Page 61 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“Nyxiana.”

“The resonance matched exactly.” I hold his eyes. “Not approximately. The same signature I read off the founders’ own record in Doria, down to the construction. There’s no room left in it for me to be wrong.”

He stays where he is for a long moment. Then puts his own hand on the panel, over the place where mine was, and leaves it there. My left wrist starts to itch, slight, a prickle under the sleeve. I brush at it without thinking about it. It goes warm, then hot. The star on my wrist comes up bright enough to show straight through the fabric, the hard white line of it where the birthmark sits, throwing my own shadow up onto the panel in front of me. I push my sleeve back. The light on my skin holds steady. There’s no flicker, none of the guttering of a thing on its way out. It sits on my wrist like it’s been waiting my entire life for somebody to say the right sentence in front of it. The star is exactly as it has always been. Five points, small, no bigger than the pad of my thumb, sitting where the two tendons run into the heel of my hand. My mother used to kiss it. Three healers in two realms have looked at it, called it a birthmark and sent me home.

I stand there and look at it. Three marks on three women I love. Nova, born with hers. Harper, who carried hers through her own death and came back still wearing it. Kari, with hers burned into her right palm off a substrate older than any of us. I’ve had my hands on all three of those marks. They cracked open into a map of four realms in a lodge at Ash Hollow with the whole pack standing around me. I’ve taken every one of those realms in order since. A fourth corner on the map has been dark from the first day I opened it. Dark, I told myself, because of distance, or interference, or because somebody had hidden that piece better than the rest. But it was never hidden. It’s on my arm. It has been on my arm since the hour I was born.

I’ve spent this entire hunt reading everyone in every realm we walked into and here are two signatures I have never been able to read. One of them is Valen’s. The other one is mine. That’s exactly why I needed my father standing in a cold room telling me what it did to him to hold my mother’s hand. The founders built their fourth point to find a particular outcome. Not a treaty. Not an alliance. A person who came through the instinct anyway. My father overcame it. My mother, angel and dragon both, met him in the middle.

A daughter. Not a son. That’s the piece they were watching for, because a daughter out of that pairing is the worst of everything they were trying to prevent, and here I am, walking around wearing their mark on my wrist since I was born without ever once asking what it was for.

My father comes over. He takes my hand and turns my wrist. He touches the mark with two fingers, careful, the same way he’d touch something hot. “Who else knows?”

“Nobody. It lit up four minutes ago.”

“How long have you been working toward this on your own?”

“Since the marks opened at Ash Hollow.”

“You came all the way here and asked me about a shard.” He keeps hold of my wrist. “This was done to you before you were born, it was done to your mother and me to get you. That makes it ours as much as yours. You’re not going to handle it by yourself.”

“I’ve handled everything by myself.”

“I’m aware,” he says letting go of my hand.

“I need to find your mother,” he says and leaves.

The door takes a while to shut. When it does, the sound goes up to the roof and comes back down. After that there’s nothing in here but me, the broken red light on the floor, and the mark on my arm still throwing its own. That’s when it comes for me - not the founders, or the map. Him. It arrives all at once. I’m standing in the biggest room in my father’s realm with the last piece of it lit up on my skin and there is exactly one person alive I would give any of it up to if I could have him here with me. He’s three realms away because of what I did and there’s no one alive who could explain it to me.

I want his hands, the weight of him beside me, close enough to lean into, so that I’m not the only living thing standing in the middle of this.

Chapter 35

Nyxiana

My old room is at the end of the family corridor, third door, the small one nobody ever wanted.

Nothing in it has changed. The same bed, four posts and a canopy, too big for a room this size, which is half the reason nobody else ever wanted it. A writing desk under the window with the same ink stain on the corner I put there when I was nine. There’s a shelf of things I stopped caring about decades ago and never came back for. The light through the window falls exactly where it fell when I was a child lying down in it, because the moon here has never moved.

My left wrist is still warm.

I get the case out of my bag and open it on the desk. Three shards, each one wrapped separate in its own square of cloth. The middle one came out of a hollow in the North Range that Valen opened with his own hands. I set them out on the desk in a line and I hold my left wrist above them. The star catches. All three answer it at once. There’s a hum that comes up between the four of them, low, no louder than a struck glass in another room. It holds. The light off my wrist and the light off the stones is the same. It’s been the same this entire time and I’ve been carrying three quarters of it around in a case.

The key is whole.

I stand there, over my own desk, with four points lit and the hum going between them. Nobody in any realm knows that except me. The shards were never the point of it. They’re the parts that could be taken out and hidden. The part that couldn’t be hidden was walking around inside a woman who reads everything.

I do what I do with any problem that turns out to be several problems - start talking it through out loud, to nobody, in an empty room. What Ash Hollow needs to hear,in what order. How much of it Dane gets before the pack. Whether Lyanna can hold the stones once they’re this awake.

Faelan is already going at the celestial realm through the crack Harper’s death and return tore in it. He’ll keep at it until he’s through, because he means to reach the founders’ own seat and use it to fire all three marks at once. Nova. Harper. Kari. Every institution in every realm losing the floor underneath it in the same hour. He intends to break through the wall. I can open the door. What’s on this desk and what’s on my wrist is the only key there is.

That’s the practical version. Underneath it there’s the other one.

Valen was built. The founders made him on purpose and set him in a wolf pack in the North Range as an infant to hold a seal for them. I was born. My parents had a daughter, and the fourth point they’d already made went off on my wrist because I turned out to be exactly what their system was watching for. Key and lock. Neither of us was ever asked. My list stops there. It stops on a thing I can’t finish, and I stand in the middle of my old room with my hands on a desk trying to finish it anyway. I straighten my spine. Four in, hold, six out. I learned the count at this desk when I was small enough to need a stool to reach it, and I have used it in every room since where I could not afford to be read.

My hands continue to shake.

That has never failed me. Not at Doria in front of a court that belongs to Faelan’s own kind. Not on a balcony with my hand at Faelan’s throat. Tonight it does, so I turn to the case instead. The lid goes down. I work the latch. Then open it again to check the cloths are folded right, close it and work the latch a second time. Halfway through the third time I stop, sit down on the edge of the bed with the case still in my hands. There’s no one in this room. No court, pack, father, mother, nobody at all in the corridor outside. I’ve held myself upright in front of somebody every hour of every day since I left Ash Hollow. In front of a dealer in the lower quarter, a fae crown, twice in one night in front of my own parents. There’s nobody left in this room to do it for.