Page 67 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“She stood in front of the pack and told us what the founders did. There was once one people. They cut them into five, sealed the pieces separately from each other, and the thing holding them apart is failing now. She says it’s pulling at everybody in this valley carrying more than one kind of blood.”

I don’t say anything.

“Nova can’t get through a sentence. Kari won’t let Rafe put a hand on her and doesn’t know she’s doing it. Evren walked out.” He stops. “She named you too, Valen. In front of all of them, said what you are, that you were made on purpose.”

“I know what I am.”

“I’m aware. This is me telling you the rest of the pack knows now.” He puts a hand on my shoulder on the way past. “Go and sleep.” Then he’s down the slope and gone. Nobody in any pack I ever ran with put a hand on me except to move me out of a doorway. I stand there, the place his hand had been still warm through my coat. I have no idea what to do with it. I walked away from her tonight because I’m still angry with her but want her anyway. A man who is both of those things at once has no business inside arm’s length of a woman.

The hum has been going under my sternum since somewhere in the middle of the watch. I know what that is now. It’s the seal. It’s been in me since before I could talk and I’ve spent a hundred years calling it the thing that made me a wolf who couldn’t shift. Tonight it’s louder than it was last night, now I know why. The other thing isn’t that. The other thing sits lower and has a direction. The direction is a cabin at the end of the row with a light in the window. It came up the first night I stood on this ridge and looked at her. It has been on me every night since.

I take the slope down. My cabin’s the last one at the edge of the cluster, close enough to the trees that I hear them when the wind moves. There’s a bed against the wall, a stove I light maybe one night in five, a shelf with what fits on it. Two changes of clothes on a peg. A pack by the door with everything in it I’d carry out, packed the way it’s been in every place I ever stayed. Dane offered me the bigger cabin at the north end after we got back from Doria. He didn’t make a speech about it, said it was mine if I wanted, which was him telling me I’d stopped being a man he was watching. I told him this one was fine. It is fine. That’s what’s wrong with it.

I put my boots against the wall and lie down. Neither thing in me eases, so I stop keeping her out. The pull answers before I’ve finished the thought. It comes low and hard, doesn’t ease when I stop thinking about her. It climbs on its own.

I’ve spent my entire life not letting anybody see me want anything. There’s nobody here so I stop fighting. Her weight comes down over me again. Straddling my lap with her knees on either side of my hips and her hands on my face, dragging herself down the length of my cock through everything we still had on. Slow. Then slower. Every woman before her wanted the dark and wanted it over with. This one held my face in the sun and made me watch her do it.

Heat drops through me.

My cock is already hard against my pants. I get them open, taking hold of myself. The first stroke pulls a sound out of me I don’t recognize as mine. I work it slowly. After that I make the rest of it up. She goes down on her knees in front of me, both hands on my thighs, hair loose around her face. Her mouth takes my cock slow, all the way, eyes coming up to mine and staying there. She never did any of that. I want it badly enough that my hand speeds up on nothing but the idea of it.

My grip tightens. I stroke faster. I’m leaking at the head. I work it down my cock with my thumb and the sound I make is worse than the first one. My other hand grips the blanket. She’s over me in that bed taking my cock a stretch at a time, slowly, both hands braced on my chest. Her fangs are down. That part I don’t have to invent. She had them out on that floor with her mouth on my throat and she let me look at her the whole time.

My hips come up off the bed to meet my own hand.

“Ana.” It comes out of me quiet. It’s the name I have never said to her face. Saying it does more to me than my hand has managed since I started.

The hum answers. It should be easing off. Every stroke should take something off the top of it. Instead it climbs alongside my hand, matching me, harder every time I go harder. It spreads out from behind my sternum and down both arms. I can’t tell any longer which of the two is doing it. Both of them feel like her.

I’m close. My hand is fast and rough. My hips drive up into it. Then the hum and the wanting stop being two things. I come with her name breaking out of me. My back comes off the bed. I get my shirt off the floor and over myself. My hand works me through every pulse of it. Then the room turns white. It leaves my arms, my back, the ends of my fingers. All at once, in every direction. I blink and I can see the grain in the boards over my head. The pack by the door. My own hand on myself. Then it’s dark again. I lie there with my ears ringing. Nothing in this cabin could have done that. The stove is cold. There’s nobody in here but me. I know exactly what my own hand does to me. That was not my hand. I get up, go to the sink, clean myself off. Then I stand there with both palms on the edge of it.

I’m not ashamed of my body. My body is the least complicated thing I own and it has never given me any trouble. What I can’t get past is how much I wanted her, and how fast it took me once I let it. I’ve kept away from her since the night I walked off that porch. Days of it. I did it again in the yard tonight with nobody watching either of us. One hour alone in this cabin and there was nothing left of it. I wouldn’t let her near me, but I lay here and used her anyway.

I go to the window. The light in her cabin is out now. She’s been in there for hours with the whole valley coming apart around her and the last thing she did before that light went out was walk half the yard toward me and get nothing back.

The hum is quieter now though it hasn’t stopped, it’s lower and slower under my sternum, still pointing in the same direction it pointed on the ridge. Whatever came out of me in here is still in me. I can feel where it sat. I lie back down, my eyes on the boards over my head, the same knot in the middle one I’ve looked at more nights than I’ve slept under it.

Tomorrow she’s going to want something from me. Dane said the seal is failing. She named me in front of the whole pack. There’s a reason she crossed that yard tonight and it wasn’t the one I wanted it to be. I’ll be up before the compound is. I’ll be at the edge of it when she comes to find me. She’s the only person alive who could tell me what came out of me in this room. To ask her I’d have to tell her what I was doing when it happened.

Chapter 39

Valen

Itake the blade out before the sun clears the ridge, sit on the top step with it across my knee.

It has an edge, had one yesterday. I run the whetstone down it anyway, slow, one long pass at a time because I want something to do with my hands. My pack sits by the door where it’s sat since the first morning I slept in this cabin. I don’t carry it when I go with her. It stays packed regardless.

Morning light comes low across the yard and puts the shadow of my own roof out over the steps. The sun’s on my boots, the rest of me is in the cold. Through the trees toward the lodge there are more wolves in one place than I’ve seen in days. Nobody’s crossing that ground with a chore. The lodge door hasn’t stopped opening since I sat down, the ones going in aren’t coming back out. That’s not a patrol getting sorted, it’s a pack being called. No call came to me. It never does. The bond goes around me the same as has in every pack before this one, because it goes where wolves go and I’m not one. I’ve never said a word about that to anybody.

Somebody comes out onto the porch and goes back in, then Nyxiana breaks off from the group and starts across the yard. Alone, heading straight for my cabin, past the woodpile. Her stride is even the whole way, the walk she uses when she’s holding herself together by force. I’ve watched her put it on for a fae crown and her own pack. It’s the first time she’s ever used it walking toward me.

I set the whetstone down on the step and stay where I am. Two hundred feet of open dirt and she takes all of it without looking at anything except me. She stops at the bottom of the steps. Her hair’s down and the sun turns it more silver than white. Her face is pale, which is nothing new, but the gray has gone out from under her eyes and there’s color in her mouth that wasn’t there before Blood Moon. She fed while she was gone. I’m glad. It’s the first thing since Doria I’ve been glad about. She opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again.

“There’s a fifth realm,” she says. “The celestial one. It’s where the founders sat when they did all of it. It’s still standing, and Faelan is most of the way into it through the crack Harper’s death opened.”

I put the whetstone in my pocket.

“The key is finished. It’s on my wrist. Nothing else opens that door.” She stops. “And the map has answered to your signature since the first day we opened it. Never to anybody else.”