A Date with the Future

The letter arrived the way all bad news arrived in the Voss household: wrapped in good manners.

Elena turned it over twice before she opened it, because the wax seal was black and gold, and black and gold meant the Ashgrove house, and the Ashgrove house did not write to werewolves unless something had gone badly wrong somewhere in the world.

"You're stalling," said her sister Marta from the doorway, arms crossed, still in her running clothes from patrol.

"I'm building suspense."

"You're stalling."

Elena broke the seal.

Elena Voss,

You are summoned to the Court of Elders at the Hollow Bridge, three days from this letter's sending, regarding a matter of prophecy and pack law. Attendance is not optional. A representative of House Ashgrove will also be present.

By order of the Council of Both Bloods

She read it three times. The words didn't change, no matter how many times she turned them over, which was the most infuriating thing about words: they simply sat there being true.

"Both Bloods," Marta said, reading over her shoulder without asking permission, the way she'd done since they were children sharing a room too small for privacy. "That's not a border dispute letter. That's an oracle letter."

"There hasn't been a working oracle in forty years."

"There is now, apparently."

Elena set the letter on the kitchen table like it might bite her, which, given everything else in her life, was not an unreasonable precaution. Her father would be furious. Her father was always furious about something involving Ashgroves, ever since the skirmish at Thornwood Pass that had taken his brother's life and left a permanent, ugly scar of politics between the pack and the vampire house that ruled the eastern territories.

She had grown up on stories about Ashgroves. Cold-blooded, literally and otherwise. Immortal manipulators who fed on more than blood, who fed on loyalty, on land, on the slow bleeding-out of everyone who trusted them.

She had never actually met one.

"I have to go," she said, mostly to hear herself say it out loud, to make it real before her father could make it impossible.

"Dad will lock you in the cellar."

"Dad can try."

The Hollow Bridge sat at the exact midpoint between werewolf territory and vampire territory, an old stone crossing that neither side claimed and both sides maintained, out of a mutual, grudging understanding that some things needed neutral ground. Elena had crossed it exactly four times in her life, always with an armed escort, always with her stomach in her throat.

This time, she came alone. Her father had wanted to send half the pack. The summons had specified otherwise, in a tone that suggested the Council of Both Bloods was not interested in negotiating that particular point.

The elders were already gathered when she arrived: grey-robed, ancient, drawn from both the werewolf packs and the vampire houses, the closest thing either species had to a shared government, which was to say barely functional, and only in emergencies.

This, apparently, qualified as an emergency.

Elena scanned the gathered faces for anything resembling comfort and found none, until her eyes landed on the one person in the courtyard who looked as furious to be there as she felt.

He stood apart from the elders, dressed in black that fit him like a second skin, arms crossed, jaw set in a line so tight it looked carved from the same stone as the bridge behind him. He was, she hated that her mind reached for the word, hated it immediately, beautiful, in the sharp, cold way of things that were dangerous to touch. Pale in the way of vampires who hadn't bothered to feign warmth in front of company. Dark hair. Darker eyes, fixed on her with an expression that could have stripped paint.

"You must be the wolf," he said, before anyone had made introductions, before she'd even fully stepped onto the bridge.

"You must be the reason I had to leave home before breakfast," Elena said. "I hope it was worth it."

Something flickered across his face, not quite amusement, too controlled for that, but adjacent to it. "Damon Ashgrove," he said, like the name itself was a formality he resented performing.

"I know who you are." Everyone knew who he was. The last Ashgrove. The one who'd ended a war by making a choice his own father had called a betrayal, and half her pack had called the only decent thing a vampire had ever done. She didn't know which version was true. She wasn't sure it mattered, standing here.

"Then you have the advantage," Damon said. "I only know what the summons told me. A werewolf. A prophecy. And apparently, my future, decided by an oracle who's been dead to the world for forty years and picked now to wake up and ruin my week."

"Charming."

"I'm told I have my moments."

Before she could decide whether that was a joke, one of the eldest of the grey-robed council, a woman whose age Elena couldn't begin to guess, whose eyes held the particular stillness of someone who had outlived several wars, stepped forward and raised a hand, and the courtyard went silent in a way that had nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with power.

