Beneath The Blood Moon

Dust and Blood

The dark was total and tasted of stone and old wine.

Sofia became aware of herself in stages. Hands. Knees on cold ground. The ringing in her ears that was either the aftermath of the shockwave or her skull's honest opinion of a thirty-foot drop. A weight across her legs that, when she pressed her palm against it, was warm and breathing.

Zayn.

She found his shoulders in the dark, his chest, the spread of blood that had soaked through his shirt and was still moving. Her hands came away black in the lightless air.

"Zayn." Her voice didn't sound like hers. Too thin.

A sound from him. Not words. Something that meant alive without language in it.

The dark adjusted slowly. Ambient light filtered through fractured stone above — pale, indirect, enough to see by if you let your eyes settle. The pack house's underground winery: the smell of aged fermentation cut through with dust and blood. The collapse had been surgical — rubble ringed them in a loose circle, the ceiling above sealed. No one was coming through it quickly.

Sofia looked at her hands. The three claw-lines on her wrist had dimmed to almost nothing — drained, the way a muscle goes after its limit. She pressed her palm flat against the cold floor and breathed.

Then she looked at Zayn properly.

Three wounds. She could count them in the low light — shoulder, ribs, back. Wolf healing moved fast under normal circumstances; he should have been closing already. But the wounds were staying open, edges ragged, the blood carrying the dull sheen of iron contamination — the kind that argued with the healing response and won.

They had used poisoned blades. Of course they had.

Sofia tore a strip from the hem of her grey dress without ceremony. Then another. The fabric was thin and not made for this, but it was what was here.

She pressed the first cloth against his back and the tears came anyway — silent and furious, dropping onto the bandage before she could stop them. Not grief exactly. Not fear exactly. The accumulated weight of the last four hours arriving all at once, with no more postponement available.

She worked through it. Tied the bandage. Started on the second.

Zayn's eyes opened.

Glassy — the particular glassy of a man running hot with iron in his blood — but they found her face in the dark with an accuracy that said he hadn't lost the thread of himself entirely.

He listened to her cry for a moment. She watched something move across his face that he had no practiced response to — something that opened a door onto a place further back than six years and was shut again with visible effort.

"Stop," he said. The word came out rough, stripped of its usual architecture. "You are wasting water."

Sofia pressed the cloth against his ribs harder than was strictly necessary.

"I'm not wasting anything," she said. "I'm done in thirty seconds. You can find it inconvenient after that."

The ghost of something crossed his face that was not quite an expression. She finished the second bandage. Started the third.

Stone shifted above them.

A pair of boots dropped through a gap in the rubble, followed by a lean young man with a cut above his eyebrow and the haggard precision of someone who had survived a very bad fifteen minutes. One of Sera's scouts.

"Sera is holding the east grounds," he said, landing in a crouch. "There's a tunnel at the south end of the winery that runs under the pack boundary into the forest. Third iron marker, then turn east." He pressed a small folded piece of oilskin into Sofia's hand. "Safe house coordinates. Four miles. She'll meet you when she can."

He was gone before she could ask his name.

Sofia looked at Zayn. Zayn was already trying to sit up.

"Stay down," she said.

"I'm not staying in a hole," he said.

"Then stand slowly and don't argue with me about it."

He looked at her with an expression she didn't have a category for yet — not hostility, not quite surprise. Something in the middle. He put one hand against the wall and pressed himself upright, and she watched the cost of it in the set of his jaw, the whitening of his knuckles.

She moved to his left side before he could tell her not to.

His arm came across her shoulders with the reluctant weight of a man using a resource he hadn't budgeted for. She adjusted her footing, took the weight, and said nothing about it.

They stepped into the pitch-dark of the tunnel together — the king who had no business needing support and the girl who had no business providing it — and the dark closed behind them like something that had been patient for a long time.

Neither of them looked back.

Some weights you carry because there is no one else. Some you carry because you find, unexpectedly, that you can.