Marked By Tide

Chapter 4 - The Luna Part 2

Juno's POV

Magnus and I walked back to the family quarters in the dark.

We walked for a long time without speaking. The pack heart was beautiful at this hour, the way it is always beautiful at the hours nobody is awake to see it. The moon had moved. The trees were doing different silvering than they had been doing an hour ago. The bond between Magnus and me was a low warm constant hum, the way it has been for twenty-one years, and tonight I was grateful for it in a way I have not been grateful for it in a long time.

Halfway home Magnus stopped.

He turned to look at me.

He said, very quietly: "Juno."

I said: "Yes."

He said: "Did you hear it. When you put your hand on her forehead."

I said: "Yes."

He said: "The note."

I said: "Yes."

He said: "*Juno*."

I said: "I know."

We stood under the canopy and held it between us. He took my hand. I took his. We did not move for a long minute. Then I said it because he was not going to say it and one of us had to and I am the Luna and tonight my hand had been on the forehead of a human girl who had been let through a border that has not let humans through in eight months:

"The biome let her through."

Magnus did not move. He did not breathe for a beat. Then he breathed out, long and slow, the way he breathes when something enormous has been confirmed and he has to choose what kind of Alpha he is going to be in the next thirty seconds.

He said: "I know."

He said: "What does it mean."

I said: "I don't know."

He said: "Did Wren — "

I said: "Yes."

He was quiet again. Then he said: "Storm sat up too."

I had not known. Storm has been almost as quiet inside Magnus as Wren has been inside me. The fact that Storm had sat up tonight was the third piece of evidence, and I let myself feel the weight of it for a second under the canopy with my husband's hand in mine.

I said: "We watch her. We are kind to her. We find out what she is in her own time."

He said: "Yes."

I said: "We don't tell the pack yet. We don't tell the boys about Wren and Storm."

He said: "No. They have enough."

We started walking again. He did not let go of my hand. We walked the rest of the way home like that.

---

We went into our bedroom. We lay on top of the blankets in the half-clothes we had left in earlier, and Magnus put his arm around me and his face against the back of my neck. He fell asleep first. He always falls asleep first.

I did not sleep.

I lay in the dark with my husband's slow breath on the back of my neck and the bond humming low in my chest and I thought about the girl on the table — about the bruise that someone older than tonight had put on her face, the older bruising on her upper arm in the shape of a grip, the rib that had healed without intervention because she had not been allowed to see a doctor for it.

I thought about a girl hurt by a hand that had been close enough to her body for the hand to have had time. I do not know how long *a long time* is. I do not know how old she is. Paloma said *younger than she looks*. I am guessing eighteen, nineteen, perhaps twenty. I do not know her name. I do not know the name of the person whose hand has been on her face. I do not know how many years she has been carrying the kind of bruising that only forms on a body whose owner has stopped fighting back.

I know what I saw on the table.

I thought about my own daughter, who is sixteen, who has never been bruised by anyone except by her own clumsiness, who has been loved every day of her life by a pack that has known her since the day she was born. I let myself sit with the distance between what Tamsin's sixteen has been and what the girl on the table's young years have evidently been, however long it had been her, before tonight.

And then I did the thing I have been doing for forty-six years when something has been taken from a person under my pack's roof.

I decided.

I decided that whoever put the hand on her face was going to find out what it costs to put a hand on a person who is now under my protection. I do not yet know his name. I do not know how to reach him. I do not know yet whether the law can touch him or whether the law has been on his side, which it usually has been, in the kind of slow careful damage I saw inventoried on the table tonight. I do not know whether we will move on him through the courts, through the pack network, or through ourselves. I do not yet know what shape my answer is going to take.

I know what I have decided.

Wren — quiet in me, sleeping but not asleep, the wolf who has not asserted herself in fourteen years and asserted herself twice tonight — sits up again. She listens to the decision land. *Yes*, she says, in the voice she has not used in a generation and is using twice tonight as if making up for lost time. *Yes. We are going to find him. We are going to remove him from her. The pack is going to do it. The biome is going to do it. I am going to be there when it is done.*

I said back to her: *yes*.

Wren lay back down. The decision sat with me. Sleep started to come.

Just before I let my eyes close, Wren said one more thing — quieter than the first two:

*She is ours, Juno. The pack's, the boys', and yours. She is ours.*

I said back: *I know.*

I slept.

The federal task force will be at our eastern boundary by mid-morning. The girl on the table is going to wake up. Her name is going to come out of her mouth, and the name of whoever has been hurting her is going to come out of her mouth, and once I have the name I am going to have one job for the rest of this year.

I slept four hours. It was the lightest sleep I have ever had.