Sparks Fly

RHYDIAN 

She held my gaze for a moment. Then she turned and walked toward the pack house without looking back, her footsteps measured and unhurried.

I waited until she was inside.

Then I turned back to the hedge.

The omega had not moved. She was watching me with large dark eyes and an expression that gave away nothing, which was its own kind of information.

"Stand up," I said quietly.

She stood. “I...I am lost,” she blurted.

I looked at her properly for the first time. The moonlight was not helping my ability to think clearly. She was striking, the kind of face that registered before your brain caught up.

"You said you were lost," I said.

She nodded once.

"Where are you supposed to be?"

"The east compound. Omega quarters."

I studied her face. She looked back at me with the same empty composure she had held during the beta's questioning and I had the distinct and irritating sense that she was performing it, that behind it something entirely different was running.

"I'll walk you to the gate," I said.

"You don't have to—"

"I know I don't have to."

I turned and she fell into step behind me and we walked in silence through the garden toward the east passage. At the gate I stopped and indicated the path. She stepped past me and I reached out without thinking and set my hand on her shoulder to turn her in the right direction.

The world stopped.

That is the only way I can describe it. Everything went very quiet and very still and something moved through my hand and up my arm and hit my chest like a stone dropped into still water and the ripples went outward in every direction at once and I could not move and I could not think and she turned her face toward me and for one split second, one fractured, impossible second, I saw something underneath her face, like a reflection behind glass, another face looking back at me through hers.

Then my knees hit the ground and the garden went dark.

The last thing I registered before it all went out was a single, certain, wordless knowledge settling into my bones like it had always been there.

I knew her.

I did not know how.

But I knew her.

AZIZA 

He was on the ground.

The Prince of Ironfang was on the ground at my feet and I was standing over him in the Alpha compound garden in the middle of the night and I could not breathe.

I looked at him. I looked at the pack house. I looked at the path Vessa had walked up not two minutes ago and I thought, very clearly, that my plan was falling apart before it had even started. I had not made it forty-eight hours. I had not made it two days inside this camp and I was already standing over an unconscious Prince in a garden I was not supposed to be in.

My mother would have been furious.

I crouched down fast. His chest was moving, I checked that first, pressed two fingers to the side of his neck and found his pulse steady and strong. Not dead. Good. I stood back up and looked at the pack house again and tried to think.

A patrol would come through this garden. They always patrolled the inner compound perimeter, I had already mapped the rotation in my first twelve hours, every forty minutes a two-man sweep moving east to west. I did not know how long ago the last one had come through. I did not know how much time I had.

I grabbed his arm and pulled.

He did not move.

I pulled harder.

He moved approximately four inches and I nearly fell backwards.

"Okay," I whispered to nobody. "Okay."

He was enormous. I had not fully registered how large he was when he was standing upright and conscious and I was trying to appear like I was not registering anything at all. On the ground he was an entirely different problem. I grabbed both arms this time, got my weight behind it, and managed to drag him maybe a foot before my grip slipped and I sat down hard on the grass beside him.

Somewhere in the distance, voices.

I went completely still.

The voices moved. Not closer, parallel, the low exchange of two men walking a route they had walked a hundred times and were paying no particular attention to. I tracked the sound until it faded and then I grabbed his arms again and dragged and this time I got him most of the way into the hedgerow before my arms gave out entirely.

He looked ridiculous. Half in the bush, one leg still visible on the path.

I shoved the leg in.

Then I crouched there on my hands and knees in the dirt and I thought about my parents and the throne room and time I had spent preparing every detail of this plan and I felt the whole thing sitting in my chest like something broken.

I had been in the camp for less than a day and the Prince already knew my face and had seen me somewhere I shouldn't be and had collapsed when he touched me. None of that was in the plan. None of that was recoverable. I needed to be invisible, completely and entirely invisible, and instead I was a face he had already looked at twice and was going to look for again.

The touch.

I pressed my hand against my knee and looked at my palm. Nothing there. No mark, nothing visible. But I had felt it, the second his hand landed on my shoulder, something moving through the point of contact like a current, like something recognising something, and it had startled me so badly I had almost stepped back.

It was the blood magic. It had to be the blood magic. I was freshly made and unstable and a working that large and that recent would produce side effects, sensitivity, misfiring responses to contact. That was what it was. That was the only thing it was.

I needed to not let anyone touch me until the working settled.

I needed to get out of this garden.

I started to stand and then the hedge moved and a hand closed around my wrist and I made a sound that was almost a scream before another hand came over my mouth and Rhydian was suddenly very much conscious and sitting up in the bush with leaves in his locs and his eyes sharp and alert.

"Be quiet," he said against my ear, low and hoarse.

I nodded.

He released my mouth but kept my wrist and stood up slowly, pulling me with him. He looked at the garden, the path, the pack house windows. Then he looked at me and whatever he saw in my face made him make a brief, almost invisible expression that I could not name.

He walked. He kept hold of my wrist and I followed because I did not have a better option.