Page 32 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

I look up at him. He’s nine inches taller than I am, so up is the only direction I have from here. Out in the last of the light his eyes aren’t the hard gray they are indoors. They’re paler and they warm up when he looks at me. I watch him swallow. Then his eyes go to my mouth and stay there. My breathing changes. I hear it happen and I can’t do anything about it. My fangs come down, he sees them, doesn’t move back. The hand on my waist tightens. The other comes up off his side and closes on my arm above the elbow. He comes down toward me. I come up on my toes to meet him. I don’t remember choosing to do it. We stop with nothing left between us. His breath is on my mouth. He smells like sweat, rock dust, and the cold he’s been standing in since morning. Under all of it there’s blood.

It’s his lower lip. He split it back on the plateau, pulling the cord tight with his teeth. It’s opened again sometime in the last few minutes. There’s almost nothing there, s bead sitting in the crack, not even enough to run. An inch. Either of us. One inch and it’s done. My mouth is ready - not for him. For that. His heart is still beating fast under my palm. Now it’s the loudest thing on this rock.

I haven’t fed since before Drakoria. Two crossings and two realms ago. My fangs are all the way down, palm sitting on a man’s heartbeat. There’s blood an inch from my mouth and he’s the one holding on to me. I know how this goes if I close the inch. I take his mouth. Then I take his throat. In that order, and fast enough that the second one is finished before he understands the first one ended.

He wouldn’t stop me. He would stand right here on this rock and let me. I take my hand off his chest come down off my toes and put a step of rock between us. His hand comes off my waist last. He doesn’t come after it just puts it down at his side. I keep my mouth shut.

“Is it me,” he says. He’s asking for a yes. He has a place ready to put it, next to every other one he’s collected up here.

“It isn’t you.”

He waits to see if anything else comes. There’s what I am tonight and how close he came to it. Under that there’s the other thing, the one I’ve been carrying since the first time I saw him - neither of them gets said on this rock. He takes it, doesn’t ask twice. Whatever he decides that step meant, he folds it away without a word, turns for the open rock to wait for me there.

He got it wrong. I let him and take us into the dark. He’s heavy as always, this time it pulls more out of me than the trip up here did. It keeps pulling after I have nothing left to give it. We come out at the Ash Hollow treeline. It’s dusk here and the air smells like pine and woodsmoke after a whole day of cold rock.

My knees hit the pine needles. Both of them this time. He gets a hand on my waist, the same side he had it on out on the rock, takes my weight and brings me back up against him.

“This is my fault,” he says. “You’ve been carrying me across realms and I’ve been letting you.”

“I’m fine.”

“You haven’t fed since before Drakoria.” His arm stays where it is. “I know what that does to you. You told me all of it on the road into Briarstone, and I’ve thought about it every day since.”

I don’t argue. There’s nothing in it that’s wrong.

“I wasn’t sure I’d get us both back tonight,” I say.

“You feed before we go to the next one.” He stops there for a second. “There’s going to be a next one.”

“Valen.”

“That’s the condition.”

Only Kaspian has ever talked to me that way. I let it stand. “All right.”

We walk through the trees toward the lights, the stone rides on his back the whole way. He knows now how little I have left but still doesn’t know what he is.

Chapter 21

Valen

Icome down to the fire an hour after we get back. I can smell Wyatt’s cooking from the top of the yard.

They took dinner outside tonight. It’s warm enough that nobody wanted to be in the lodge, so they carried it out to the pit at the west edge and stayed. Logs and camp chairs the whole way around, most of them full. Half the pack is still holding a plate. Two kids are running the gap between the chairs and the woodpile. They belong to the two families that came in this month. The fire is bigger than it needs to be for cooking. Somebody built it up when word got around that we were back.

I take a log at the outer edge where the light stops. The fire is warm on my left, behind me the yard runs out into the dark, he treeline sits about thirty feet past that. Old habits - from here I can see all of it and nobody gets behind me.

Dane stands up, Nova with him. The talk around the fire drops off without either of them asking.

“Valen,” Dane says. “Tell them what you brought home.”

Every face at that fire comes around to me, I’ve been off since the North Range. It changed nothing. There’s been something else in me since I had my hand on that stone. I’ve had the whole walk down and the evening to put a name on it. Nothing fits. So, it’s the trip. I get up and take the stone out of my pack.

“We got it,” I say. “It was set into the rock under the oldest part of their range. Nyxiana read the layers underneath it. One is gone, cut out and sealed over, then laid back down, a rock on top.”

I put it on the flat stone at the edge of the fire where they can all see it. “It’s the same layer Drakoria is missing,” I tell them, then sit down again.

Lyanna has the Drakoria stone with her. She unwraps it, takes the wards off, sets it down beside the one I brought back. Nyxiana picks up both halves, turns them until the broken faces line up, puts them together. They fit.