Novels by Love above Stories

The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening EndsMona's POVCassian's youngest boy came at me across the grass at a dead run with a wooden wolf toy in his fist, and he was laughing.His name was Hal. He was three years old. He had his father's serious eyes and his mother Yara's easy laugh, and the two of them together made him the kind of small child who could switch from grave to joyful in one breath. He barreled up to my chair and thrust the wooden wolf at my knee. He said, breathless, "Grandma. This wolf. This wolf is tired." I said, gently, "Is he." Hal said, "He walked all the way from the fountain." I said, "That is very far." Hal said, "For a wolf." I said, "Especially for a wolf." He climbed up my knees. He sat down on the grass by my feet and laid the wooden wolf on its side. He patted its wooden head with great seriousness and said to it, "You rest now." Then he looked up at me and said, "Grandma. Do wolves get tired?" I said, "Yes, little bear. They do." He said, "Even the big ones?" I sa

Mona's POVI got out of bed at first light the morning after we buried Sophie, and I did not tell anyone I was going out.I dressed slowly. My hands were stiff from the cold. I pulled on the long grey walking cloak Derek had given me on my sixtieth birthday — heavy wool, deep pockets, a hood that fell all the way to my eyebrows if I wanted it to. I did not want the hood. I put my hair back with a plain leather cord. I laced my boots. I stood in front of the small mirror on my washstand for a moment and I looked at the old woman looking back at me. Seventy. My hair was the color of ash now. There were lines at my mouth I had not earned in a single year. My eyes were the same eyes I had had at seventeen in a Silver Moon kitchen, and I could not decide whether that was a kindness or a cruelty. I turned away from the mirror. I picked up Derek's wooden comb from the small table by the fireplace where it had lived for years. I put it in the deep pocket of my cloak. I do not know why. I only

Mona's POVI walked the three lanes to Sophie's house on the morning of my seventieth birthday, and I found her before she found me.That is the sentence I have kept for two years now. That is the sentence that holds the whole shape of it. She had not come to my kitchen for breakfast that morning, which was strange. Sophie had come to my kitchen every seventh morning for two years, and every morning-morning during Derek's fever, and every morning of the year after. She was never late. So when the sun was already up over Nightshade's rooftops and she had not come, I put on my shawl. I walked. I did not run. My knees would not let me run. But I walked as fast as an old woman who is trying not to be afraid can walk. The three lanes have never been so long. I passed the well. I passed the bakers already at work. I passed a small yellow dog who followed me for half a lane and then decided I was going somewhere too sad and turned back. I did not knock at her door. I had not knocked at her d

Mona's POVVesna's letter came in early spring, and it was the first thing that had made me set down my tea in months.The paper was plain. Her handwriting had settled into the small careful shape it had taken on years ago. Mona. Would you allow me to come and see you? Not for school business. Not for the councillor. Only for tea. It has been a long time. I understand if you say no. — V. I read it twice. Sophie was sitting across from me at my kitchen table, buttering bread. She saw my face. She said, "Who is it from?" I said, "Vesna." Sophie set the knife down. She said, "What does she want?" I said, "Tea." Sophie was quiet a moment. Then she said, small, "You should say yes." I said, "I know I should." She said, "Are you going to?" I said, "Yes." I did not need to think about it long. I owed Vesna a cup of tea. Not because she deserved it — deserving was not the shape of what was between us. Because we had built something over the years, quietly, letter by letter, small step by smal

Mona's POVI laughed for the first time on a Wednesday, and I did not even notice I had done it until the sound was already out of me.Little Mona had come for her weekly lesson. She was fourteen now, tall for her age, all knees and elbows the way girls are at that age when the body has decided to grow faster than the mind can keep up with. She had been working, for three weeks, on a small trick she had invented for herself — a floating flame in the shape of a bird. It was harder than it looked. Fire wants to be a round thing. Making it into a bird takes patience and a strange kind of attention. That Wednesday she came in and dropped her satchel and said, without a hello, "Grandma. Watch." She lifted her palm. She breathed. A small yellow flame came up. She narrowed her eyes. The flame stretched. It thinned. It grew two small pointed wings. It sat on her palm like a tiny burning sparrow. She looked at me, triumphant. She said, "I made a bird." And then, because she was fourteen and co

Mona's POVThe morning after the funeral, I woke up and I reached for him before I remembered, and that was how the first year began.My hand crossed the sheet on his side of the bed. My hand met linen and nothing else. I lay very still for a long time with my palm pressed to the cool empty place where his shoulder used to be. The sun was already up. The sun should have known. The birds outside the window should have known. Nothing outside had noticed. That was the cruelest thing about that first morning — the world had not adjusted itself to match the size of what was missing. I sat up slowly. I did not weep. My eyes had been dry since I had cried into Rose's shoulder at the graveside. I got out of bed. I dressed myself. I combed my hair with the wooden comb — his comb, still on the washstand — and then I sat with it in my hand for a moment, holding the small chip Cassian had put in it as a toddler, and I did not put it down. I carried it into the sitting room. I set it on the small

