, unconsummated First Heat.
Every inhale Avaline pulled into her lungs shuddered through her chest. Every exhale fogged the passenger glass in pure mating pheromones.
Stop the truck, my obsidian wolf roared, pacing the bloody floor of my skull, claws out, slamming his heavy bulk against the inside of my ribs. Lock the brakes. Tear the canvas from her body. She is in Heat. Our mate is begging for the bite. Claim her.
Hold the line, I ordered the beast, locking my fingers so hard around the steering wheel the tendons in my forearms ached. We held the line in the Bitterroot blowup. We held the line when the crown fire jumped the ridge. You can hold it until we reach the First Altar.
Look at her, the beast snarled, phantom fangs dripping. She is drowning in fire for us.
“Reed.” Her voice was a low, ragged scrape that sliced straight through the diesel engine’s rumble. “Your hands.”
I glanced down. The scarred skin across my knuckles was flushed dark with magma-heat, the wheel shuddering in my grip.
“I’m managing, Avaline,” I said through locked teeth.
“You’re strangling the steering wheel like you’re trying to choke out a Warden,” she said.
She shifted on the worn vinyl bench seat, the coarse weave of her borrowed trousers rasping against the cushion. To a human ear, the sound would have been nothing. To an unmated Founding Alpha whose mate was slick and feverish beside him, it sounded like canvas tearing in a gale.
“Look at me.”
“If I turn my head right now, sweetheart, we’re going over the embankment,” I told her, my voice vibrating in the low register that shook the vents. “You smell like rain after a drought, and my wolf thinks we’re twenty years late to our own mating bed.”
“Maybe we are,” she whispered.
She leaned her head back against the headrest, her throat long and pale in the faint green wash of the instrument cluster. A bead of sweat traced the hollow of her collarbone, disappearing into the collar of her shirt.
“If we sit here in the dark with nothing but the engine running,” she said, her chest rising and falling in shallow, rapid pants. “I’m going to climb across this console and ruin every plan we just made.”
I pressed the accelerator down, the engine roaring as we took a sweeping hairpin curve.
“We’re meeting up with the pack at Sanctuary Farm,” I said, forcing each word past the tightness in my jaw. “To gather the bloodlines and make our final plan just like how you want it. They’ll be there in the morning.”
She turned her head on the vinyl, her golden eyes wide, her breath catching audibly. “You go back there? To our farm?”
The house burned to the foundation. The barn was nothing but charred cedar beams and rusted tin, and the pasture where we...
where everything broke was choked in weeds.
But the land remembered. The roots ran too deep for their alchemical fire to kill, and the old blood wards were tied directly into the water table.
When I pulled the boys together and founded the hotshot crew, I didn’t hide them in a city.
I brought them home. We rebuilt the cabins in the hollow with green timber and granite, reinforced the old cellars, and wove new wards into the soil. ”
“You rebuilt it,” she whispered, her fingers curling into the fabric of her trousers.
“I didn’t let the Order keep the ground where we loved each other,” I said. “I expanded pack territory and kept the farm protected at its heart.”
A long, trembling breath escaped her lips.
I gripped the wheel tighter as the tires skipped across a patch of loose shale. My throat felt dry, packed with ash that had nothing to do with wildland smoke.
“I go there every year,” I said.
Avaline went very still.
“What?” she asked.
“Every year,” I said, keeping my eyes locked on the dark road ahead, where the yellow beams cut through the pine branches.
“On the winter solstice. When the fire season shuts down and the snow packs the high ridges. While the rest of the crew went to town or took leave with their families, I drove out to the Sanctuary Farm alone.”
She didn’t speak. She just watched me, her chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow pants.
“I walked out to the cedar fence line in the pasture,” I told her, the words grinding out. “Right to the spot where we tried the solstice rite. Where my arrogance….” My voice cracked, raw and bleeding.
A sharp, ragged sob tore from her throat.
“I built a fire out of fallen cedar branches,” I said.
