What Damon Knows

Elara's POV

Damon didn't say a word until we were off the field.

That alone should have told me something. My brother talks through everything  nervous energy, he calls it, though it's really just that silence makes him itchy.

 He'd narrated our entire childhood out loud, half to me and half to himself. So when he pulled me by the wrist past the fire pits, past Mira's confused wave, past old Thorne still standing frozen mid-sentence in the middle of the field, and said nothing at all, I knew we were past the point where he could talk his way around it.

He didn't stop until we were behind the lodge, out of the torchlight, where the grass gets long and nobody bothers cutting it because nobody comes back here.

"Okay," I said. "You can let go of my wrist now."

He let go. Then he put both hands over his face like he was trying to physically hold himself together.

"Damon."

"Give me a second."

"You don't get a second. You've had nineteen years of seconds. Talk."

He dropped his hands. In the dark I could just make out his expression, and it wasn't the one I expected. I expected worry. I got something closer to grief.

"I need you to understand I was trying to protect you," he said.

"From what? A Choosing ceremony?"

"From him." He said it like the word cost him something. "From this. From exactly what just happened out there, in front of two entire packs, where I couldn't stop it and I couldn't warn you and I just had to watch…"

"Watch what? He looked at me. He asked my name. That's it, that's the whole event, I don't understand why you look like someone died."

The second I said it I regretted it. 

Something crossed his face, quick, and old, and I knew exactly what memory I'd stepped on. He didn't flinch away from it, though. He never does. He just breathes through it, the way he's taught himself to since he was fourteen and I was ten and it was the two of us standing in front of two graves that the pack elders wouldn't let us look inside.

"I'm sorry," I said. "That wasn't fair."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine, I just" I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. My heart still hadn't slowed down. If anything it was worse now, further from him, like some part of me was still standing in that field waiting for something. 

"Damon, what happened to me out there? 

He said his wolf claimed me. He said it's never been wrong. What does that mean?"

"It means what he said it means." Damon's voice had gone flat, careful, the tone he used when he was choosing each word like it might go off in his hands. 

"The Choosing bond isn't supposed to happen without scent. It's not supposed to happen at all below Alpha rank, not really, not like that  but especially not without scent recognition. Scent is the whole mechanism. It's how the wolf verifies. No scent, no bond. That's not folklore, El, that's just how it works. Every wolf who's ever been born."

"Except me."

"Except you." He said it so quietly I almost didn't catch it.

I stared at him. Nineteen years of my brother explaining away every strange thing about me with some variation of you're just different, it doesn't mean anything, some wolves are just built strange  and for the first time in my life he wasn't doing that. He was standing in the dark behind the lodge looking at me like I was a bomb he'd been assigned to defuse and had just realized he didn't have the manual for.

"You knew," I said. "You knew something like this could happen."

"I didn't know it would be him."

"But you knew it could happen. With someone. You've always known something was…" I stopped, because saying it out loud made my chest hurt in a way I didn't have a word for. "You've always known I wasn't just scentless. Haven't you."

Damon didn't answer right away. In the quiet I could hear the ceremony still going on the other side of the lodge. Thorne's voice, trying to smooth over what had just happened, trying to get two hundred wolves to pretend they hadn't all watched the Alpha of the Northern Territories abandon protocol to walk across a field for the pack joke. I wondered what they were saying about me right now. I decided I didn't want to know.

"There are things about your parents," 

Damon said finally, "that I was told never to tell you. Not until you were older. Not until it was safe."

"Safe from what?"

"I don't fully know. That's not me being evasive, El, I mean it  I was a kid too. I know pieces. I know it was serious enough that our mother made my mother swear on her life, and I know our mother doesn't make promises like that for small reasons." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, and for a second he looked much older than twenty-three. "I know your parents didn't die in a territory dispute like everyone always says."

The ground felt strange under my feet, like it had shifted half an inch to the left.

"That's the story I've been told my entire life."

"I know."

"By you. You told me that story, Damon, when I was seven and I asked why I didn't have a mom like the other kids"

"I know what I told you." His jaw tightened.

 "I was protecting you the only way a fourteen-year-old knew how, with the only information I had, which wasn't much and which I was specifically told not to give you more of. And I've spent every year since then trying to figure out if that was the right call, and I still don't know, and now" He gestured back toward the field, toward the ceremony, toward Kael Draven, presumably still standing there confused in front of his lieutenants. "Now I don't think I get to choose anymore. Now it's out of my hands."

"What is out of your hands? Damon, just say it. Whatever it is, just say it."

He looked at me for a long moment. Weighing something. I'd seen him do this before right before he told me our father used to keep bees, right before he told me our mother's favorite color was the exact shade of green my eyes are, small true things he doled out over the years like he was worried I only had room for so much grief at a time. This felt different. This felt like the door to a room he'd been standing in front of for nineteen years, and he'd finally decided to open it, and he still wasn't sure it was the right decision.

"Your parents didn't die protecting territory," he said. "They died protecting you. Specifically you. Because of who you are. Or who your bloodline is. I don't have all of it, El, I swear to you I don't, but I know it's the reason you have no scent, and I know it's not a flaw. I know people have been looking for you since before you could walk, and I know that if the wrong person ever worked out what you actually are, it wouldn't matter whose wolf claimed you in a Choosing ceremony. It would just matter that you existed."

Somewhere behind the lodge, the ceremony horn sounded  three long notes, the signal that meant the Choosing line was forming, that they were still going to try to finish the ritual like nothing had happened, like an Alpha hadn't just crossed a field for a girl with no scent at all.

I didn't move toward the sound. Neither did Damon.

"And Kael Draven," I said slowly. "You think he's part of finding out."

"I think," Damon said, "that his wolf just did in ten seconds what I've spent nineteen years trying to prevent anyone from doing.

It found you. And I don't think it's going to let that go."

Between my chest, that same low pull was still there  quieter now, but not gone, patient in a way that scared me more than the panic had. Like it had waited a long time and wasn't in any hurry now that it had finally gotten what it wanted.

Found you, it had said. In a voice that wasn't quite mine.

I was starting to understand it hadn't been talking about tonight.