Moon Dreams

Sleep didn’t come so much as it dragged me down by the ankles and held me under. I didn’t fight. After the courtyard, after the heat and the crack and the way my bones had argued with themselves and then agreed on something older, I didn’t have fight left. Vivian helped me to my room—half-carrying, half-chiding—while Jason pretended he wasn’t limping and Lyra pretended she wasn’t satisfied. Jasper walked behind us, a quiet wall. If anyone spoke, I didn’t catch the words. Sound had turned into weather—there, around me, unavoidable, but not for me.

My room in the Holdfast had one small window that looked at nothing in particular: a slice of pine and a sliver of sky. I sank onto the bed like the mattress had been waiting for this exact shape of collapse. My fingers could not decide if they were human or not. They curled, uncurled, curled again, nails biting crescents into my palm. I set the staff against the wall and the necklace burned once, a steadying pulse, then cooled to a heartbeat I could wear.

Vivian pressed a damp cloth to my forehead, as if fevers belonged to this. “Breathe,” she whispered.

“I am,” I said, though it came out thin.

“You’re still you,” she added, and I couldn’t decide if it was a comfort or a threat.

Jasper stood at the door, not crossing the threshold. The line between us felt both old and necessary. “You did not lose yourself,” he said. “You found a door.”

“Doors go both ways,” Lyra said from the hall, as if she’d been waiting to throw cold water. I didn’t see her face, only her outline, a wedge of dark between torchlight and stone. “Make sure you know how to close it.”

Vivian turned, a bite in her voice she usually kept sheathed. “She knows.”

Lyra’s silence felt like a shrug. Footsteps faded. The hall took her.

Jasper’s gaze flicked from me to the window. The moon had not risen yet, but the sky had that pale expectant color, like the day was waiting for something to bless it or break it. “Rest,” he said. “Tonight there will be dreams.”

“Because of the shift?” I asked.

“Because of the you,” he answered, which was not an answer at all, and somehow the only one I could hold.

He left with a nod to Vivian, and the weight of the door closing sounded like a promise—keep the world out, just for a while.

It didn’t keep the world out. It kept me in.

I woke to a room full of silver. The window poured it. It was soft light, almost liquid, the way the sea might look if the sea remembered the sky. My breath fogged once and then not at all, like the air had decided to be kind. For a moment I wasn’t sure if I was awake or waking inside a dream that had good manners.

I sat up. Pain arrived late to the party—soreness in my shoulders and along my ribs, a deep ache in my hands where the claws had wanted more than skin. The bruise on my cheek from Lyra’s slap had yellowed at the edges. It made me look like someone I wouldn’t have smiled at in the hall.

The necklace warmed. Not hot, not pulsing danger, just warm, like a hand between my shoulder blades saying here. My fingers found it without thinking. Silver hummed under skin.

The room smelled different. Not the usual stone, smoke, wool. This was water on cold rock, pine resin, fresh-turned soil. A forest smell without the forest. My heart lifted in my chest like a bird realizing a window is open.

When I swung my feet to the floor, the shadows shifted. Not outside—inside. The corner where the staff leaned stretched a fraction longer. Something watched me with patient attention that wasn’t threatening and also wasn’t not threatening. I didn’t know how I knew that. I just did. The way you know when a thunderstorm has set its stake in the ground five towns over and started walking toward you.

“Okay,” I whispered, to whatever and whoever, and also to myself. “Okay.”

I stood.

The door didn’t lead to the hall. I opened it and walked into the woods.

I didn’t think that was how doors worked, even here. But the corridor had gone missing and a path had taken its place, the kind of path that had not been made by feet and had been made by feet both. Pine needles muffled sound, and in the muffling I heard more: a creek somewhere to my left, not loud, just insisting; a wind carrying a thin high note I could not name; and the impossible steady rhythm of many hearts at once, as if the earth had drawn breath and decided to keep it.

Moonlight gathered in handfuls along the ground. My night vision didn’t feel like a trick. Trees stood like pillars in a ruin; the mist lay low, ribboning the air with little unmade rivers. I walked. I did not know where I was walking to. The path knew. I trusted it.

