Chapter 23 Twenty-Seven Nights

Evan

I counted every one of them.

Night one, I sat on the lawn until dawn with my back against the spot where the circle had been, talking out loud like a madman while a thousand wolves pretended not to listen. Night two, Josh dragged me inside and made me eat. Night three, I stopped pretending I was fine.

By night nine, I had a routine. I woke at sunset because that was when she was loudest, a warm hum at the back of my skull, like someone humming in the next room. I told her about my day. She told me about hers. The women in the dark had a lot of opinions about everything, and Odessa had become the unwilling arbiter of a four-hundred-year-old argument over whether the first Lunara's stew needed more salt.

It does, she said on night fourteen. It really does. I've never been so right about anything.

You're eating soup in the void and you're still insufferable.

Say that again.

You're insufferable.

Again.

I love you.

That's the one.

On night nineteen, I stood in my father's study while he handed me the Alpha's signet ring, and I told him I wasn't ready.

"No one is," he said. His arm was healing, and he had stopped looking ten years older than his age. "I gave it to you early because I want to watch you do it. Not hear about it from a hospital bed."

I put on the ring. It was heavier than it looked.

On night twenty-four, Aurelia sat beside me on the porch steps. She had stayed. She had no place else, and Grayson had quietly refused to let her leave. She watched the northern treeline for a long time before she said, "My mother says you talk in your sleep."

"She can hear that?"

"They can all hear you, Evan. You say her name."

I winced. Aurelia smiled, small and tired.

"It's a good sound," she said. "Four hundred years, nobody said any of our names like that."

On night twenty-seven, I did not sleep at all.

Odessa

There is no sun in the loom, so I counted by the moon.

It was a good system. At the far edge of the silver grass, a pale disk hung in a sky that wasn't a sky, and every night it grew a little rounder, and every night my sisters sat with me in a circle and told me stories while I watched it swell.

Marian was the one who found out first.

She wasn't Silas's Marian, not the thing that wore her voice. She was the real one, what was left of her, a small grey-haired woman with a stubborn chin who had spent four hundred years as a thread and still had the energy to scold me. She took one look at me on the nineteenth night and set down her spoon.

"Child. When did you last bleed?"

I stared at her.

"I'm eighty-eight years old," she said patiently, "and I have been dead for four centuries. I still know that look."

I did the math on my fingers. Then I did it again. Then I put my face in my hands.

Evan, I thought. Oh, no. Oh, Evan.

I didn't tell him. I told myself it was because he had enough to carry. I told myself it was because I didn't know what it meant for a child to be conceived on one side of the door and grow on the other. Marian said, gently, that it was the sort of thing the world had never had to learn. Nobody knew.

The truth was simpler. I was terrified that if I said it out loud, the door might not open for me at all.

On the twenty-seventh night, I stood at the edge of the grass with my hand on my stomach, and I watched the moon fill to the brim.

"Ready?" Aurelia asked from the other side of the circle. She was only there in thread now, but I could feel her warmth, as bright as a candle.

"No."

"Good. Nobody should be." She smiled. "Go."

Evan

The full moon came up over the Sorrel lawn like a coin dropped in a well.

I stood at the center of the circle with my hands at my sides. The pack had gathered again, quieter this time, a thousand wolves holding a thousand breaths. Josh stood on my left with Mia's hand in his. My mother-in-law had her fingers pressed hard against her lips.

Now, said the old wolf.

I stepped forward. I laid my palms flat against the silver air where the threshold had been, and I said the only thing I had.

"Come home."

The world turned white.

It felt like pulling someone out of deep water. Resistance, then give, then a rush of warmth up both arms, and a thousand silver threads singing at once. I held on. I held on with every muscle and bone, and every ounce of gold the first wolf had left in me, and in the middle of the light, a hand closed around mine.

Small. Warm. Real.

I opened my eyes.

She was standing in front of me with her hair coming loose and her chin lifted and tears already streaming down her face. She was wearing the same jeans she'd gone in with. She had a smear of something that might have been soup on her sleeve.

"Hi," Odessa said, and her voice cracked in the middle.

I don't remember crossing the grass. I remember her arms around my neck and my face in her hair and the smell of her, rain and vanilla and wild things, hitting me so hard that my knees went out. We hit the lawn together, laughing and sobbing, and a thousand wolves roared loud enough to shake the stars.

"I forgot how you smell," I said into her throat.

