The Choosing

By the time I finish with the fourth wolf, my hands won't stop shaking.

Every healing is the same and different all at once. I press my palm to torn skin, and the world tips sideways, and I fall into someone else's pain like it's a river with no bottom. I see a woman drowning in her own memory of a spear through her side.

I see a boy no older than twelve, curled around a wound that should have killed him, whispering his mother's name into the dark. Each time, I pull the poison out thread by thread, and each time, a little more of me goes with it.

"You should rest," Nyssa says, gripping my elbow as I sway on my feet. "You've done six. Voss can wait for the rest."

"I don't think Voss waits for anything," I say, and even that small joke costs me more than it should.

Two more slabs. Two more wolves gray-skinned and barely breathing. I kneel beside the next one, a woman with braided hair and a jaw clenched tight even in sleep, and I place my hand against her chest before I can talk myself out of it.

This time the vision comes faster, sharper. I see the woman on watch duty, alone at the tree line, when something moves in the fog that isn't a wolf at all—something with too many joints, moving wrong, moving hungry. I feel her terror as it drags its claws down her ribs. I feel the poison enter her blood like ink dropped into water, spreading, spreading.

"What did this do?" I gasp, drawing back my hand once the last of the black poison has gathered in my palm like tar.

Voss, standing at the foot of the slab with his arms crossed, goes very still. "You saw it."

"I saw—" I pressed my fingers to my temple, trying to hold onto the shape of the thing before it slipped away. "Something in the fog. Not a wolf. Something else."

"The Hollow Lands have been creeping closer to our border for a year now," he says, low. "Things come out of that fog that shouldn't exist anywhere. I didn't think a healer's touch could show you that."

"I didn't either," I admit.

The woman on the slab gasps awake, chest heaving, tears sliding into her hair. "Rennet," she chokes out. "Is Rennet safe? Did it get Rennet too?"

"He's already healed," I tell her, my voice cracking with exhaustion. "He's sleeping two slabs over. He's safe."

She sobs with relief, and something in my chest cracks open at the sound of it—not pain this time, but something warmer. Something like purpose.

"One more," Voss says, nodding toward the last slab.

I nod and stand, though the room tilts when I do. Nyssa catches my arm again, steadying me without a word.

The last wolf is the worst of them—an older man, his whole left side gone the color of a bruise that never healed. When I touch him, the vision hits so hard I nearly black out. I see decades of loyalty to a pack that never once thanked him. I see him standing between children and danger more times than anyone counted. I see him afraid, now, not of dying, but of dying unremembered.

"I see you," I whisper to him, though he can't hear me yet, though this is a memory and not the present. "Whatever happens, someone saw you."

When I finally pull free, my whole body is trembling and my vision swims black at the edges. Nyssa's arms come around me before I hit the floor.

"That's enough," she says, glaring at Voss like she'd fight him herself if he argued. "She's done. Look at her."

I expect Voss to push back. Instead, he crouches in front of me, studying my face with his one good eye like he's seeing something new.

"Eight wolves," he says. "Eight wolves I thought I'd be burying by winter. You did that."

"Barely," I managed.

"Barely is still more than every healer I paid gold for." He stands, and for the first time since I met him, his voice loses its edge. "You have my word. You and your friend walk free. Nobody in Shadowfang territory touches you."

Relief floods through me so fast it almost hurts worse than the visions did. "Thank you," I whisper.

"Don't thank me yet."

Something in the way he says it makes my stomach drop. "What do you mean?"

Before he can answer, the door at the end of the hall bangs open. A scout stumbles in, breathless, dropping to one knee in front of Voss.

"Alpha. Riders at the border. They're flying Lycan Court colors."

The room goes cold in a way that has nothing to do with the stone walls.

"How many?" Voss asks.

"Six. Led by a Court captain. They say they're here for the healer."

My heart stops. "Me?"

"Word travels faster than you think, girl," Voss says, and now there's something almost like pity in his face. "A Noctari healer who can see wounds like they're written in a book—that's not the kind of secret that stays a secret. Not with half my pack whispering about it before you finished with the second wolf."

"I don't understand," I say, though a cold, sinking feeling in my stomach tells me I understand perfectly well. "Why would the Court want me?"

"Because the man who rejected you in front of every pack in Vhalaris," Voss says slowly, "is the same man whose Council leader recognized your mark. You didn't think that ended at the temple, did you?"

"No," Nyssa says, stepping in front of me like she can physically block this from happening. "You gave your word. You said we walk free."

"You do. I'm not the one stopping you." Voss's jaw tightens. "But I am not fool enough to stand against the Elder Blood Council over one girl, healer or not. If they've come for her, they'll have her, whether I hand her over or whether they burn this fortress down looking. I've buried enough wolves this year. I won't bury more for a war I can't win."

"So that's it," I say, and my voice comes out flatter than I feel. "You'll just give me to them."

"I'm giving you a choice," he says. "Walk out to meet them on your own feet, with your head up. Or get dragged out in chains like a criminal. Either way, you're going. I'd rather you go the first way."

I want to scream at him. I want to run again, the way I ran from the temple, the way running has always felt like the only thing I know how to do. But I look at Nyssa's face, pale and terrified, and I think of eight wolves breathing easier tonight because of me, and something steadies inside my chest.

"Fine," I say. "I'll go on my own feet."

"Aurelia, no—" Nyssa grabs my hands. "You can't just agree to this. We can find another way, we can—"

"There is no other way, Nyssa." I squeeze her fingers, memorizing the warmth of them, afraid of how much I might need this memory later. "If I run, they'll hunt me. If I fight, I'll lose. This way, at least I choose how I walk through that door."

"I'm coming with you."

"They didn't ask for you."

"I don't care what they asked for." Her eyes are fierce, wet, unshaking. "I have followed you since we were six years old. I am not stopping now."

Voss watches this with an expression I can't read. Then he says, quiet, almost gentle for a man built like a war that never ended, "Let her come. The Court captain won't argue over one extra body, and the girl clearly isn't leaving your side no matter what anyone says."

I don't have the strength left to argue either of them. So I let Nyssa link her arm through mine, and together we walk out of the healing chamber, down the long stone hall, out through the fortress gates into the gray light before dawn.

Six riders wait at the border, mounted on huge wolves the color of storm clouds, their armor stamped with the crest of the Lycan Court—a black moon wrapped in silver thorns. Their captain dismounts as we approach, a tall woman with cold eyes and a scar through one eyebrow.

"Aurelia Vane," she says. It isn't a question.

"That's me."

"You'll come with us. By order of the Elder Blood Council."

"And if I refuse?"

"You won't." She says it without cruelty, just certainty, like she's stating the weather. "The Council doesn't ask twice."

I look back once at the Shadowfang fortress, at Voss standing in the gate with his arms crossed, at the wolves I healed who will never know my name once I'm gone. Then I look at Nyssa, who nods once, steady, refusing to let me do this alone.

"Then let's go," I say.

The captain's mouth twitches, almost a smile, almost respect. "Smart girl."

They put us on two of the riderless wolves, and as the fortress falls away behind us, I feel the mark under my collarbone pulse once, sharp and sudden, like it knows exactly where we're headed.

Toward the black fortress in the mountains.

Toward him.