Page 58 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

I go past the last cabin, out to the open stretch behind it where nobody has any reason to be, stand there a moment with the bag against my hip. Then go. The dark comes up clean. It takes me the instant I ask it and lets go the instant I’m through. Nothing in me has to be spent getting across. This is my realm answering my blood. It’s never argued with me. I come out under the red moon, into air thick and cool, smelling of stone, iron, and the smoke they burn in the upper city. Every part of me settles the moment I’m standing in it. This is more home than Ash Hollow has ever managed to be, and I’ve loved Ash Hollow since the winter. None of that makes the other thing any smaller.

My body is still half turned back toward a training yard three realms behind me. The only hard part of this entire trip was the thing I didn’t say, and I’m going to be carrying that through everything that happens on this side.

Time runs faster here, always has. Whatever the pack does today at Ash Hollow, I’ll have lived through more of it than they will. The seal is going now in a way it wasn’t a month ago, and every realm we’ve opened has taken more out of it. There’s less left every time. Nobody has said a number out loud yet, they don’t need to.

I square my shoulders and start walking toward the part of Blood Moon that’s about to stop being simple.

Chapter 33

Nyxiana

Icome through inside Vampiria, at the family gate on the east side of the courtyard, the one with no guard and no record kept of who uses it. My travel clothes go over into court dress while I’m still finishing the step through. Dark, fitted, high at the collar. I go over the visit one more time, the same as I went over it on the crossing. Greet them in the receiving hall. Ask where the fourth point is kept in this realm. Hold the audience under an hour. Be out of here before anybody has room to ask me a second question.

I check my hands; they’re steady.

The courtyard is exactly as I left it. Black stone underfoot, laid in the long pattern nobody has changed in four hundred years. The dark glass in the upper windows throws the moon back at itself so that the whole east face of the palace glows dull red from the third floor up. Somewhere behind the wall a horse moves in the stable yard. I start across it toward the main doors but I don’t get to them - my mother and my father come out to meet me themselves, through the small door under the arch. No herald walks ahead of them, nobody trails behind at the proper distance.

For as long as it takes them to cross the stones, the space at my left side is very obviously empty. He would have crossed those stones on my left, walking between me and every door in that courtyard. He does that everywhere. He always has.

My mother gets to me first, takes my face in both hands. For a while she doesn’t say anything, just looks at me the same way she’s looked at me over skinned knees, unhurried, going over all of it before she’ll comment on any part.

“You’re pale,” she says. “Even for you. And you’re worn straight through. It isn’t the kind sleep fixes.”

My father stands a step behind her with his hands folded, waiting his turn. He’s watching her face more than he’s watching mine.

“I’m here for the fourth point,” I say. “Niko will have told you what we took out of Drakoria. There was one in the North Range after that and one in Doria. The fourth is in this realm and I need to know where you keep it.”

My father starts to answer, slowly, turning it over, the way he handles anything that lives in the old records rather than in his own memory.

“There’s nothing in the household register under that description,” he says. “There may be something in the deep archive. I’d want to look before I told you yes or no.”

“Where’s Valen?” That’s my mother, straight across the top of him.

She has his name. Niko will have given it to her, because Briarstone was the first realm we walked into together and my uncle has never let a thing like that go unmentioned to his sister. The question isn’t a guess. She has been holding on to it since we came through that gate.

“He didn’t come” is all the answer I give her.

My hand closes at my side, nails digging into my palm hard enough to leave marks that will be gone in a minute. Neither of them can see it from where they’re standing. My mother’s eyes stay on my face. She’s already decided there’s more to it than I’ve handed her. My father’s eyes go to my hand. He puts his hand at my back and turns me away from the corridor that runs to the audience hall.

“The map can wait until you’ve fed,” he says.

We go through the private way, the narrow halls between the family wing and receiving rooms. The stone in here is older and darker than the polished floors out front. It’s worn into dips at the middle of every threshold from a few hundred years of the same handful of feet. Lamps set into the wall down here rather than hung - small and low. They come up as we reach them, settle again behind us. The place smells of old stone and candle wax, with the faint metal underneath both that any house full of my kind carries in it. We pass the stair - the narrow one that comes out on the gallery above the small court. Kaspian and I ran up it half our childhood, straight past a session in progress underneath. A steward always came after us with his hands out, hissing at us to be quiet. I look at it, then I look away and keep walking.

“Has anything come across the borders?” I ask.

I keep it light.

“Anything unusual. Anything the watch flagged and couldn’t place.”

“Nothing,” my father says. “The borders have been quiet since spring. There’s nothing in the logs that hasn’t already been walked down and accounted for.” He looks over at me. “How long are you staying?”

The receiving room he takes me to is one of the small ones. Two low couches facing each other, a table between them, one narrow window. Nothing in here was built to impress anybody. My mother chose every piece of furniture in it herself, which is not something that could be said about a single room on the public side of this house.

“Blood,” my mother says to the steward at the door. “Not tea.”

“I’m fine.”

She doesn’t argue with me, doesn’t look at me either. The steward goes.