Chapter 4: Ninety Seconds

"He's going feral!" someone screamed on the stream.

Nora was already on her feet. Poppy grabbed her arm. "Where are you going?"

"To the arena."

"Are you insane? The wardens will tranquilize him in a minute. You can't..."

"Poppy." Nora pulled free, quiet and steady. "He's mine on paper. If he's put down, what happens to the match?"

Poppy opened her mouth, closed it, and swore. "Fine. But I'm coming with you. Lucy, grab your coat!"

The Moonstone arena sat at the north edge of campus, a huge bowl of white stone and floodlights, packed with hundreds of wolves on their feet. On the sand, Mason Reed had dropped to his knees. His claws were out, his shoulders were heaving, and his eyes were black from edge to edge. Two wardens circled him with sedative rifles, but their hands shook. Nobody wanted to shoot a rising star.

Nora shoved through the crowd. A guard at the stairs tried to stop her. "Restricted. Guard teams and family only."

"I'm his match," she said. "Nora Whitlock. Look me up."

The guard hesitated, then shook his head. "I'd need the squad leader's sign-off..."

"Then you'll have it."

The voice came from behind her, lazy and warm, like honey over a blade. A hand settled on Nora's waist before she could turn around.

"Evening, Miss Whitlock," said the man at her shoulder. He was tall and lean, with short russet hair and narrow amber eyes. His black uniform jacket hung open at the throat, and he wore the grin of a man who had never once been told no. "Hudson Pierce. Match number three. I'd shake your hand, but we're a little busy."

Nora's mouth went dry. In the photo he had been handsome. In person he was a problem.

"You're the squad leader," she said.

"I am." He glanced at the guard. "She's with me, Tomlin. Let her through."

"Sir, the protocol..."

"Is mine to waive. Move."

The guard moved.

Hudson steered her down the tunnel with one hand, quick and sure. "Here's the situation, since I imagine you've got questions. Reed's wolf hit ninety-eight percent restlessness thirty seconds ago. Nobody's soothed him in two years. He refuses the Bureau. He keeps saying he's waiting for his mate."

"He didn't even know me until this morning."

"He knew the Well was going to match him eventually. Some of us have been waiting longer than others." He said it lightly, but his eyes slid to her face and stayed there a beat too long. "Wardens give him ninety seconds before they fire. After that, the sedative stops his heart about one time in five."

Nora swallowed. "Then we'd better hurry."

"My thought exactly."

They emerged at the lip of the arena sand. The crowd's roar dulled to a rushing sound in Nora's ears.

Mason was down on all fours now, snarling at the wardens. Up close he was younger than she'd expected, lean and dark-haired, with a long scar along one forearm and hands that looked too gentle for claws.

"Wait here," Nora said.

"Absolutely not." Hudson caught her wrist. "I'll cover you. If he lunges, I step in. Deal?"

"Deal."

He let go. She walked onto the sand alone.

"Miss, back away!" a warden shouted.

"Hold your fire," Hudson called behind her, in a voice that had suddenly dropped an octave and filled the whole arena. "That's an order."

Nora dropped to her knees three feet from the feral wolf. He growled. Saliva dripped from his teeth. His black eyes locked on her, and for a second she saw nothing human in them at all.

She had stared down worse. In the Collapse she had sat with a man gone half-Dead and sung him to sleep, and he'd died peacefully in her lap.

"Mason," she said softly. "I'm Nora."

His nostrils flared. The growl faltered.

"I know you can smell me. I smell like pine and old rain, and I'm not afraid of you." She held out both hands, palms up. "Come here."

He lunged.

The crowd screamed. Hudson's boots hit the sand, but Nora lifted one hand without looking back. Wait. Mason's jaws closed a hair's breadth from her collarbone and stopped.

His whole body shook. And Nora, very carefully, laid her palm against his cheek.

Green light flowed from her skin. Not wood magic this time but something quieter that she'd never named: warm, slow, and old as the redwoods. It slid into the cracks in his spirit and filled them like water finding a riverbed. She felt the red, ragged heat in him cooling. She felt a name rise out of the dark: mate.

The black bled out of his eyes. They turned brown, wide, and very young.

"Nora," he whispered.

"Hi."

His claws shrank back into fingers. He folded forward, buried his face in her shoulder, and shuddered once, long and deep, before he went completely limp.

The arena was so silent she could hear the floodlights humming.

Then the whole place erupted.

In the stands, Poppy was on her feet screaming something unprintable, and Lucy was crying into both hands. Farther up, among the rows of white-uniformed first-years, a girl in a white silk coat sat perfectly still. Savannah Whitlock was not cheering. She was staring at the sand with narrowed eyes, as though she were doing sums in her head, and none of the answers pleased her.

Nora did not see her. Not yet.

---

"Medical!" Hudson's voice cut through the noise. He swept in, lifted Mason's unconscious weight onto his own shoulders as if it were nothing, and said, very low in Nora's ear, "Cover your hands. Now."

She looked down. Her palms were still faintly glowing green.

She slid them into her sleeves.

"Good girl." He steered her toward the tunnel with Mason slung over one shoulder and the other arm curved around her back, shielding her from the cameras. "Everyone's going to ask what you did. You say it was a standard C-plus soothing and you're very tired. Understood?"

"Why are you helping me hide it?"

He flashed a grin. "Because a girl who can do that and still scrapes by as a C-plus is either very lucky or very dangerous. There are people in this world who'd lock her in a lab and call it research. I'd like to keep my wife out of one."

"I'm not your wife yet."

"Then I'm planning ahead."

She would have rolled her eyes, but her legs were wobbling. He caught her elbow without comment and kept walking.

---

In the infirmary beneath the stands, Mason lay on a cot with an IV in his arm and color back in his face. A doctor was reading his chart with a bewildered frown. "Restlessness down to eleven percent. In a minute and a half. That's impossible."

"A good match," Hudson said blandly. "Happens."

The doctor looked at Nora, then at Hudson, and decided not to argue.

When the room cleared, Nora sank onto the stool beside the cot. Her head was pounding. Using the new power had cost her more than she'd expected, as if a spoon had scraped out the inside of her chest.

That green warmth hadn't been wood magic or lightning, and she had never used it in the old world. It had simply answered when she called, the way a dog comes to a whistle. She filed the thought away for later. Tonight there was only the boy on the cot, the tired ache in her bones, and the nagging sense that Hudson Pierce had watched her far too closely for a man who'd just met her.

She pressed her cold fingertips to her temples and waited for the room to stop tilting.

"Thanks," she said to Hudson. "For the cover."

"Any time." He propped himself against the wall, arms crossed, watching Mason's chest rise and fall. For the first time his grin slipped, and something raw showed underneath. "He's my best friend. Eight years. He's carried half my squad on his back. And you walked out there like it was nothing."

"It wasn't nothing."

"No." His amber gaze met hers. "It wasn't."

Mason's fingers twitched. His eyes fluttered open.

"Nora?" His voice was thin and cracked. He found her face and relaxed. "You came."

"Of course I came."

"I didn't think..." He swallowed. "Nobody ever does." Then his hand closed around hers, tight, and his voice dropped to a whisper only she could hear. "Listen. Don't go to the opening ceremony on Saturday."

Nora went very still.

"They know what you are," Mason breathed. "They've been waiting."

"Who?"

But his eyes had already slid closed again, and his grip went slack.

Behind her, Hudson straightened off the wall. All the lazy charm had drained out of his face.

"Who's been waiting?" Nora asked him.

Hudson didn't answer. He was looking past her, through the narrow window in the infirmary door, to the far end of the corridor where a tall figure in a long dark coat stood watching them with gold eyes.