Page 55 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“You should get back,” I say. “I’ve got the rest of this line.”

Dane nods once, pushes off the trunk, goes back toward the lodge, and doesn’t look over his shoulder on the way. Down by the training yard, orange flares up into the dark, it comes up fast off Evren’s hands, bright enough to throw his shadow out across the yard. He doesn’t pull it back fast enough, looks at his own palms, around the yard, quickly checking every direction at once. With dinner just called there’s nobody out to catch it but me. He swears quietly at himself, shakes his hands out and heads up toward the lodge. I watch all of it from the treeline. Somebody should go down there, put a hand on that boy’s shoulder and tell him it happens, has been happening more than it used to and that nobody in this compound is going to hold it against him.

I don’t go. The patrol takes me past Nyxiana’s cabin on the long side. Kaspian is on her porch again, this time with his bag over his shoulder, on his way out for the night. She’s in the doorway with the lamp behind her and her hair down, one shoulder against the frame, the same way she stood the first hundred nights I watched this place from up here. I’m far enough away that neither of them marks me going by. I put my eyes back on the trees without changing my pace. Most of a sentence reaches me anyway.

“Evie’s dreams have gotten sharper this last week,” he says. “Scarlett’s up with her. She’s restless enough that it’s got both of us watching her.”

I put it aside, it doesn’t go. I walk the next quarter mile still thinking about a girl who dreams too hard and a boy who can’t hold his own fire. There’s nothing I can do for either of them. Evren couldn’t hold that flare and didn’t know why. Evie can’t sleep, nobody can tell her why. Nothing in this compound used to do that.

The cold comes up harder past the middle of the night. It always turns colder out here right before it turns light. I’ve got no coat, don’t go back for one. Somewhere in the fifth or sixth lap my legs have an opinion. They haven’t done that in years, a night of walking has never been enough to get at this body. Still, I don’t stop. On the seventh lap the lodge goes dark, window by window. On the eighth there’s nobody awake in this compound but me, which is how most of my nights here have ended.

The sky over the east ridge turns gray, then goes the color the sky does before there’s any sun, then the gold comes in along the bottom edge.

I don’t go back to my cabin even though my body’s asking for it. There’s a bed in my cabin across the compound and nobody here would say a single word about me being in it. Instead I put my back against the split trunk and stay at the treeline until the sun’s the whole way up over the ridge, with warmth in it again.

The compound starts moving below me. Doors. Voices. Somebody at the woodpile. Still, I don’t move, because out here nobody has ever asked me to be anything except what I already am.

Chapter 31

Nyxiana

The cold is deeper this morning.

I run cool, have done ever since I can remember. This isn’t that. This has been sitting in me since I opened my eyes and it hasn’t shifted. The sun is full on the boards outside my window with August heat.

I get the cruor out of the case where I keep it. Eleven coins, more than a run to the quarter has ever taken. Blood Moon is home, home is where the prices go strange on you. I count them out into my palm the same way I’ve counted them for decades, oldest first, checking the crystal in each one against the light from the window. My hand isn’t as steady around them as it should be and I put them down.

Before I take a crossing that long I’m going to know exactly what I have to spend on it. So, I test it. Floor to door, one side of my cabin to the other, a distance I’ve covered without thinking about it since the day I moved in. The dark comes up but it’s slow coming and even slower letting go, so much that it doesn’t finish. I come out of it a full step short of the door with my weight already going the wrong way. My hand reaches the frame before my knees reach the floor. I holding on with my heart hammering against my ribs and my legs not entirely willing to take the rest of me back off that frame.

The cabin is eleven feet across. I’ve crossed continents, this has never happened. Not the year I went longest without a run, nor any of the times I let it go past sensible because there was work in front of me. I make myself go through it properly instead of around the edges of it. The last time I fed to full was before Drakoria. Since then there’s been the quarter, which came to less than half of what I went down there for. Then a broken vessel in a street, three swallows off the bottom of it. Every crossing since Drakoria has had Valen. He doesn’t carry like a passenger, never has. Something in him pulls against the dark the whole way and I’ve been paying out of a reserve that had nothing spare in it to start with.

It’s worse than I let myself track. I could go anyway. I’m good enough to make Blood Moon on empty, probably, and that is the entire problem. A phase that doesn’t finish clean over open country in the middle of a crossing isn’t a risk I get to take by myself. Not now. Not with the last of them in front of me and no one else in any realm who can read those marks. Which leaves the other thing - asking.

I’ve fed myself in the dark for decades and nobody at Ash Hollow ever knew it was a thing that had to be managed. Valen knows. He caught my hand shaking in the yard before we crossed to Drakoria and kept his own on my arm until I said it out loud. Then he told me to tell him the next time, before it got this far, said we would handle it together. The day after that, in Drakoria, he asked me why I go to another realm for blood when fifty people live at Ash Hollow, and I gave him the rest of it.

Outside my window, past the horse paddock, Valen is at the far edge of the compound. He hasn’t moved off that treeline since last night. The light came up over him and the sun is high enough now to put his shadow short on the path. He’s still standing in it. I’ve watched that man come in off a perimeter at dawn morning after morning. He always came in. This time he left my porch before I got to say anything other than the answer he asked for. There’s more in me, none of it is anything he wanted to hear at the time, some of it he might want now. I stay at the window. Then I go to Lyanna.

Everyone at Ash Hollow knows what I am. Dane knew before I ever crossed the yard. What none of them know is that it has to be managed. Lyanna is the one who worked that out on her own because she’s treated people in this compound who aren’t wolves, she knows what those bodies run on. She’s never asked me a question I didn’t offer to answer first.

She looks up when I come in. Whatever she’s holding goes down on the table. She doesn’t ask me what’s wrong.

“How long since you fed properly?”

“Before Drakoria.”

She goes still at that.

“And since?”

“Part of a vessel in the Blood Moon quarter. Then most of another one that got broken before I finished it - a third of what I should have taken, since this hunt started, with a crossing on nearly every day of it.”

Saying it out loud takes something out of me that the crossings didn’t. Lyanna comes around the table, takes my wrist in both hands, holds it a while. Then she puts two fingers under my jaw and turns my head into the light.

“You can’t make Blood Moon like this,” she says. “Not safely. Not today.”

“I know.”

“Then we can skip the part where I talk you out of it.”