“And I stood under the Goddess Moon and sang the grief songs. Every single verse the Scribes wrote for a wolf whose arrogance cost him his mate and his sister. I sang them until my throat tore, year after year, because I swore to the moon that as long as I had breath in my lungs, the world would not forget your names.”
A fever-hot hand reached across the space between us.
Her fingers closed over my right forearm, pressing through the heavy fabric of my shirt down to the corded muscle beneath. The touch was pure fire, sending a jolt of heat racing straight into my chest.
“Reed,” she whispered, her voice breaking on the syllable.
“I thought I was singing to ghosts, Avaline,” I said, my jaw clenching hard enough to ache.
“I spent two decades howling at an empty sky, believing the only thing left of you was the debt I owed your memory and the vengeance I pursued on your behalf. And now you’re sitting in my passenger seat, breathing my air, telling me how to bring down the monster who built the cages. ”
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m right here.”
“I know you are,” I said, swallowing the thick knot in my throat. “It’s time you met the rest of the pack we’ll be running with.”
A faint, curious flicker touched her golden eyes.
“Brann might carry the Sovereign bloodline, but Wren is the one who keeps his crown from crushing his skull. Santos has Nell—she keeps him in line pretty good.”
“And the others?”
“Levi has Genny,” I continued, navigating a sharp bend where the road leveled into the valley timber. “Tommy found Kaia. And Sloane handles Finn. All of the women were dormants. All of them went through a version of what you are going through. All of them eager to take down the monsters for good.”
Avaline let out a soft, breathy sound that was half laugh and half groan, her head resting back against the seat.
“Let me understand this,” she said, her lips curving into a wicked smirk despite the fever flushing her cheeks.
“You spent years gathering an underground strike team of displaced, traumatized royal heirs, and every single one of them ended up mated to a brilliant woman who basically runs his entire life?”
A genuine chuckle tore out of my chest. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“Reed,” she said, shaking her head, her eyes shining with warmth. “That isn’t an elite paramilitary resistance group. That’s a backcountry matchmaking commune with chainsaws.”
“Don’t let Brann hear you say that,” I muttered, the ghost of a smile lingering on my mouth. “He still likes to think he’s running a hotshot outfit.”
She shifted again, pulling her hand back to press her palms flat against her thighs, anchoring against the rising tide of her Heat.
“How much time do we have,” I said, glancing her way. “Really?”
Avaline frowned and I kicked myself internally for taking the smile off her face with my question.
She looked down at her hands. “Enough. It has to be enough. I feel my Heat rising, but I can manage it for long enough to make the plan with your pack and then make it to the Caldera.”
“You know that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t. But I’ll manage somehow.”
The truck rolled down the long straightaway through the valley pines, the heavy diesel engine humming a steady, low rhythm that filled the dark space between us.
Avaline watched the trees rushing past, her breathing slowly steadying, though the scent of clove and wild honeysuckle only grew thicker in the warm air.
“Do you remember the tree?” she asked softly.
The memory hit me like a spark in dry timber.
“The one by the old mill,” she said, turning her face toward me, her eyes luminous in the dark.
“That golden summer when my family first came to the farm. The afternoon you pinned me against the sycamore. You were soaking wet from hauling timber out of the rapids. You leaned down and breathed me in, right at the crook of my neck, and you made this sound... a deep, territorial rumble that vibrated all the way through my spine.”
My hands tightened on the wheel. “Ava...”
“I’ve thought about that sound for twenty years, Reed,” she said, leaning slightly closer, her voice thick with the rising fever.
“When the needles were cold and the dark was quiet, I held on to the memory of that tree. I don’t want a polite commander when this is over.
I want the wolf who pinned me to the bark. ”
I reached down with my right hand to grab the floor shifter for a steep drop in the grade. As my knuckles moved past the console, the back of my hand brushed the bare skin above her wrist where her jacket had parted.
The contact was an electric detonation.