Chapter 24
Full Wolf Moon
Ty wakes me on the morning of the full moon by surging deep inside of me, rolling me over him on the bed and then clamping his arms around my back so he’s controlling the angle and his own depth even though I’m on top.
He makes me turn bright and hot. He makes me come, crying out his name.
Then he does it again, just for good measure.
The third time, he flips us over and takes it slow. So slow that I’m writhing beneath him, actually sobbing. And interspersing that with the most creative curses I can come up with, because I know that he’s torturing me on purpose.
“Good girl,” he murmurs when I come again, falling completely apart beneath his hands. “Happy claiming day, Maddox.”
I want to bite him but instead, I melt. I wrap myself around him and hold on tight when he rolls us up and carries me like that into the shower.
Unlike every full moon that I can think of in recent memory, I wish that we could get to the moon’s full height immediately. I don’t like that this one features the death goddess’s potential rise in the middle of it all, when on Halloween I was delighted to divert attention from Ty and me.
This is how I know that if Vin?a does show up, I’ll figure out a way to take her down.
Because nothing is going to keep me from running tonight.
Ty insists that we grab breakfast in the grand cavern, and I know why he’s doing it.
He wants us to come out together exactly like this, both of us smelling scrubbed clean and clearly not just intimate with each other, but united.
Connected despite the Connor thing, and my weekend at Savi’s, and our entire tortured history.
He’s not going to make an announcement, but he’s still letting everyone know how things stand. I have to respect it.
My mother finds me as we’re eating and performs her little bow to both of us. Then she sits, her head lower than mine, because nobody knows protocol better than Johanna.
I listen with half an ear as she fills me in on all the gossip of the den and makes sure that I know the implications in every possible direction.
“Do you ever think,” I ask her, holding a piece of bacon, “that a lot of these interpersonal issues would cease to be a factor if we didn’t all live on top of each other?”
Johanna laughs. “All the time. But what wolf do you know who allows his pack to live beneath the sky instead of in a cave?”
Beside us, Ty grunts, though whether in support of skies or caves is unclear. I open my mouth to tell him and my mother that I would like to start thinking that way. That I think a little privacy would do wonders for pack relations.
Not today, I caution myself. Not when there are so many other things that need to happen between now and morning.
Living arrangements can wait.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but think that it would be smart, and awfully helpful, if Ty and I were already fully mated for Vin?a’s new resurrection tonight.
It would only make us stronger, especially when we have a bond that’s already so intense outside of the claim.
It would allow us to communicate better, because I can already sense him.
He can already sense me. My understanding is that once we’re truly mated, that connection will be even more intense and reliable.
All useful tools to have in the fight against a powerful, horrible being like Vin?a.
But that’s not the day we have ahead of us. So I try to enjoy the day that we do have.
After we give our quiet breakfast performance, Ty assembles all of his returned lieutenants in the mapping room and I sit in, taking notes about the things they saw. I’m particularly interested in those things as they relate to the lines of supply and demand Ty intends for us to open and monitor.
I might have gotten a little lost in the Vin?a stuff and the claiming that will finally happen later tonight—because I refuse to let anything but that happen—but as the men talk about what they saw out there I find myself thinking about the kingdom Ty is building.
About how different everything will be, so different from how it’s always been.
Wolves striving, not hiding. Wolves controlling their environments instead of reacting to them.
I like this future. I like it a lot.
I will do everything I possibly can to live through this night so I can see it for myself.
After that meeting wraps up, I head down to the warehouse in Phoenix. I tell myself I’m fired up after hearing all the talk about the future, but when I get there I find myself getting all of my affairs in order.
As if I think that there is some possibility that Vin?a could rise tonight and there might be something left after that.
I doubt there will be much of a world left, much less someone to come along and pick up where I left off.
That’s not really my impression of what happens when a death goddess razes the world.
That’s certainly not what she claimed she’d do the last time.
