Chapter 22 The Full Moon

Odessa

By the time we reached the Sorrel estate, the whole territory knew.

I don't know who told them. Nobody had to. When the roof came off that farmhouse, every wolf with a drop of moon in their blood felt the sky tear open, and by dusk they were walking out of their houses and up the hill road in silence. Packs that hadn't shared a fire in a generation stood shoulder to shoulder on the great lawn. Northern wolves beside Sorrels. Kades beside Hales. Kessa's thirty-one, bandaged and hollow-eyed, standing in a tight knot near the front, and Ines the midwife with her hand on a little girl's shoulder.

The girl waved at me. Missing tooth and all.

I almost broke right there.

"Breathe," Evan murmured beside me.

"I am."

"You're not. Do it again."

I did. Behind us, the dark that had followed us down the mountain sat low on the northern horizon, patient as a tide.

My parents were waiting at the top of the steps. Mom had pulled her hair back and put on a plain grey dress, and she looked like she'd aged ten years in two days. Dad stood beside her with his hand on her back. Neither of them said anything when I reached them. Mom just took my face in her hands and looked at me for a long time, memorizing, the way Evan did.

"I traded your brother's thread to keep you breathing," she said quietly. "I would do it again. And I will never, ever forgive myself."

"Mom."

"Whatever you choose tonight, I will stand behind it." Her voice shook. "I only ask that you choose it knowing we love you."

"I know."

"Do you?" Dad's voice was ragged. "Because I wasn't sure, baby. For six years, I wasn't sure I'd said it enough."

I pulled them both into my arms, and for a moment the three of us just stood there, breathing each other in.

Then the moon touched the treeline.

Mia

I have been to a thousand ceremonies. Weddings, funerals, naming days, pack oaths. I have worn a veil and a mourning band and a ceremonial sash, and I have held a sword at attention while old men talked.

I have never seen anything like that lawn.

The moon came up enormous, red-gold at the edge, so close it felt like you could reach up and pull it down by the rim. A hush settled over a thousand wolves. Grayson stood at the head of the steps in the old Alpha's coat, one arm bandaged against his chest, his voice carrying without effort.

"Tonight," he said, "the Sorrel pack holds no seat. Tonight, we bear witness."

Beside me, Josh went very still.

I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking it too. For a year I'd carried a hollow place in my chest where something should have been. I felt nothing, Josh had said. No pull, no heat. I'd taken it personally. I'd been a child about it.

I looked up at him now, bloodied and tired, with his sister's whole future about to walk across the grass, and a long-buried thing in my chest turned over.

"Josh."

"Hm?"

"Whatever happens." I swallowed. "I'm not going anywhere."

He looked down at me. The moonlight caught the grey in his eyes.

"You don't have to."

"I know." I took his hand. "I want to."

His fingers closed around mine, warm and a little shaky, and something I had been bracing against for a year gave way, quiet as snow sliding off a roof.

Evan

We walked to the center of the lawn alone.

I had imagined this a hundred different ways since the quarry, and none of them were right. In my head it was always dark, always terrible, always ending in a scream. Instead, the grass was soft under our feet, and the air smelled of smoke and cut wood, and my wife's hand in mine was warm and certain and not trembling at all.

Aurelia met us at the circle.

Someone had drawn it again, in chalk and salt and silver, a spiral seven feet across. This time it wasn't a cage. It was a doorway. The old wolf had been pacing in my head since sunset, and he went quiet now, settling like a dog at the foot of a bed.

"I've spoken to my mother," Aurelia said.

I blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"In the loom." Her face was luminous in the moonlight, and her eyes shone silver. "The Hollow ate her, but it never digested her. None of them. Every woman Silas bound is still in there, a thread of her, holding on." She laughed, shaky and bright. "They've been waiting for someone to ask."

"Ask what?" Odessa breathed.

"To help."

The old wolf spoke through me then, low and slow, and I let him.

"The seal was always meant for a guard and a keeper. A pair. But no one ever told the guard she would not be alone." His voice rolled across the lawn like warm thunder. "The women Silas stole are not victims, child. They are an army. They have been waiting four hundred years for a daughter strong enough to wake them."

Odessa's eyes went wide.

"A door that locks," the wolf said, "is a door that holds. But a hinge is a promise, child. It swings both ways. It opens when you wish and closes when you must. If the Lunara walks the dark with her sisters beside her, and the keeper stands in the light with the moon to call her home..."

"Then the door isn't a wall," Odessa whispered. "It's a threshold."

"Yes."