"You did not."

"I did. I forgot completely."

"Liar." She was laughing so hard she was shaking. "You didn't cough."

"Because I didn't forget, I was exaggerating, it's a different thing..."

She kissed me. Everything else went away.

Odessa

We had until dawn.

Marian had been very clear about that. The hinge opened once a month, and it held until the sun touched the horizon. After that, the door closed, and I went back to the loom, and my husband went back to holding the world together with his bare hands.

We didn't waste it.

We walked the whole estate in the dark, hand in hand, ignoring every wolf who tried to speak to us. We ate cold chicken in the kitchen at two in the morning, with Josh hovering in the doorway pretending he wasn't crying. My mother cornered me in the hall and held me so long that Evan finally cleared his throat and said he'd like to borrow his wife back. My father didn't say anything. He just put his hand on my head, the way he used to when I was small.

By four, we were alone on the balcony outside Evan's room, wrapped in a single quilt. The moon was dropping toward the trees. Down on the lawn, the last stragglers were drifting home.

"I have something to tell you," I said.

His arm tightened around me. "Tell me."

"You're going to be upset."

"I'm not going to be upset."

"You're going to be so upset."

"Odessa." I felt him smile into my hair. "I've spent twenty-seven nights talking to you through a hole in the sky. Nothing can upset me anymore."

I took a breath. I took his hand off my waist and laid it flat against my stomach, under the quilt.

For a long moment, he didn't move.

"Odessa," he said, very quietly.

"I know."

"Is that..."

"Marian says nineteen weeks." I couldn't look at him. "Which can't be right, because it's only been four. But time doesn't move the same way where I am, and I don't know what that means, and I'm so scared, Evan, I'm so scared..."

He turned me around.

He was crying. I'd never seen him cry like that, not even in the courtyard, silent and open and totally unguarded. His hands shook as they came up to frame my face. Through the bond, I felt what he felt, a huge, bright, trembling joy so enormous it knocked the breath out of me.

"You're having a baby," he whispered.

"We."

"We're having a baby."

"I think so." I was laughing and sobbing both. "I think we are. I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to worry, and I didn't know if the door would let me out if I said it, and..."

He kissed me, fierce and wet and shaking. I felt both his heartbeats slam against my ribs, and underneath them, so faint I almost thought I imagined it, a third.

Small. Quick. Gold and silver at once.

"Did you feel that?" he breathed.

"I felt it."

"That's..."

"I know."

We both started laughing again. I put my forehead against his collarbone, and he held me so gently that I thought my heart would split.

Pup, said the old wolf, quietly, from the back of his mind. His voice was rough. Child. I've been waiting a very long time to say this.

What?

Welcome to the family.

I felt Evan break completely.

Evan

The sun was a thin gold line on the horizon when she took my hand.

"It's time," she said.

"Not yet."

"Evan."

"Five minutes."

"We have three."

"Then three." I pulled her into my arms and held on, breathing her in, memorizing every inch of her, the weight of her against my chest, the quiet drumbeat under her ribs. "I'll be here. Every night. And when the moon's full, I'll be right at the door."

"I know." She tilted her face up. "And I'll tell our daughter every day that her father is the stubbornest man in the world."

"Daughter?"

"Marian says so."

"Marian's been dead for four hundred years."

"She's very sure."

I laughed, and kissed her, and for one long perfect moment the whole world was warm gold and silence.

Then the light touched the lawn, and the threshold opened behind her like a lung.

"I love you," she said.

"I love you."

"Hold the door."

"Always."

She stepped back into the silver. I felt her go, the long familiar ache of it, and I stood on the grass with my hands open and watched until the last thread of her hair vanished into the light.

I'm here, she said, softly, in the back of my head.

I know.

She's kicking already.

I put my hand over my mouth.

Behind me, on the empty lawn, my father cleared his throat. I turned. Grayson stood on the steps with a letter in his hand and a face the color of old paper.

"Evan," he said quietly. "This came at dawn. It was left on the gatepost."

"From who?"

He didn't answer. He just held it out.

The paper was black. The ink was silver. And the seal pressed into the wax was a crescent moon with a wolf's head curled inside it, the exact same sign on the back of the forged parchment, only this one was broken in half.

I turned it over. Four words, in a hand I recognized.

The door has a twin.

Silas's handwriting.

And under it, fresher, in a different ink, as if it had been added a minute ago:

Congratulations on the child.