The Morning After the Moon

You don't sleep. You lie in the guest cabin listening to Wilder breathe in the little bed beside yours and turn Elodie's words over and over like a stone in your pocket.

It wasn't Caius.

At midnight you give up. You check that Wilder's window is latched, ask Clem, who's been sleeping on the cabin couch because she offered and you were too tired to refuse, to keep an ear out, and you walk up through the wet dark to the infirmary.

You need something to do with your hands.

You're scrubbing the third bed frame with Calla's old lye soap when the door opens behind you. You don't turn around. You don't have to. The bond tugs under your ribs like a dog on a leash, and you hate it.

"You should be asleep," Caius says.

"So should you."

"I don't sleep much." He comes in and shuts the door. The room feels smaller at once. "Your heart's been going like that for an hour. I could feel it from the house."

You put down the brush. You turn around.

He's leaning against the shelves by the door in a black t-shirt, arms folded, the lamplight catching the gold in his eyes. It isn't fair, how he looks. It never was. Even at twenty you used to have to look at the floor when he walked into Calla's kitchen, because if you looked at him too long you forgot what you were saying. Now he's thirty, all the boyish edges carved away, and the stubble and the ink and the size of him make him look like something out of an old story about the wolf at the edge of the forest. The kind of story that warns you not to go in.

"Did you send them?" you ask.

He doesn't pretend not to understand. "No."

"Two enforcers in a council truck. At the river road. Alpha's orders. They said you wanted me over the border by dawn, and if I ever came back, if I ever tried to contact you—"

"I didn't send anyone." His voice is very quiet. "I never gave that order. I would never have given that order."

"You stood in that circle and said—"

"I know what I said." Something cracks in his face. "I know exactly what I said, Ava. I hear it every night."

You stare at him.

"The morning after the rite," he says, "I went to Calla's cottage at dawn. Your bed hadn't been slept in. Your bag was gone. Calla thought you were with me." He looks at the floor. "I drove the river road four times. I tracked you as far as the bridge and lost your scent in the water."

"Why?" It comes out of you raw. "Why would you go looking for me? You rejected me, Caius. In front of everyone. You didn't even look at me while you did it."

He pushes off the shelves.

He crosses the room in four slow strides, and you don't back up. You should. You don't. He stops so close you have to tip your head back, so close you can smell him, cedar and rain and something warm underneath that is just him and has haunted five years of dreams.

"I looked at you," he says. "I looked at you after. Every second. You just didn't see it, because you were looking at the trees and trying not to cry in front of them. And you didn't. You didn't cry. You stood there like a queen."

His hand comes up. It stops a breath from your cheek.

The bond is a live wire. You can feel his pulse, you swear you can, running under your own skin. His eyes drop to your mouth. Your lips part. Five years. Five years of telling yourself you didn't miss this. That you'd forgotten how it felt to be looked at like you were the only warm thing in the world.

He leans in.

You put your hand flat on his chest.

He stops instantly. Under your palm his heart is slamming, hard and fast.

"You don't get to," you whisper. "You don't get to say it like that. Like it was something that happened to you."

He closes his eyes.

When he opens them, the Alpha is back, the mask in place. He steps away. Cold air rushes into the space where he was.

"You're right," he says. "Goodnight, healer."

The door closes behind him. You stand alone in the lamplight with your hand still raised, shaking.

Van shows up twenty minutes later with a cardboard box in his arms and a guilty face.

"Saw him come out," he says. "Walked straight past me like I was a tree. So I figured you might want some company." He sets the box on the counter. "Also, gauze. You said you needed gauze."

You almost smile. You can't help it. Van was always the one who could make you smile, even at twenty, even when Calla had just made you redo a poultice nine times.

"Thank you."

He leans on the counter and watches you go back to scrubbing. After a while he says, "You know he looked for you."

"He said."

"No, I mean he looked for you." Van's voice loses its usual joke. "A year. Every pack from here to the Montana line. Every human town on the coast. He drove until he couldn't see and then I drove. He went to Greyharrow alone, into Thane Ravenscroft's own hall, and asked if they'd seen you. Thane nearly killed him for the insult." He shakes his head. "He stopped eating. His father was dying and he barely noticed. The council thought he'd lost his mind."

The brush has stopped moving in your hand.

"Then why did he stop?" you ask. "If he looked that hard. Why did he stop looking?"

Van goes very still.

You turn around. He's staring at you with an expression you can't read at first. Then you can. It's horror.

"Oh, God," he says quietly. "Nobody told you. Of course nobody told you. You were gone."

"Told me what?"

Van pushes his hand through his dark curls. He looks at the door, as if he wishes Caius would walk back through it and say this himself.

"Silvan Coyle brought a scarf back from the river a week after you left," he says. "Your green one. Caught on a snag below the falls. The council searched the banks for three days and called it." He swallows. "Ava. They told him you drowned."