What I Came For

Theron's POV

I had been looking for her for eleven years.

Not her, precisely. I did not know her face or her name or that she would be lying between two rocks in the borderlands with frost in her hair. I knew only what I needed. A Luna with no wolf in her. Empty enough to hold the moon.

Eleven years of chasing rumours that led nowhere.

And here she was, three hours' walk from my own border, dying quietly and doing a competent job of it.

I crouched at the mouth of the boulders, shadow moving with me the way it always did.

The guardians had not attacked. That was the first thing that troubled me. They had stood aside as I came through the trees, forty of them, made of smoke and older than my bloodline, and they had *let me pass*, and nothing in three hundred years of Shadowborn history says the moon's guardians make way for the cursed.

The second thing that troubled me was the sigil on her wrist.

I turned her arm over. Silver, burned deep, still glowing that sick green at the edges. Wolfsbane work, and recent, and done by someone who knew exactly how much extract to steep to make it permanent rather than merely cruel.

Not a punishment, then. A procedure.

"Somebody wanted you finished properly," I said.

She did not hear me. Her lips had gone the blue-grey I had seen on soldiers we pulled out of drifts too late, and her pulse under my thumb was doing that stuttering thing bodies do near the end, the heart forgetting the order of its own beats.

I should have felt something at that. Pity, perhaps. Eleven years of searching and I arrive in time to watch it end.

What I felt instead was a low, ugly urgency that had nothing to do with her at all, and I recognised it, and I did not like myself for it.

*She is the last one. If she dies here you begin again, and you do not have another eleven years in you.*

That was the curse talking. It has a voice, by now. It has had three centuries and eleven generations to learn how to sound like me.

The marks along my collarbone had begun to ache the moment I entered the clearing, the deep grinding ache that comes when the thing under my skin scents something it wants.

I put my hand flat against her sternum.

And the world tilted.

Light came up through her, silver, sudden, so bright I felt it against my teeth. It ran up my arm and into my chest and hit the curse hard, and the marks on my collarbone *screamed*. Not pain. Something worse and better than pain. A sound like something about to snap.

I went backward into the snow and sat there, stunned.

When I could see again I pulled down my collar and looked at what I had carried since I was nineteen years old.

The uppermost mark had cracked.

Not faded. Not lessened. *Cracked*, through the middle, a hairline fracture in something that had never in my life given so much as a fraction.

I laughed. It came out wrong, closer to a sob, and I was grateful there was no one in that clearing to hear it but a dying woman and forty shadows.

Three hundred years. Eleven generations of my family hollowed out one after another, my father at forty-one, my grandfather at thirty-six, every one of them going grey and thin and strange at the end, and the answer was a woman I could carry under one arm.

I got up and went back to her and my hands were not entirely steady.

"Right," I said. "You do not get to die."

I had my cloak off and around her before I finished saying it. She weighed almost nothing, which told me she had been walking on nothing for days, and when I lifted her, her head fell against my chest, completely limp, like she had almost nothing left in her.

She said something. Barely a sound.

I stopped. "Say that again."

Her lips moved. I put my ear close.

"Nine days," she said.

Then nothing more.

I stood there in the moonlight holding a stranger and turned those two words over and could make nothing of them at all.

I was three steps toward the treeline when I saw the tracks.

I nearly missed them. The wind had been working on them for hours and the snow had begun to fill them in, and if the moon had been anywhere else in the sky I would have walked straight past.

Boot prints. Two sets.

They came out of the north, and they came directly to the gap between the boulders, and they stopped.

I stood very still.

They stopped, and they milled, the way men's feet mill when they are standing over something and looking down at it and talking. A long time, by the churn of it. Long enough to get cold. Long enough to have a conversation.

And then they went back north.

Without her.

I crouched with her still in my arms and read it three times to be certain I was not inventing it, because what it said was not possible.

Two men had come out of the north in the dark and walked directly to a woman lying in a gap between two rocks in five hundred square miles of borderland. They had not searched. There was no casting about, no back-and-forth of men quartering ground. They had come *straight to her*.

They had stood over her while she froze.

And they had walked away and left her to it.

You do not find someone like that by accident. You find someone like that because you were told where she would be.

Which meant somebody had known she would be lying in that exact gap on that exact night, and had sent men to confirm it, and the men had looked down at a Luna with her wolf cut out and decided the cold would do the rest.

I looked down at her face. Frost in her eyelashes. Her jaw was still set, even unconscious, like she had not finished arguing with someone before she went down.

"Who did you make angry?" I asked her.

Somewhere north of us, past the ridge, a horn sounded. Two short notes and a long one.

I knew that call. Every border lord for two hundred

miles knows that call.

Silverpine.

They were not leaving after all.

They were coming back for the body.