Page 6 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

I don’t turn back into the trees. I walk down, out of the pines, down the slope, onto the open ground between the eastern cabins and the treeline. It’s closer to the compound than I’ve stood in months. This is the ground I’ll walk in the morning, when I stop hiding and let them see me.

I fix my line, the angle I’ll take. Where the light falls at that hour. Which cabin door sees me first, and who’s standing in it. I make sure I’ve noted patrol timings so they won’t cross me. I’m not walking in tonight, caught on the wrong night by a boy with something to prove. I’m walking in on a morning I choose, in daylight, on my own feet.

For months I could vanish off this ridge the second anyone got close. That way out is gone now, I’m the one who took it. Below me, a lamp comes on in the lodge kitchen. The patrol finishes its pass and starts again. Her window stays lit a while, then goes dark.

The pull at the back of my skull, the one that’s been there since the first night I read her from this line, doesn’t ease with the decision. It isn’t hunger, at least not any hunger I know how to name. I stop trying and instead I stay until the cool comes up off the ridge and the compound goes quiet under it. The last porch light goes out at the west end. Every other night out here I’ve told myself the same thing. Step back into the trees. Come again tomorrow.

Tonight, I don’t say it. The next time her window goes dark, I’ll be on the other side of these trees. I set the morning in my mind before turning for the ridge to wait it out.

Chapter 4

Nyxiana

Lyanna’s healing space smells of dried herbs and moonflower, the same as it did yesterday when the day was still ordinary. Bundles of yarrow and something sharper hang drying from the beam over the counter, under it all sits the cool mineral smell of the stone she grinds for poultices. Morning light comes through the east windows and lays warm across the worktable, catching the dust that turns in it. In the far corner, the doorframe I keyed for her months ago stands quiet, the runes I traced into the wood dim until a patient needs them. Medical access only, opening for Lyanna alone. Dragons come through it to be healed, fae, anyone hurt who can’t be seen elsewhere. Nothing that means them harm gets through. Somewhere out in the yard a horse blows and stamps. It’s a good room. It’s held a lot of bad news and stayed a good room.

I checked Nova and Kari on my own yesterday, quickly and quietly, enough to know I needed everyone in one place. Today I do it properly, with Lyanna’s senses on the marks beside mine and all three marked wolves here, a full day has gone by, enough to tell me whether any of it has moved since.

Nova sits with her wrist turned up on the table. Kari’s leaning against the shelves with her arms crossed, already bored, or pretending to be. Harper’s by the window with Ben beside her, steadier than she was yesterday, his shoulder close to hers. Lyanna works at the counter, close, ready. Rafe stands near the door, arms crossed, watching. Dane stands in the center of the room without crowding it.

I turn my attention on them and what each of them is carrying comes to me at once, under whatever they’re letting the others see. Nova’s already ahead of me, working the problem before I’ve told her there is one. Kari wants this over with. Rafe has been waiting weeks to be right about the thing he never wanted to be right about, and today he will be.

I set my hand over Nova’s wrist. Her skin is cool and dry under my palm, her pulse steady, slower than a scared woman’s would run. She doesn’t pull back. She turned her wrist up for me herself and holds it there.

The silver lines sit quietly under my fingers, fine as thread, cool where the rest of her is warm. She’s carried them since before she was born, Faelan’s work laid into her blood before she drew a breath. I send my senses down through them, past the surface, into the resonance underneath. It answers and it’s not the slow settle of something winding down. Not residue from the network that came down two months ago. It’s live, deliberate, ordered, the same way Harper’s was yesterday under my hand.

“Give me a moment,” I say. “It’s faint.”

Quiet all these months, it gave nothing back. There was nothing to get hold of. Now it’s awake, and there’s a live signature under my hand to follow. The movement stays under the skin, nothing on the surface to catch, so I slow down and trade speed for precision. I go down into it a layer at a time. Everyone goes still around me while I work. Kari’s stopped shifting against the shelves. Ben’s hand has found the small of Harper’s back. Nobody says a word. It all sits at the edge of my attention while the rest of me goes down into the resonance, where what answers isn’t the scatter of a working that’s lost its purpose. This was made, it’s holding a design. Someone built this to sit in her blood and wait.

I keep it to myself for now.

“It used to act up,” Nova says. Cool and precise, giving me something to work with. “Before the collapse. Not often and nothing since, not once, until yesterday. Every time it did act up, the guardians had logged a portal running unstable the day before. That kind of thing crosses my desk. I don’t know if it’s the cause. I wrote down the dates either way.”

“That helps,” I say, because it does. Her steadiness gives me a cleaner line into the resonance. The picture sharpens. Whatever set this in her is the same hand that touched Harper.

“You’re welcome to all of it,” Nova says.

I turn to Kari. She holds out her right hand and shakes it once before I can take it. “It buzzes. Like a foot that’s asleep,” she tells me and lets me take her hand anyway. Her palm is warm and callused, a working hand, it doesn’t hold as still as Nova’s did. Her fingers keep wanting to curl. Her mark is a different thing entirely. Not laid into her before birth, not pressed in by a Debt Stone. Burned into her palm up in the North Range when she touched the substrate mural. It reads rougher for it, raised where Nova’s lay flat, the silver now a scar. I read past all of that, down to what sits underneath. It’s the same signature as the one under Harper’s mark. The one I just found in Nova.

Three.

“Well?” Kari says. “Am I going to live?”

“You’re going to live.” I hold onto her hand a moment before I let it go.

Three of them. Nova, Harper, Kari, three people I would step in front of without thinking about it. The urge to do that rises right now, to put myself between them and whatever made these marks. I hold still, don’t let it move me. Harper doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have to. She’s already lived through hers, and is still standing at the window.

I go over all of them again, slowly, checking myself. Not the count. I’ve known that since Kari came back from the North with hers. I’m making certain of who made them, and whether I’m sure of it or only want to be. The answer holds. Nova’s, Harper’s, Kari’s - three different origins, one hand under all three, the same interlocking work in each.

Across the table, Lyanna has her fingers over Kari’s palm, reading it her own way with healer’s senses where mine are frequency. She lifts her eyes to me. She has it too. The match holds.

“I can’t heal what isn’t broken,” Lyanna says from the counter. “These are records, not wounds, and something in them is moving now that wasn’t a week ago.” She meets my eyes. “It’s him. I’ve handled his work enough times to know the feel of it.”

“Faelan’s,” Rafe says.

Everyone turns to him. He’s gone quieter. He gets quieter when a thing is bad. His accent thickens when he speaks, the Drakorian coming up under the words.

“This is what I’ve been saying since the network came down. It didn’t end. We patched the hole and called it over.” His voice drops. “Vorthak. It was never over.”