CHAPTER 2

Ivy's POV

Nobody explains the howling.

That's the thing that gets me. The sound rises and dies and the Pack at the table just resumes. Forks lifting, wine pouring, conversation picking back up like nothing carved through the air thirty seconds ago. Like it's as ordinary as rain.

I look at Maren beside me.

She's smiling at something the woman on her left said, completely unbothered.

I pick up my fork and eat. But my spine hasn't settled. That pull; low and strange and embarrassingly physical is still sitting at the base of me like a second heartbeat I didn't have this morning. 

Across the table, Caelum is talking to the man on his right, something about the eastern boundary, patrol rotations, a word I don't catch. He has a way of talking that's different from the men I grew up around. No performance in it. No calculation about how the words are landing. He just says things like he means them, which in my experience is either the mark of someone very honest or someone very dangerous.

I haven't decided yet.

He glances over mid-sentence and catches me watching.

I don't look away fast enough.

He doesn't make it weird. He just holds eye contact for one easy second and then goes back to his conversation, and somehow that's worse than if he'd made it weird. 

Dinner ends without incident, which is its own kind of suspicious.

***

Maren walks me back to my room.

The halls of the main lodge are quieter now, most of the Pack dispersed to wherever they go after a meal, and our footsteps echo against stone floor. 

"The howling," I say.

Maren glances at me sideways, "What about it?"

"What was it?"

She's quiet for a step or two, not avoiding the question, just considering how to answer it. "The full moon is in three days," she says finally, "The Pack feels it before it comes. It builds," She pauses, "You'll hear it every night until the rite."

"What rite?"

"The Full Moon Rite," She says it simply, like I should already know, then remembers I don't, "It's sacred. It's not something outsiders attend." She says the last part gently, but clearly. A border drawn in kindness.

I nod like that's fine.

I'm not here to attend sacred ceremonies. I'm here to survive a year and go home and figure out what home even means to me anymore.

We reach my door. "Maren," She turns, "That feeling, when the howling started. That physical…" I stop, because I don't know how to describe it without sounding unhinged, "Does that happen to everyone or."

She looks at me for a moment with an expression I can't fully read. Something careful in it. 

"Goodnight, Ivy," she says.

She walks away before I can decide if that was an answer or the beginning of one.

***

I can't sleep.

That pull I felt at dinner has graduated into something restless and buzzing, like static under my skin. 

I get up at half past midnight.

I pull on a jacket over my sleep clothes and tell myself I'm stretching my legs, adjusting to a new place the way you always have to adjust. I open my door quietly. The sentries from earlier are gone, just an empty corridor, torches burning low.

I follow the hall to the end and find a side door onto a covered walkway that runs along the back of the lodge, open on one side to the night and the mountain.

The air hits me and I stop.

The sky out here is something I have never seen. No light pollution, no neon ceiling, no glass between me and it. I stand there with my hands in my jacket pockets and tilt my head back and breathe.

I don't know how long I stand there, but long enough that I stop listening for footsteps and that's exactly when I hear them.

Soft. Unhurried. And then Caelum steps out of the shadow at the far end of the walkway with his jacket half-buttoned and a look on his face like he's as surprised to find me here as I am to find him.

We stand there for a moment, twenty feet apart, in the dark and the impossible sky.

"Couldn't sleep?" he asks.

"No."

He nods like that's a reasonable answer and doesn't push it. He leans against the railing and looks out at the tree line, and I notice he looks up at the sky the same way I was just doing; like it's something he hasn't gotten tired of yet.

"It does that the first few nights," he says. 

"The mountain. Something about the elevation, the air. Your body doesn't know how to be still in it yet."

"Does it get better?"

"It gets different," He glances over at me. "Better is when different starts to feel like yours."

I don't have anything to say to that so I don't say anything, and the silence between us is deafening.

Then from the tree line, close enough to raise every hair on my arms; a howl.

One voice this time. Low and sustained and searingly close.

And my body responds before my brain does: that pull again, violent this time, a lurch so physical I take one step forward without meaning to, my hand catching the railing, and my breath gone.

Caelum is watching me.

Not with surprise or alarm. With the focused, careful attention of someone who just saw exactly what he was afraid he was going to see.

"Ivy." His voice is very quiet. "How long have you been feeling it?"

My hand tightens on the railing.

"Feeling what?" I say.

But we both already know I know what he means.