"How often?"

"Once a month. When the moon is full." His gold eyes met mine, ancient and kind. "One night in every twenty-eight, the hinge will turn. You will not be parted forever, pup. You will be parted mostly."

Mostly.

I stood very still. My wife looked at me across a foot of moonlit grass, and in her face I saw all of it, the fear and the hope and the stubborn, ridiculous love.

"It's not forever," she said.

"It's twenty-seven nights out of twenty-eight."

"It's one night."

"It's a lot of nights, Odessa."

"I know." She laughed, and it broke in the middle. "I know. But I'll hear you. Every single day. That's what the bond is for."

"That's not the same as..."

"I know, Evan."

I couldn't speak. She stepped close and put her palms flat against my chest, over both heartbeats, and I felt her silver rise warm through my ribs.

"Tell me what you're afraid of," she said.

"That I'll forget how you smell."

"You won't."

"That you'll forget me."

"Impossible." Her thumbs brushed my collarbone. "I'm a Lunara. I remember everything."

"That I'll be holding a door shut for sixty years, and I'll get old, and you won't."

"Then I'll wait on the other side," she whispered. "Until you're a grumpy old man who's lost his teeth. And then you'll come through, and I'll still be here, and we'll be annoying together for eternity."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. It cracked out of me wet and rough, and she kissed me, soft and slow and full of every promise she was about to keep.

"I love you," I said against her mouth. "I loved you before I knew what it was. I love you so much it's embarrassing."

"I know," she said. "You can't lie about it."

"No."

"Good."

She stepped back. Her hands slid down my arms and laced through mine. For a long moment, we just stood there, foreheads touching, two heartbeats in one chest and one in hers.

"Ready?" she whispered.

"No."

"Me neither."

"Together?"

"Always."

Odessa

I stepped into the circle.

The silver rose around my ankles like water, then my knees, then my waist. I could hear them now, every woman in the dark, a thousand voices in a single steady hum, and they weren't screaming anymore. They were singing. The oldest song in the world, the one the first Lunara sang to the first wolf before the world broke.

Aurelia stepped in beside me and took my left hand. Her fingers were warm and real. Across the lawn, a thousand wolves dropped to their knees in perfect silence.

I looked back once.

Evan was standing at the edge of the circle, gold fire pouring off his shoulders, tears running freely down his face. He didn't look away. He didn't flinch. He held my gaze like a man holding a rope across a chasm.

I'm here, I said, through the bond.

I know. His voice was ragged, and so tender I felt it in my bones. I'm holding the door.

Don't let go.

Never.

Then the moon reached the top of the sky, and the whole world turned white.

I felt the Hollow scream. I felt the silver thread through my chest pull taut and bright as a bowstring. I felt a thousand women take hold of me from the dark, not to drag me down, but to lift, and I felt Evan on the other side of the threshold, vast and gold and unbreakable, closing his hands around the edge of the world.

The door swung shut.

And in the silence after, I heard him whisper my name.

Evan

The light faded slowly.

I was on my knees in the grass. My hands were bleeding, pressed flat against the earth where the circle had been. The chalk was gone. The salt was gone. The dark in the north was gone. Overhead, the moon hung huge and calm and bright, and the whole lawn was silent.

She was gone.

I knew it the way I knew my own name, a hollow ache in the exact shape of her. I bent forward, pressing my forehead to the ground, and a sound came out of me I didn't recognize.

Then, very faintly, in the back of my skull, I heard it.

Evan.

I stopped breathing.

Evan, I can hear you. I can hear you breathing. You have to stop that, it's loud.

A sound came out of me, half sob and half laugh.

Odessa?

I'm here. Her voice was small and warm and impossibly close. It's very quiet, and everyone's very nice, and I'm sitting next to a woman who says she's my great-great-great-great-grandmother and keeps trying to feed me soup.

You're okay?

I'm okay. A pause. I miss you already. It's been four minutes.

I put both hands over my face, and I laughed until I cried, and behind me, a thousand wolves rose slowly to their feet.

Josh crouched beside me and put a hand on my shoulder. Mia crouched on the other side, her sword across her knees, her fingers laced through his.

"She's alive," I said hoarsely. "She's talking to me."

"Of course she is," Josh said, voice thick. "She never shuts up."

Above us, the moon began its slow, ordinary descent, and somewhere far off, in the quiet dark between the worlds, my wife was sitting in a circle of her sisters, eating soup.

It was not forever. It was twenty-seven nights out of twenty-eight.

I could survive that.

I would survive it for her.