Diane's POVHe's happy. Luna's whisper crawled through me colder than the wind, but before I could make sense of it, before my father could speak a single word across that frozen clearing, the mountain gave us no time to grieve or reckon or heal. Because from the tree line beyond the ridge came the sound of feet in the snow — dozens of them — and out of the dark stumbled the broken remains of Silver Creek. Not warriors now. Survivors. Old ones, and mothers, and small ones clutching their mothers' legs, the whole of Victor's pack pouring down from the burning lodge with nowhere left to run, herded before Corwin's fighters like sheep before wolves. And I saw the pack around me shift, saw the torchlight glint off bared teeth, and I understood that the war I thought had ended an hour ago was about to begin again — not with claws this time, but with a question. What do you do with the pack that came to kill your children, now that they kneel in your snow with nothing left? My father, the f

Diane's POVHe's standing right behind your new family. I did not turn to look. I could not. Because if I turned and saw my father's face in that crowd — the face I had grieved, the face I had prayed to, the face I had told my daughter stories about on dark motel nights — I would break into so many pieces that no one could ever put me back together, and I could not afford that, not with Luna watching, not yet. So I stayed exactly where I was, kneeling on the black ice, staring into the pale eyes of the man who had just told me my mother was murdered. And something happened inside me that I have no gentle words for. All night I had been a mother — fierce, controlled, choosing mercy, choosing not to teach my daughter the wrong lesson. But the woman who died when I was small, the woman whose face I could barely remember, the woman who had tried to save me and been handed over like a debt — she rose up inside me now, and the mother stepped aside, and what was left was the little girl who

Diane's POVThe torches came down the mountain fast, and I held my daughter and could not breathe, watching that flood of paws and firelight pour toward us through the dark — until the wind shifted and Luna lifted her head from my shoulder and said, in a voice thick with tears but certain, "It's Grandmother, Mama. And Uncle Cole. And Corwin. It's ours." And then I saw them, breaking out of the pines at the head of the whole pack — the grandmother on the back of a great gray wolf, her silver hair wild, my brother running at the flank with blood on his face, Corwin roaring the old rally cry — and I understood that the ridge had held. Silver Creek had broken. The pack had won the lodge, and now they had come down the mountain for us, hundreds of them, and the sight of them cresting that slope under the moon made me sob all over again with a relief so total it hurt. The grandmother flung herself off the wolf's back and stumbled through the snow to us and gathered Luna and me both into her

Diane's POV We came down on Victor's people at the frozen creek bed, where the valley narrowed and the water had turned to black glass under the moon, and I want you to understand what it is to hunt the man who has your child — every sense screaming, the cold forgotten, your whole body one drawn arrow. Zev hit them from the high side, a black storm out of the pines, and I came low along the creek where the shadows hid me, and for the first few heartbeats it was chaos, torches spinning, wolves turning, shouts cutting the freezing air. But Victor's people were tired. They'd climbed the mountain, they'd fought at the lodge, they'd run the slope carrying a struggling child — and we were fresh with fury. Zev tore through the rear guard while I slipped between the fighting bodies toward the center, toward the one place they were all trying to protect, toward the tall calm figure who stood on the black ice with my daughter clutched against him. And Luna saw me first. Of course she did. She

Diane's POVWatch how brave. My daughter's words hung in the smoke where her small hand had been, and something inside me that had never fully broken — not through five years of running, not through twelve rogues in the snow, not through any of it — finally broke now, and out of the break came something I had no name for. I don't remember getting to my feet. I remember the blood in my eye and the fire on the walls and the six Silver Creek wolves piled on top of Zev, dragging my mate down, tearing at him — and I remember that I did not think. I moved. I crossed that burning floor and I hit the pile of them the way I'd hit Corwin's son that morning, low and fast and merciless, driving my shoulder into the joint of a wolf's leg, hearing it buckle, and I was screaming Luna's name with every breath and I was not afraid of any of them anymore, because the worst thing in the world had already happened, and a mother with nothing left to lose is the most dangerous thing that walks.And beneath

Diane's POVThe lodge became a nightmare of smoke and firelight and screaming, and I lost sight of everything for three terrible heartbeats — and in those three heartbeats, the shape of Victor's whole lie became clear. Because they didn't come through only the front doors. They came through the walls. They came up through the old root cellar and down from the smoke-hole in the roof and in from the sleeping-quarters where the pups had been sent for safety — and I understood, with a sick lurch, that Victor had not done this alone. No lone pack knew our lodge this well. No stranger knew where the pups slept. Through the smoke I saw them — wolves I half-recognized, wolves wearing the gray of a neighboring pack, Silver Creek, the pack that shared our western border, the pack Zev had traded with and trusted for twenty years. They had opened the walls for Victor from the inside. And behind them poured Victor's rogues, the wild hungry ones with no pack and no law, and the two forces crashed i