When the clearing opened, it did it all at once, like a curtain yanked. I stumbled forward into space and stopped so my body wouldn’t keep me past the edge.

The clearing was a bowl. Grass grew thick and silver-tipped, bending under a breeze that had never met the rest of the forest. In the center stood a stone I did not have a word for—a standing stone, but not like the ones in the old books. This one wasn’t about marking a grave or holding a fence line; it was about telling the sky where to aim. Carvings covered it: moons inside moons, wolves in profile and in motion, lines that might have been rivers or veins. I moved closer because the kind of hunger I suddenly had could not be fed by food.

She was waiting there already.

Not a she—a wolf.

She wasn’t the size of any animal I had seen. Too big for sense, too small for myth. Her fur was dark at the ridge and light along the flanks, shifting color when the moon breathed. Eyes the color of old coins caught me, held me, did not blink. She didn’t snarl. She didn’t lower her head. She bowed.

It had the same effect as if someone had taken a hand and pressed it to my sternum and said: pay attention. My body did. My mind tried. I had the strange sense that if I spoke, it would be rude.

So I didn’t. I bowed back. Not an apology. Not submission. An answer.

Her ears flicked. She stepped aside, the way you do when you’re inviting someone to stand equal at the edge of something.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said, and my voice did not echo. It just settled, as if the clearing had been waiting for my particular uncertainty.

She came forward one pace, so close now I could see the pattern in the fur along her chest: a crescent, not white, not any color I could pull into a sentence, but there. My fingers lifted without asking my permission and hovered over that mark. Heat came off her the way sleep does. She smelled like the stream and the pines and something copper, and beneath all of it, the thing that had no name but felt like home seen for the first time, like you don’t know you are thirsty until the glass is in your hand.

“I’m scared,” I told her. I had not told anyone else. Not that word. Fear around the edges, fear packed into jokes—sure. Fear plain: this is what it is, this is what I don’t understand—no.

Her head tipped, a fraction. I was not a fluent reader of wolf, but even I could see that meant I know.

“Do I belong to you?” I asked. “Or do you belong to me?”

She opened her mouth. Not a snarl. A sound like a breath in reverse. Not words, not human, but it lived where words live. Neither. Both.

The necklace heated. The standing stone hummed. The carvings seemed to shift, the wolves along the edge moving one step closer, the moons layering each over each.

“Clara,” a voice said behind me, and I turned because that’s what my body would always do when it heard that sound from that throat.

Jasper stood at the edge of the clearing, hands open, weaponless, as if he’d come to a church and remembered how to be humble. He had that look again, the one that said he had seen too many endings and was trying to choose better ones. His eyes slid from me to the wolf, and he bowed—not to me. To her.

“I wasn’t sure you’d find it alone,” he said.

“I didn’t,” I answered. “It found me.”

“That’s the way of it.” His mouth hitched, the ghost of a smile. “You’ll learn to walk when it calls.”

“Is this real?” I asked, and the question tasted like a child and a queen.

“Yes,” he said. “And no. And it doesn’t matter which answer you choose. The choosing is real.”

The wolf’s gaze moved from Jasper to me again. I stepped closer until my knee brushed the edge of the standing stone. The stone was colder than the night, and when I rested my palm against one carved line, the stone turned skin-warm like it had decided to be polite.

“What do you want from me?” I asked the wolf. “What does the moon want?”

A wind came like a dress lifted from a chair. I heard the creek louder. I heard a bird behind me take off and scold us, as if we’d stepped into its private argument and brought the wrong snacks. The wolf’s mouth parted again. The sound was different: Come. Rise. And beneath it, tangled into the tone like a thread in a braid, another shape of meaning: Remember.

“Remember what?”

She stepped aside fully now. Beyond her, the clearing rippled—and then it wasn’t the clearing. It was the courtyard again, my body a tangle of pain and newness, Jason’s face folded into rage and humiliation, Vivian’s laugh caught in her throat before it had decided to be joy. It was my hands tipped to claws, my breath a ragged flag, my heart thundering in my teeth. It was the way I’d thrown him like he weighed nothing, like the air itself had borrowed his weight for later. It was the gasp from the pack, the fear and awe braided so tight together they looked like one color.

