Destiny

Chloe's POV

Four days later, my body began shutting down, and I was calm about it in a way that frightened me more than panic would have.

I could track it happening. Thoughts arriving slower, arriving thicker. Fingers and toes going from pain to numbness to nothing at all, which is the part nobody warns you about, that the worst stage does not hurt. My heartbeat going uneven in my chest, skipping and catching.

Hypothermia. I had watched a tracker die of it once, at fourteen, and had not understood why he was smiling at the end.

I understood now.

*Good,* something in me said. *Let it be over.*

Because what exactly was I preserving. No pack. No wolf. No name worth the breath it took to say. Gareth had stood at that window with his shoulders loose and I had spent four days walking with that image behind my eyes, and there is a particular exhaustion that comes from being unable to stop thinking while your body slowly stops working.

I had wedged myself into a gap between two boulders sometime after dark, out of the wind, which was the last competent thing I did.

*I am sorry,* I thought, and did not know who I meant. My wolf. My parents, ten years gone. The girl who had stood up at her own investiture and believed she was going to be the best of them.

The tears froze before they finished falling. I could not even cry properly. It struck me as very funny and I did not have the strength to laugh.

Then the binding mark on my wrist caught fire.

Not the memory of fire. Fire. I gasped and clutched my arm and the sigil burned like Maris was carving it again, fresh, deeper, and the pain went up into my shoulder and my chest and outward until my blood felt like something clawing to get out through my skin.

I tried to scream. Nothing came.

*This is dying,* I thought, distant and reasonable. *This is what it does at the end.*

But it did not stop. It sharpened, and kept sharpening, past anything my body should have been able to hold, and I remember thinking with strange detachment that I was going to come apart.

Then the air changed.

I felt it before I saw anything. The air changed, grew heavy, went charged, like right before a storm breaks. Something I could almost taste.

Light came through the gap in the boulders.

Not dawn. I had been counting the hours and dawn was a long way off, and this light was wrong in every particular. Too bright. Too focused. Too deliberate, like something aimed.

Moonlight.

Except the moon had gone behind cloud before midnight. I had watched it go. I had lain there and resented it for going.

I tried to turn my head. My body did not answer. I was awake inside a thing that had stopped taking instruction.

The light spilled over me and did not stop.

And something reached for me.

I have no better word. There was a presence, vast, old past reckoning, and it was not my wolf, my wolf was severed and silent and gone. This was something that had always been underneath her. Something patient. Something that had been waiting, and had known it would not wait forever.

*What are you?*

It did not answer in words. It simply put itself around me, the way you hold something small and about to break.

Like protection. Like being carried. Like finding a part of myself I never knew I had.

The moonlight went into my veins. It replaced the ice with something molten and it burned, but not the way the sigil burned. This was warm. Alive. It felt less like being healed and more like being *recognised*.

The binding mark pulsed with my heartbeat, faster, faster, and the sigil glowed silver so bright I shut my eyes against my own wrist.

When I opened them, the dark was moving.

Shadows were peeling off the boulders. Gathering. Thickening into shapes with weight and intention, enormous, built out of smoke and something like starlight, and they circled the gap where I lay with their heads low and their eyes burning the same silver that was now running through me.

Wolves. Or the idea wolves come from.

*Guardians,* the old thing whispered. Not my wolf's voice. Something further back than that. *They have been waiting for you.*

*Waiting for what?*

*For you to wake up.*

None of it made sense and all of it was happening. They moved with purpose, with intelligence, with the settled calm of something that had done this before and expected to do it again.

Then the nearest one turned its head sharply toward the treeline and pulled its lips back from teeth made of nothing at all.

Something was coming.

I felt it a half-second behind them, a presence moving through the trees, heavy and unhurried. Powerful in a way that made the guardians go rigid.

They coiled to attack.

*No,* the old voice said, quiet and absolutely certain. *Not an enemy.*

*Then what.*

*Your destiny.*

I wanted to laugh again. Destiny. I had been Luna of the Silverpine Pack and destiny had put me face down between two rocks with my wolf cut out of me.

The footsteps came closer. Deliberate. Two-legged. Nothing that walked on four feet announces itself like that.

The guardians did not scatter. They *parted*, the way an honour guard parts, and that was somehow the most frightening thing that had happened all night.

A shadow fell across the gap and blocked out the stars.

I could not turn my head. I could only lie there and wait to be looked at.

Something crouched at the mouth of the boulders, close enough that I felt the cold come off its cloak, and for a long moment it said nothing at all. It only studied me, like it had been looking for me a very long time and could not quite believe it had finally found me.

Then it spoke, low, and almost to itself.

"There you are."

A pair of eyes came level with mine.

They caught the moonlight and flared red.

That's the last thing I saw before darkness took me.