CHAPTER 4

Ivy's POV

I leave Maren's building before she can see it on my face.

The day passes by. Caelum finds me in the eastern courtyard after lunch and walks me through the territory the way Soren apparently assigned him to, pointing out boundary markers and paths and the things I'm allowed to know about.

He doesn't mention last night.

Neither do I.

We walk and he talks and I listen and catalogue and every time the wind shifts from the north I feel it; that pull, low and insistent, like a string tied somewhere inside me that someone keeps plucking. I breathe through it. I ask appropriate questions about Pack geography and treaty logistics and I am so impressively composed that I almost convince myself.

By evening I'm back in my room with the mountain air coming in cold and clean through the window. I'm thinking about what Maren asked me. Has your wolf ever surfaced.

I'm thinking about the answer I gave her, which was the truth.

And I'm thinking about everything that sits underneath that truth; the years of being told that my lack of a wolf was a defect, a disappointment, a thing to be managed and concealed and never spoken of outside the family. My father's careful silences on the subject. The Syndicate medic I saw twice a year who wrote things in a file he never showed me. The way nobody ever said the word Omega in my presence but I caught it twice, edges of conversations that stopped when I walked in.

I press the back of my head against the mattress and close my eyes.

I make it to ten o'clock before I do the stupid thing.

I don't plan it. I'm at my window watching the tree line. The rite grounds are north, Caelum said, and the preparation fires are lit, and I can see the faint glow of them above the canopy, and I'm telling myself I'm just getting air, just standing here, just looking.

And then I'm pulling on my jacket.

And then I'm in the corridor.

The lodge is quieter now, most of the Pack dispersed for the night, a few lights under doors. I move through it the side door and the covered walkway. 

I stop there, like last night, and try to talk myself back inside.

I was told not to do this but I keep walking.

The rite grounds open without warning.

One moment I'm in the trees and the next I'm at the edge of a wide clearing; a perfect circle, I realize, too perfect to be natural, ringed by standing stones so old the moss has grown in the carving. At the center, three fires burn in a triangle formation. Around them, figures in the middle of something I have no framework for, moving and still by turns, voices low and layered and harmonic in a way that doesn't feel like singing but isn't anything else either.

I stop at the tree line.

I should leave. I know I should leave. This is exactly the thing Soren told me this morning not to do and I've done it inside twenty-four hours, which is impressive even for me.

I don't leave.

I stand there in the shadow of the pines and watch the firelight move across the clearing and feel something unlock in my chest. Something that feels, absurdly, terrifyingly, like recognition. Like my body has been here before.

"You were told not to come here."

I spin around.

Caelum is standing two feet behind me, jacket on, arms at his sides. His voice isn't angry. It isn't even surprised, which is the part that unnerves me most.

"I know," I say.

"Ivy…"

"I know." I turn back to the clearing because looking at his face right now is more than I can manage. "I'll go back. I just…" I stop. The word needed is sitting in my throat and I swallow it back because needing things is something I don't do in front of people, "I couldn't sleep."

He's quiet for a moment.

Then he steps up beside me and stands there, looking out at the clearing, and doesn't tell me to leave again.

"What are they doing?" I ask, because the silence between us has already gone somewhere complicated and I need somewhere to put my voice.

"Calling to the moon," he says, "Asking it to witness the Pack. To see us." He pauses, "We do it every month. The full rite is longer, more formal. This is just the beginning of the conversation."

Calling to the moon. I think about the howl last night that moved through me like it was looking for something to answer. "Do you believe it's listening?"

"Yes."

No hesitation. Not defensive about it, just yes. Like the ground is solid under him.

Something about that breaks a small thing open in me that I immediately try to close.

"Caelum," I keep my eyes on the clearing, "What you asked me last night. What Maren asked me this morning," I feel him go still beside me, "I want to know what you both think you know about me."

He turns to look at the side of my face and I can feel it, the weight of whatever he's deciding, the edge he stood at this morning before Rook's voice pulled me away.

"I think," he says carefully, "that you've been carrying something your whole life that nobody told you the name of."

My jaw tightens.

"And I think," he continues, "that being inside Pack territory is starting to wake it up."

I don't say anything for a long time.

The moon above the clearing is one night from full and the light it throws is sharp enough to read by, cold and silver and indifferent to everything I'm feeling.

"If that's true," I say finally, "then my father knew."

Caelum doesn't answer.

Which is the only answer that matters.

I stand there in the dark with that landing in me like a stone dropped into still water.

He knew what I was.

And he sent me here anyway.

"I need to go back inside," I say.

"Ivy…"

"Not yet." I turn to look at him and whatever is on my face makes him stop. "I just need a minute. I'll go back inside and I won't come here again and tomorrow I'll be…" my voice almost does something I won't allow, "I'll be fine. I just need a minute."

He looks at me with those open, unguarded eyes and nods.

He stays beside me though. He doesn't go anywhere.

And somehow that's the thing that nearly undoes me completely; not the revelation about my father, not the wolf I've never had that is apparently waking up in foreign territory, not any of it.

Just a man standing beside me in the dark who wasn't asked to stay and stayed anyway.

I stare at the fires and breathe and don't let myself fall apart.

And on the path behind us, a twig snaps.

I turn.

The path is empty. Trees and dark and nothing moving.

But the skin on the back of my neck is telling me something different.

And I know; with the certainty of someone who grew up in a world where being watched was a fact of life that we were not alone in those trees.