Then the picture changed and I was small, smaller than the memory could easily hold, a girl at a kitchen table with a coloring book that never held me long and a mother who always did. The window was open. Night sounds came in: crickets, a far-off owl, a train that didn’t run through our town and had never run through our town and still I heard it. Mom hummed something that didn’t belong to radios. Dad—Mr. Drake—laughed in the next room, the sound catching on the edge of something harder I didn’t know how to name then. My hand drew a crescent on the paper. I filled it with stars.

Then the picture shifted again and I was running. Not the alley by the club night. Not the school corridor. A hill covered in dead grass and new grass mixed, the kind of place you go to shout and pretend the wind is answering. Someone ran beside me. Not Jasper. Taller. Laugh wilder. Footfalls that matched mine out of a habit I wasn’t old enough to call love and not old enough to dislike for the same reason. We didn’t speak. We didn’t have to. I looked over and all I saw were eyes like mine, flecked like river stone, and the quick flash of teeth in a grin that had chosen to be mine too for a second. Kennedy. The name came like a bruise pressed; not the feeling, the knowledge of the feeling.

My fingers dug into the stone. The wolf watched. The clearing was a clearing again.

“What is this?” I asked, and I didn’t know if I was asking Jasper or the wolf or the stone or the necklace or myself.

“Memory is a doorway,” Jasper said softly. “Sometimes it swings from the past to the future. Sometimes it just lets the air move better.”

“Ronan took my mother,” I said. The word Ronan felt like iron in my mouth, heavy and wrong. “He thinks he can use me to make a claim. He thinks blood is a currency he can spend twice.”

“He does,” Jasper said. He didn’t add anything pretty to make it less.

“So what does this do to stop him?”

The wolf shifted her weight, a quiet step. She lifted her head and in that small motion I felt a possible life tilt into another possible life. She was not saying here is a map. She was saying here is your compass if you decide to hold it.

“Three nights,” I said, tasting the number. “Three nights until the Blood Moon.”

Jasper nodded. “Less now.”

I wanted to tell him that time should obey me, that it owed me the decency of not slipping. Instead I said, “What happens under it?”

“The world thins,” he said. “The old bargains get loud. If a rite is started, it is easier to finish. If a bond is forged, it is harder to break.”

“And if a girl decides to stop being a girl?” I asked, and I was not sure which answer I feared most.

He looked at me, not like a leader watching a liability, not like a guard watching a charge. He looked at me like a man watching a storm he hoped would water the fields and not drown them. “Then the world watches back.”

The wolf moved again, a circle around me and the stone. She brushed my hip with her flank as she passed, a touch not accidental. My legs went weak for a heartbeat, then steadied as if the ground had done me a favor. When she came around the other side, she stopped and put her muzzle against the necklace. The metal went white-hot and then not at all, the way good tears do.

I did not cry. I wanted to. The wanting felt clean in a way crying might not have.

“Clara.” The name came again but from elsewhere. Vivian. I turned and she was there at the edge, breathless, hair undoing itself from the neat braid she always wore at dinner, eyes big in a way that made me want to either laugh or make her tea. “You shouldn’t—” she started, and then saw the wolf fully and swallowed the rest of the sentence like a stone she had not meant to drink.

“It’s alright,” Jasper said. “She was invited.”

“By who?” Vivian whispered, as if the night might take offense.

“By the you that had to meet the you,” he answered, and she shot him a look that said some parts of him were too fond of the way words could be furniture.

Vivian’s hand found mine because of course it did. She squeezed. My fingers squeezed back. “You scared Jason,” she murmured, and a laugh tried to break out of the end of the sentence and failed, hiccuping somewhere in the middle. “He’ll pretend you didn’t, but he did.”

“He’ll get over it,” Jasper said, though his mouth said he wouldn’t mind if Jason didn’t for a while.

“Lyra won’t,” Vivian added, and now the laugh went away properly. “She sees you as a storm we can’t afford. Or one we can’t avoid.”

