Page 77 of Monster Queen Rising

And the field comes up, and it isn't six lines anymore.

It's one.

Every bond answering every other until I can't tell where mine ends and theirs begins, the whole of it filling the room and all seven of us at once, and I come with the field cresting straight through me — through Thaw and Crull and Harek and both twins and Fen at the very top of it — more than I can hold, morethan anyone bothered to count, and he goes a beat behind me with a sound low and not human in his chest and his teeth still set in the back of my neck.

The crest holds.

Something comes up under his mouth that isn't his.

I feel it arrive and I feel all six of them feel it, and not one of them says a word, because there isn't one yet.

Then it lets me down. Slow.

The peaks fade and the marks settle and the pack breathes and I breathe, and there's the moon through the window and the sound of seven people remembering how to.

"For the record," Daron says into the quiet, wrecked and happy, "I stopped counting at —"

"Daron," the whole bed says.

Silence.

Then Thaw, mild, "Eleven."

Nobody moves.

"THERE WAS A LIST—"

"There was no list."

"You counted!"

"I paid attention," Thaw says.

Daron laughs so hard the bed shakes. So do I. So, eventually, does Crull — which is the rarest sound in this house and the one I'd put above all the rest of it.

I'm in the middle of the bed with all of them folded around me. The field is the quietest it has ever been. It stays that way a long time.

Then Thaw, near my ear: "There you are."

Crull, behind me, his arm tightening once: "Held."

Harek, from the foot: "Stay."

Daron, against my shoulder: "Mine."

Dean, his hand in my hair: "Ours."

Fen says nothing for a moment. Then, into my hair: "Home."

I close my eyes.

Nobody's standing watch. Nobody's listening for engines on the road.

For the first time since the cells, the whole pack sleeps together at once.

So do I.

Chapter twenty-seven