It was definitely sold to us as the kind of apocalypse that left no room for plucky bands of rebels to eke out an existence against the cruel background of her nonsense, the way they do in all the books and movies and television shows that imagine these things.
Still, I don’t stop. I leave detailed notes describing everything it is that I do, and I tell myself it’s not because I think I’m going to die but because I want to live. I want to make sure that these systems I’ve built can stretch out and hold the kingdom Ty’s building as securely as possible.
On the drive back from the warehouse I can already see the shadows getting long and that winter sun draping itself above the western hills.
My plan is to go back to the den and see Ty one more time before meeting him to run the full moon—and before all the rest of the things that may or may not happen between now and then—but as I look at the swiftly darkening sky, I don’t think I should.
I remember what Savi said about the three of us together.
There’s no doubt that’s the smarter play.
Yet I really don’t feel smart as I drive up the old Highway 99 that pokes around to the west of the big interstate as the local route up from Ashland.
The sun is setting on this last day of the year in reds and oranges, and maybe it’s the usual New Year’s thing that gets me thinking about this life I’ve led.
These years of being fated, then unofficially mated to Ty.
My escape from this valley. My return. All of our fights. All of our tempests and tempers.
I remember all of our years with perfect clarity. These last few as notable for our partnership as our passion, though both have grown so much that we’re almost unrecognizable from where we started.
“I can’t lose him,” I whisper, as if the sunset is listening. As if this last bit of the year can intervene. “I want all of him. Tonight.”
I feel those words settling in me. They feel different. Bigger, maybe. More intense. Like spells I’m pressing into my own bones.
I understand, then, that this is how it’s supposed to feel.
This is what a claim is supposed to be about.
This deep determination to be with him in all the ways I can.
This conviction that all the things that have always worried me about claims and mating from a distance don’t matter, because this is us.
This understanding that Ty and I can make the world what we want it to be, so we can certainly make us what we need to be too.
I feel silly for ever imagining otherwise.
It makes me sad for all the females like me who weren’t allowed to wait until they felt like putting themselves forward at a gathering. All the females who weren’t allowed to find this iron conviction deep inside themselves.
I feel it now. He is mine. I am his. And I want everything that goes along with that.
I decide there’s no point in beating myself up for not getting here sooner.
It took all of those moves I made to get me to this one.
It took everything I did, everything we were, to be sitting in this rattling old vehicle on New Year’s Eve, finally completely certain that there is nothing I would rather do than run with him, submit to him like a wolf and partner with him like a human, and have him call me his forever.
That I have to deal with Vin?a’s beak-faced, wormy bullshit in the middle of this makes me highly motivated to do whatever is necessary to get rid of that bitch once and for all.
I’m actually gritting my teeth a little as I drive up Winter’s bumpy driveway.
Everything feels like déjà vu tonight, or maybe it’s just a hint of that “Auld Lang Syne.” I remember the first time I drove up here like this.
How I had an irritated pack of bodyguards who all warned me that trying to rent one of the cottages here would piss Ty off. They were right. It did.
Though he still let me do it.
I remember meeting Savi and Briar for the first time. I knew who Savi was on sight, of course. I knew Briar was one of the Kind at a glance. Made of magic, if not, apparently, able to access any.
I never thought I’d be friendly with either one of them.
I knew Winter best—though, back then, I barely knew her at all.
Now look at us, I think as I swing out of the Explorer and let my boots hit the cold, icy ground.
We were all hanging out in a bar last night like regular old twentysomethings on a sitcom somewhere.
Practically idyllic, if you squint and tell yourself that there weren’t three gorgons and a whole drunk-ass manticore at Gold Rush last night.
The sun is behind the hills now. The dark night falls like a curtain. Savi, apparently not wishing to bother with her fancy vehicle, appears in the door of her cottage. On my other side, I hear the front door to the house open, and a glance tells me that Winter’s there.
She starts toward us, over the yard that still shows patches of green grass beneath the thinner patches of snow.