“She slapped me,” I said, touching the faded bruise.

Vivian’s eyes went flint. “She shouldn’t have.”

“She shouldn’t have,” Jasper agreed quietly. He didn’t say it again louder. He didn’t need to. I felt the decision settle in the air like dust a second after rain—later.

The wolf lifted her head. The moon had climbed a bit, a slow hand over the edge of the bowl of sky. The clearing made a sound I won’t be able to explain to anyone who hasn’t stood in a place that remembers what you forget. It was not a noise. It was the absence of noise going very alert.

“She wants to run,” I said.

Vivian hugged herself. “I don’t.”

“She does,” Jasper said, like that was news and also not. “And you might. Once your feet remember they were never only feet.”

“I don’t know how,” I said, which was the truest sentence I’d made all day.

“She does,” he said, nodding at the wolf. “Close your eyes.”

“That’s how people fall off cliffs,” I said.

“Close your eyes at the edge and you’ll learn what your body believes,” he returned, the tone a dare he’d never admit to in any court.

I closed my eyes. The world did not go dark. It went present. The sounds rose and braided: creek, wind, breath, the small things living their small lives in moss, the large things living the same way. I lifted my chin. The necklace pressed into my throat. The staff leaned somewhere far behind me in a room that wasn’t here. I felt fur that wasn’t mine along my forearm—the ghost of it, the memory of it, the promise. My knees wanted to bend. My fingers wanted to spread. My teeth wanted too many things at once.

“Wait,” Vivian said softly, panic edging the word like foil. “Not a full—Jasper—”

“She won’t,” he said. “Not here. Not now. Not like this.”

“Promises you can’t keep,” she hissed.

“Not promises,” he said. “Knowing.”

I took a breath again that wasn’t just breath. My body leaned forward, a fraction. And then I didn’t move at all, and all of me moved. The you that was not the me stepped, and I stepped too, and we didn’t leave the clearing and we ran for miles. The math of it is impossible. I know. I did it anyway.

We ran the ridge where the pines line up like soldiers who put their spears down only to eat. We ran the old riverbed where stones sit like bones thinking about the flood. We ran through town and didn’t touch it, the way music runs through a room and no one knows which part of it removed the dust. I felt my muscles without pain for the first time in days. I felt my lungs become bellows and not cages. I felt the ground tell me where it hurt and why the deer had been thin this season and where the mushrooms would decide to appear tomorrow morning for the woman who always gathered them barefoot and humming.

We came back into the clearing and I hadn’t moved. My chest heaved but hadn’t. My feet were still rooted and also very far and also back again. The wolf sat, tongue out, not quite a canine grin, but not grim either.

I opened my eyes. Vivian was crying, which annoyed her. She flicked the tears away like flies. “I hate when magic does that,” she said, which made me love her a little more than ten minutes ago.

“I like when it does that,” I said.

“I know,” she said, and laughed through a last tear that got confused about its job.

Jasper’s expression had loosened, something relieved leaking through. “You’ll sleep now,” he said. “And you’ll wake with your feet still your feet.”

“Will the dreams come back?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re not done with you. And you’re not done with them.”

“Wonderful,” Vivian said dryly. “I’ll bring tea. And a bucket. And a brush for your hair because it will look like you fought the wind and the wind won.”

The wolf stood. She pressed her head once against my hip and the necklace burned in a way I did not want to call blessing because that felt like asking for trouble. Then she turned, and with a few steps she was only shadow, and then the shadow was only the part of the clearing that had always been shadow.

When she was gone, the standing stone’s carvings stopped the slow moving I hadn’t admitted to seeing. The creek returned to being a creek. The moon kept doing its old job. The path back appeared because I needed it and not because it had been there.

“Come on,” Vivian said, voice hushed now that the loudest quiet had left. “Before Lyra finds us and says we’re doing the wrong thing in the right place.”

Jasper stayed where he was until we reached the edge. When we passed him, he fell in beside us, not too close, exactly where the danger would hit first if it were going to hit. It felt like the first thing that had made the right kind of sense in days.

