The Golden Wolf

The room was silent after Orion spoke. Nobody moved for a long time either. I stood on a spot with the fire still tracing lazy, gentle lines along my fingers. I watched it patiently, waiting for it to feel less like someone else's hands. Cillian hadn't let go of me, and I hadn't asked him to. I enjoyed the way my hands felt in his.

"So what happens now," I finally said, "now that we’ve established I might be an apocalypse or a working disaster or anything else you might want to call it."

"Now we figure out how to make sure you’re not one," Orion said. "Tonight though, you sleep. Everything else can survive until morning."

It was, of course, exactly then that the window shattered.

I didn't have time to be afraid in any organized way. One second Orion was still holding the word Phoenix in the air between us like something fragile, and the next there was glass everywhere and a shape moving through it too fast to be human, Cillian was up in a blink of an eye, already between it and me snarling in a tongue that wasn't English.

"Get back," he said, to me, not looking away from the thing pulling itself upright amid the broken glass. "Aurora, get behind Orion, now." He shouted this time when I refused to move my feet.

"What is….." I started but he wasn’t having it.

"Now."

I moved. Orion had already thrown up both hands, something crackling blue and furious between his palms, and the creature, tall, wrong-jointed, its face a smear of shadow where a face should have been, let out a sound like tearing metal and lunged.

It lunged for me. Of course it went for me and I screamed and closed my eyes in panic.

Cillian moved faster than my eyes could properly track, and what met the creature halfway across the room wasn't quite Cillian anymore. It was taller, impossibly broad through the shoulder, gold fur rippling up through his skin like it was breaking the surface of water. His eyes had gone entirely animal but somehow, they still looked like his.

A wolf. My infuriating, sarcastic, secretive neighbor was, in whole or in part, a wolf, and he put himself between me and the thing that wanted to kill me with a violence that should have terrified me but instead got me very curious and more interested in him.

Girl, get a grip! This isn’t the place and time, I screamed at myself internally.

They went down together in a tangle of claws and shadow, the creature shrieking something that might have been words in a language built for throats that weren't human, and Orion's blue fire arced past my shoulder close enough that I felt it singe the air, catching the thing across what might have been its back. It reeled and screeched further.

 Cillian didn't give it time to recover. It didn't seem to be thinking in terms of time at all anymore, just motion, teeth and gold fur and a low, continuous sound in his chest that I felt in my own ribs from ten feet away.

"Stay behind me," Orion said, not looking away from the fight, positioning himself bodily between me and the worst of it, and for once I didn’t argue with being told what to do. I scooted back enough to be away from the fight but also see everything clearly.

It was over in under a minute. The creature broke for the shattered window the moment it understood the fight wasn't going to go its way, and Cillian let it go rather than leave me undefended to chase it.

He shifted back mid-breath, human again. He was human and bleeding from a gash along his forearm that he didn't seem to have noticed yet.

"You’re hurt." I was already moving toward him before I’d decided to.

"I’m fine." He tried to brush me off with a wave of his hand.

"You’re bleeding, that’s not the same as fine, sit down….". I raised my hands to touch him.

"Aurora." He caught my hands, both of them, mid-sentence, and held them still between us, and something in his face had gone raw in a way I hadn’t seen yet, not once, not even in the alley.

 "I’m fine. Are you? It went for you. Did it touch you?" and he was back to being concerned.

"No. You didn’t let it." I gave him a small smile.

The look that crossed his face at that moment was almost unbearable to witness. It was relief so total it looked like pain, like he'd been braced for a different answer and hadn't quite believed he'd get this one.

"A wolf," I said, because someone had to say something, and my brain had apparently decided stating the obvious was the safest available option. "You’re a wolf."

"Sometimes." His voice had gone rough. "It’s not, it’s complicated. It’s a family thing. I was going to tell you eventually. I didn’t think eventually would arrive quite this fast."

"You have a lot of family things."

"You have no idea." He looked away from me and that twisted my heart a bit.

"Try me." I hadn’t meant it to come out so soft. "After tonight, I think I’ve earned a little bit of ‘no idea.’"

Something in his face cracked, just slightly, just for me.

"Later," he said. "I promise you later”. He pleaded with his eyes. “Tonight I just…. I need to know you’re actually alright. Not brave, not managing, really alright."

"I don’t know if I’m alright. I think I’m still deciding." My hands had stopped shaking, I noticed, somewhere in the middle of the fight, like fear of losing him had briefly outweighed fear of what I was. "But I’m here. And so are you. That feels like enough for right now."

We were standing very close. I hadn't noticed how close until his thumb moved, absent, unconscious, tracing once across my knuckles where he was still holding my hands, and neither of us stepped back, and for one suspended second the wrecked room and the broken glass and the word Phoenix still hanging unfinished in the air all fell away to almost nothing at all.

"It got away," Orion said grimly from the window, and the moment broke like something dropped. "Which means it saw enough to report back. Whoever sent it knows exactly where we are now."

Cillian's hands didn't leave mine, not right away, and when he finally looked away from me toward Orion, his voice had gone hard in a way that made something in my chest ache on his behalf.

"Then we don’t have until morning," he said. "We move tonight."

"Move where?" I asked. "I don’t exactly have a second safehouse lying around."

"Elaria," Orion said, already moving, already pulling books from shelves like the house itself was being packed into a bag. "It’s the one place they can’t simply walk into uninvited. It’s also the one place that’s going to want you dead for entirely different reasons. I did say this wouldn’t be reassuring."

Cillian squeezed my hands once, and let go but before he turned to help Orion, he said something.

"Whatever happens tonight," he said, quiet enough that it was only for me, "you’re not doing it alone. I need you to believe that, even if you don’t believe anything else I tell you."

"I believe that part," I said, and found, to my own surprise, that I meant it completely.