"Elena Voss. Damon Ashgrove." The elder's voice carried without being raised, the way water carries a stone dropped from a great height, quiet at first, and then unmistakably heavy. "You have both been summoned because the Oracle of the Hollow has spoken for the first time in two generations, and she has spoken your names."

"With respect," Damon said, in a tone that suggested respect was the last thing he currently felt, "oracles have been wrong before."

"This one has not," the elder said. "Not once, not in three hundred years of recorded prophecy."

Elena felt something cold settle in her stomach, separate from the November wind cutting across the bridge. "What did she say?"

The elder produced a folded parchment, old and creased from handling, and read from it in the flat, careful voice of someone reciting words too dangerous to editorialize.

"When wolf and blood stand at the bridge divided, war will follow like a shadow follows fire, unless the two who hate each other most learn instead to love. Before the eclipse moon rises, or both houses will burn, and no crown will remain to inherit the ashes."

Silence, after that. The kind of silence that had weight.

"That's it?" Elena said finally. "That's the whole prophecy? 'Learn to love or everybody dies'? That's not a prophecy, that's a bad greeting card."

"The Oracle does not concern herself with your literary opinions," the elder said, not unkindly, but with the air of someone who had heard worse reactions and would likely hear worse still. "She concerns herself with outcomes. And the outcome she has seen, should this prophecy go unanswered, is war between werewolf and vampire kind within the year. A war neither side will survive intact."

Damon's jaw worked, a muscle ticking there that Elena found herself watching for reasons she chose not to examine. "And the Council's proposed solution to a war is what, exactly? An arranged courtship? Between people who've never met?"

"Between the two people the Oracle named," the elder corrected. "There is precedent. Difficult ties have been made before, between our kinds, in moments of necessity."

"Difficult ties," Elena repeated. "You mean marriages. Political marriages, forced on people who had no say."

"I mean," the elder said, and for the first time something almost gentle entered her ancient voice, "a chance. Nothing is forced tonight except your presence at this bridge, and your attention to what is at stake. What you choose to do with the months between now and the eclipse remains, as it always has, entirely your own."

Elena looked at Damon. Damon looked at her, and there was no softness in it, none of the gentleness the elder had offered, just two people measuring each other across a gap neither had asked to have bridged, both of them furious, both of them cornered, both of them, if Elena was honest with the small, treacherous part of herself that noticed things like the line of his jaw and the darkness of his eyes, aware that this was the beginning of something neither of them could walk away from.

"How long," Damon asked, "until this eclipse?"

"Six months," the elder said. "Time enough, if you use it. Time enough for disaster, if you don't."

Elena thought of her father, who would burn this letter the moment she showed him, who would call this whole arrangement an insult wrapped in ancient superstition. She thought of her uncle's grave, and the scar on the land at Thornwood Pass that still refused to grow anything but thistle, twenty years later. She thought about war, real war, not the simmering cold war grudge her people and Damon's had nursed for a generation, but the kind that emptied villages and made orphans of children who hadn't been born yet.

"Fine," she said, before she could talk herself out of it. "Six months. I'll do it."

Damon's eyes narrowed, like her agreement was somehow more suspicious than her refusal would have been. "Just like that?"

"Just like that," Elena said. "I don't like you. I don't trust your house, and I definitely don't trust an oracle who thinks 'fall in love or the world burns' is a reasonable ultimatum to hand two strangers. But I've buried family because of the fighting between our kinds, and if there's even a chance this stops another grave from getting dug, I'm not going to be the one who said no because my pride got in the way."

Something in Damon's expression shifted, not warmth, not yet, but a kind of reluctant respect, the look of a man recalibrating an opponent he'd underestimated.

"Six months," he said, finally, extending a hand that Elena eyed like it might be a trap, because with vampires, it so often was. "Try not to bite me, wolf."

"No promises," Elena said, and shook it anyway, and told herself the warmth that shot up her arm at the contact was nothing but nerves, and told herself that lie all the way back across the bridge, and didn't quite manage to believe it once.