We reached my door and it was a door again. Vivian hustled me inside and shoved a mug into my hands like she’d conjured it. The tea smelled like lemon peels and something green. I sipped. It burned and mended at the same time.

“Try to sleep,” she said. “If you can’t, count backwards from a thousand in steps of seven and curse Jason on every prime.”

“Is that a witch thing?” I asked.

“It’s a Vivian thing,” she said. “More powerful.”

Jasper leaned a shoulder to the frame. He didn’t cross the threshold again. He looked at me like he was memorizing my face in case the moon tried to change it too quickly. “We start again at dawn,” he said. “Not training like today. Listening. We’ll walk the west line. We’ll ask the ground what it knows.”

“That’s training,” Vivian said.

“It’s the kind that keeps you from dying,” he said, and she didn’t disagree.

I put the mug down. The room had that soft tilt again, the way beds tilt when they see you and are pleased. “Stay?” I wanted to ask. I didn’t. Some part of me already knew the shape of how we had to want each other if wanting was going to be allowed at all: at angles, in silences, around corners. Under oaths. Inside wars.

“I’ll be outside,” he said instead, which was the only real answer there had been to this particular un-asked question. “If you dream too hard, knock.”

Vivian closed the door after him and stood a second with her palm against the wood, as if she were greeting the tree it used to be. “He keeps his word,” she said into the grain. “Even when it hurts.”

I lay down. The mattress folded around me like it had learned my outline. Vivian fussed with the blanket because she is physically incapable of not fussing if a fuss can be made to serve a heart. “I’ll wake you before dawn,” she said. “If you aren’t already awake pretending to have slept.”

“Thank you,” I said, and it was too small for everything she was doing and also exactly the size she’d accept without laughing at me.

She pinched my cheek, very lightly. “Dream good,” she said. “Or at least useful.”

The door clicked. The room took its breath back. The necklace warmed once, as if agreeing with both of us, then settled to its quiet.

I closed my eyes.

The first dream came like a slow river, no rapids, no panic. I walked the corridor between my house and the school that doesn’t exist in any map, the one that only shows up on mornings when you are late but the day is not. The lockers were old. My name was scratched into one—not by me, by someone who had known it a very long time ago and had wanted to make sure the metal remembered. I touched the letters and the metal went skin-warm.

Around the corner, I heard two voices. My mother’s, young. And a man’s, laughing, then not. I stood at the edge and did not step in because sometimes it’s better to keep your blood pressure for later. “He’s not like us,” Mom said, and the sentence was a bird bumping a window. “He’s… too much like us,” she corrected herself, and the bird found a second window and fled through it.

“He’ll take what he wants and call it a gift,” the man said. Not Mr. Drake. The other one. Kennedy. The syllables tasted like a soft cut. He sounded like the hill from my memory. He sounded like the reason I could run without moving.

“You’ll be careful,” Mom said, and even in the dream I knew that was a wish you make when you’ve already decided to be stupid.

The second dream had edges. It stood in the clearing, but the clearing was wrong. The grass blackened in circles as if the moon had spilled something it shouldn’t. The standing stone’s carvings writhed properly now, wolves twisting into things that wore their shapes like costumes. On the far side, a man stood with his hands spread to show he held no weapon, and then smiled to show that he did. Ronan. I knew him like a toothache you finally remember you’ve been ignoring for a week. His eyes were pale in the way a winter sky is pale when it has decided your road trip was a bad idea.

“Daughter,” he said, and my body rejected the word like a bad pill.

“Not yours,” I said, and my voice did not shake. It felt good to tell my mouth to do something and have it obey.

“Blood wants what blood wants,” he said. “It is generous. I am generous.”

“You are a thief who learned to say please,” I said, and Jasper’s voice was not in the clearing but I heard it anyway—good.

Ronan’s mouth curved, as if I had done a trick he knew and liked. “Bring me the staff,” he said, as if the world were a marketplace, as if I were the price of something and not the thing itself. “The Blood Moon will be kinder to those who walk toward it.”

The necklace scalded my skin. The clearing shifted underfoot. A howl rose—not his, not mine. My wolf. Not in body. In the old way. It cut his voice in half.

