Except Her

Nobody breathes.

You can hear the moon. That's the only way to describe it. A low hum, like a wineglass rubbed at the rim, coming down through the glass roof and into the top of your skull. Two hundred wolves kneel in it. Some of them are crying without seeming to know.

And Anya Sorrell stands.

It costs her. You can see exactly what it costs her. Her shoulders are locked. A vein stands out along her throat above the silver neckline, and her knees keep starting to bend and stopping, as if somebody's pulling on strings and she's cutting them one at a time with her teeth. Her eyes never leave yours.

There's something in them you have never seen in sixteen years of pouring her wine.

She's afraid.

"Anya," Kaspar says through his teeth. He's on one knee beside her, his hand braced flat on the flagstones, the cords in his neck straining like he's trying to lift a truck. "Anya. What is he doing?"

She doesn't answer him. She doesn't look at him. She's looking at you.

The hum gets louder. The red light gets brighter. The fist behind your ribs opens all at once, and the world goes white at the edges, and the last thing you see before the floor comes up to meet you is her taking one step forward. Toward you.

You wake up cold.

Not winter cold. Old cold. The kind that lives in stone. You know it before you open your eyes, because you've carried two hundred blocks of lake ice into this building every February since you were twelve.

The ice house. Below the kitchen gardens, half sunk into the hill, two feet of granite and a door like a vault. The air smells of sawdust and wet rock and, faintly, burning.

The burning is you.

There's a chain around your wrists. You can feel it before you look: a band of heat that isn't heat, like holding your hands too close to a stove, except the stove is inside the metal. When you shift, it bites.

Silver.

"Don't pull," says a voice. "It just gets worse."

Rurik Huxley is sitting on an upturned crate by the door with a shotgun across his knees. He's twenty-seven and built like a gate, handsome in the blunt, broken-nosed way the girls in Lantern Bluff seem to like, and he has spent ten years making your life a specific kind of small misery. He's the one who taught the younger enforcers to call you stray. He once locked you in the walk-in freezer for an hour as a joke.

He is not looking you in the eye.

"What happened?" Your voice comes out shredded. "Rurik. What happened up there?"

"You know what happened, Ethan."

It's the first time in ten years he's used your name. That scares you more than the chain.

"I don't."

"You made me kneel." His jaw works. He's holding the shotgun the way you'd hold a crucifix. "You made everyone kneel. The Alpha. The Ashthorn Alpha. Me. I couldn't..." He stops. "It was like somebody had a hand on the back of my neck. Pushing."

You look down at your hands. They look like your hands. Callused knuckles, a burn scar from the bread oven, dirt under one nail.

"My eyes," you say.

"Gray again." He says it like it doesn't help.

"Where's Gitta?"

"Came down an hour ago. The Alpha's orders are nobody gets in." For the first time, Rurik almost looks at you. "She called me a word I didn't know old ladies knew."

"That sounds like her."

You sit back against the cold wall and try to think. The chain burns. Your shirt is still damp with wine and now it's freezing on you, and your head is pounding with something that isn't quite a headache. More like a second heartbeat.

"Rurik."

"Don't talk to me."

"What are they going to do?"

He doesn't answer. That's an answer.

You don't know how long you sit there. Long enough for the light under the door to go from orange to nothing. Long enough to replay it a hundred times. The wine. The red moon. The word coming out of you like someone else had borrowed your mouth.

And her. Standing. Shaking. Looking at you like you were the only thing in the room.

She did nothing when Kaspar poured the wine. You keep coming back to that, and you keep coming back to the other thing too: when everyone else was on the floor, she took a step toward you.

Somewhere above, the Hall is loud. Trucks start and stop. Doors bang. Once, through the vent high in the back wall, you hear a man shouting, and you think it's Kaspar, and you think the word he's shouting is mine.

Rurik checks his watch. Checks it again.

At three in the morning, someone knocks on the door.

Two knocks. Firm. Rurik is on his feet with the shotgun up before the second one finishes.

"Who is it?"

"Open the door, Huxley."

It's her voice. You'd know it anywhere. You've heard it giving orders over your head your whole life.

Rurik opens the door.

Anya Sorrell walks into the ice house in a long black coat over workout clothes, platinum hair yanked back in a rough knot, no jewelry except the Ashthorn sapphire. She has washed off whatever she wore to the party. Without it she looks younger and harder at the same time, and the lamplight catches the scar on her collarbone and the blue of her eyes and you forget, for a second, that you're chained to a wall.

That's the effect she has. You've watched it happen to Alphas.

"Go and get coffee," she says to Rurik.

"Princess, your father said..."

"My father is asleep. I'm not. Go and get coffee, Huxley, and take a very long time about it."

Rurik looks at her. Looks at you. You watch him do the math and arrive where everyone always arrives with Anya Sorrell, which is don't.

The door shuts behind him.

She doesn't speak. She walks across the ice house slowly, her boots loud on the stone, and stops in front of you. You get to your feet because sitting feels wrong. The chain drags. You're taller than she is. You've never noticed that before; you've never stood straight in front of her before.

She notices too. Her eyes flick up to yours. Gray, now. You see her check.

"Princess," you say.

That does it.

She moves so fast you don't see it. One second there's three feet between you, and the next your back is slammed against the granite so hard your teeth click, and her forearm is across your throat. Not crushing. Not yet. Just there. Her other hand is flat on your chest, right over the place where the fist opened.

She's close enough that you can smell her: cold air, cedar soap, something under it like the edge of a storm. Close enough that you can feel her pulse through her arm, racing.

Her lips pull back from her teeth.

"Who," Anya Sorrell says, "are you, Ethan?"