“Three nights,” he said, as if I didn’t own calendars. He bowed, small, mocking, and the dream ended because I ended it.

I woke with my tongue dry and my fists clenched and the sheets twisted like vines. The window held a line of pale that meant dawn hadn’t won but had stopped losing. Outside my door, a foot scuffed the stone—light, paced. Vivian. Another footstep, heavier, the small pause of someone listening to a corridor breathe. Jasper.

I sat up. My body had kept its promise—it was mine. Soreness like old furniture sat in the corners, but the edges had been sanded in my sleep. The necklace lay against my sternum with the weight of a coin that bought something in a shop no human ran. I touched it and felt the thrum answer.

When I opened the door, both of them turned with that comical synchronized concern that would have made me laugh if the night hadn’t given me a list of things to do. Vivian shoved a piece of bread into my hand and then a slice of something that used to be a fruit and tried its best to still be one. Jasper just looked, the question in his eyes already answered by the color of mine.

“Dreams?” he asked anyway.

“Yes.” My voice went hoarse on that one syllable, so I swallowed and tried again. “She came. We ran. And Ronan came pretending to be polite.”

Vivian’s hand found my elbow, the squeeze gentle but full of electricity. “What did he want?” she asked, as if he wanted something other than the obvious.

“Me,” I said. “The staff. The moon. All of it in one basket with a ribbon.”

“Of course he did,” she muttered. “He has never met a boundary he didn’t mistake for a suggestion.”

“Three nights,” I said, as if saying it would make the number either bigger or less insulting.

Jasper nodded, once. “Then we begin.”

“Begin what?” I asked, and the part of me that would always be a teenager wanted to add I thought we already started, but I kept that part mostly in my pocket.

“Listening,” he said. “To the ground. To the wind. To the old places. To your bones. We don’t have time to pour strength into the wrong muscle.”

“We’ll also train the right ones,” Vivian added. “But first, tea. And to wash your face. You look like you argued with a pillow and lost.”

I did as commanded because some orders are a kind of love. The water woke my skin, the bread put a temporary stop to the noises my ribs had been making. We walked out into the corridor. Lyra stood there like a door posted her as its guardian and was proud of its decision.

“Your howling woke three pups,” she said to me, which I am fairly sure was a joke and fairly sure was not.

“I didn’t howl,” I said.

“Not with your mouth,” she returned. “Your blood shouted. It has poor manners.”

Vivian made a face behind her back because Vivian enjoys living at the line where trouble begins. Jasper inclined his head the bare minimum a person can incline their head and still claim to have done it. “We’ll be at the west line,” he said.

Lyra looked me over the way generals look at cavalry they have decided to admire or abandon. “Don’t die,” she said, which was either an order or a gift. “Not yet.”

“Noted,” I said, because sometimes you have to be your own joke to keep from becoming someone else’s.

We stepped into the morning. The Holdfast breathed with us. The trees lifted their arms and waited. I tightened the strap on the staff, felt the smoothness of the carved crescent under my thumb, and thought of how it had flared under Ronan’s voice—hotter, angrier, alive.

“Clara,” Jasper said as we crossed the inner yard, “one more thing.”

“Mm?”

“If he speaks to you again, in dreams or in the waking, do not answer with your fear.” He glanced sideways, not quite at me. “He’s fluent in that language.”

“What do I answer with?” I asked.

He considered. “With your name,” he said finally. “Say it the way the wolf did.”

“How did she say it?” I whispered.

He smiled then, quick as a blade unsheathed and sheathed again. “Like it was a word the world had been wanting.”

The west line waited, a ridge we’d have to climb and then learn like a song. The day stretched ahead full of things that might try to kill me and might teach me how to live. Behind us, the Holdfast kept its promises and its secrets. Above, the moon was a pale coin someone had set down and would come back for later.

Three nights. The number tasted less like a threat now and more like a dare.

I set my feet on the path. The ground answered. The wind agreed. Somewhere very far and very close, a wolf lifted her head—mine, not mine—and I lifted mine too, and then lowered it, and then walked, because sometimes that is the bravest thing and sometimes it is simply the next thing and sometimes it is both.