Marked By Tide

Chapter 2 - The Finding Part 2

Cassian's POV

I am already gathering her up. She weighs almost nothing. I do not understand how she has been moving with these wounds for as long as she has obviously been moving, because she should not have been able to. She is built small, fine-boned, *light*, and the part of me that is still cataloging her — the part that will keep cataloging her every time I look at her, for the rest of my life, I suspect — registers all of this in the half-second it takes me to get an arm under her knees and the other under her back.

Surge *keens*.

It is a sound I have never heard him make. It is a sound I did not know he could make. It is a high small grieving sound that he makes the second she comes off the ground and into my arms, and it is wordless and it is *in mourning*, and I almost go down on my knees again because the sound is so close to crying that my eyes do the burning thing.

*Surge*, I say to him. *Surge. She is alive. We have her*.

*She is so light, Cassian*. *She is too light. She has not been fed. She has not been fed in a long time. I can feel it through you — through your hands holding her. Look at her wrist. Look at her ribs. They are too close to the surface, Cassian, look —*

*I know*, I tell him. *I know. I see. I see. We are going to feed her, Surge. We are going to take care of her. Stay with me. Stay with me right now, I cannot lose you in my head right now, please —*

*I am with you*. *I will not leave*. *I am keening because she is mine and I am late*.

*You are not late.*

*I am late. I should have been here weeks ago. I should have been here when whatever bruised her face happened, I should have been here when whoever held the blade was deciding what he was going to bring with him, I should have been here —*

*Surge, you could not have been*.

*That does not matter to me right now*.

It does not matter to me right now either. I do not say that out loud to him, but he knows. He has shared the inside of my head for nineteen years and he knows what I am thinking before I am thinking it, and the thought I am not articulating is the same thought he is keening over, which is that we should have been here, and we were not, and someone got to her first.

He is not trying to take the body. He is mourning from the back seat. The mourning is its own kind of presence, and the presence is *heavy*, and I am carrying her and carrying him at the same time, and I do not mind because I have lived with him in me for nineteen years and his weight has never been a thing I minded.

Her head falls against my shoulder.

I can feel her pulse where her throat is pressed to my collarbone. I focus on it because focusing on it is what I have right now. I count it. Forty-something beats a minute. Too slow. Way too slow.

"Cassian."

I look up. Soren is on his feet, scanning the trees behind us, the direction we came from. He is doing the perimeter check before either of us has talked about doing one. He is also doing something else. He is looking at the ground.

"What."

"There is no second trail."

"What."

"Cassian. She came in alone. She is bleeding from blade wounds. Look at the cuts. Those are blade wounds. Someone did this to her. There should be a second trail."

I look down at the girl in my arms. He is right. The wounds are blade wounds — clean across the arm, deeper through the side. Someone with a blade in his hand did this and someone with a blade in his hand should be in these trees behind her.

He is not.

I look at the eastern border — at the line we crossed coming in, the line *she* must have crossed coming in, because there is no other place in this part of the territory where the boundary is unguarded. I look at the trees there.

There is no one.

The biome has not pulsed an alarm tonight. Soren and I would have felt it. Every pack member capable of feeling the alarm pulse would have felt it. The biome has not warned anyone, has not summoned anything, has not done what the biome has been doing for eight straight months every time a human comes within fifty yards of the border.

She walked across.

She walked *across*.

The biome let her through and the biome stopped whoever did this to her and the biome has not raised the alarm.

*Surge*, I say, because I want to hear what he has to say about it.

He is quiet for a long beat. Then he says, very low: *the Goddess knows her, Cassian*.

*What*.

*I do not know how I know. I am telling you what I know. The Goddess knows her. Reef will tell you the same. Ask him.*

I look at Soren. Soren is looking at me. He is having a similar conversation, I can see it on his face. He says, out loud, "Reef knows her."

"Surge says the same."

"How."

"He doesn't know. He just knows."

"The Goddess — "

"I *know*, Soren."

"We talk about it later. We move her now."

"Yes."

I nod. I cannot say anything else. The bond is humming in my chest and Soren's eyes are doing the thing they do when he is holding too many enormous facts at once, and I am holding our mate in my arms and she is bleeding through my fingers and we are three miles from the healing house.

"Run with me," I say.

"I am going to run ahead. I am going to wake Paloma. You catch up."

"Soren."

"Cassian, I can run faster than you can run carrying her. Let me wake Paloma. You bring her."

He is right. He is right and I do not want him to be right because every cell in my body is screaming at me to keep him and her in the same place at the same time, but he is *right*, and I make my mouth say:

"Go. Go now. I am two minutes behind you."

He goes.

He is gone before I finish the sentence. He shifts mid-stride into Reef and I hear his paws hit the leaves and then I do not hear them anymore because Reef does not make sound when he runs and never has.

I am alone with her.

I look down at her. She has not moved. Her face against my shoulder is gray under the dirt and the blood. Her eyelashes are dark and very long and stuck together where the tears have dried on her face, which means she was crying when she went down, and the part of me that is going to be cataloging her for the rest of my life adds that to the catalog and does something with it I cannot describe.

She was crying.

She was running through these trees crying and she did not stop.

"Hold on," I say to her, quietly, because there is no one to hear me say it and she cannot hear me say it either. "Hold on. We have you. I have you. Just — hold on."

*We have you*, Surge echoes, in a voice that is almost mine now, layered over my own thought. *We have you, mate. We have you. Stay with us. Stay with us, do not go, do not go —*

*Surge, breathe*.

*I am breathing, I am running with you, I am here, please tell her to stay —*

*I am telling her*.

*Tell her again*.

"Stay with me," I say, out loud, to a girl who cannot hear me. "Stay with me. Please."

I start running.

I run the three miles to the pack heart in seven and a half minutes, which is the fastest I have ever run any distance with anything in my arms, and which I will not be able to repeat for the rest of my life because the bond will never again be in the state it is in right now, which is *newly snapped*, which is *wide open*, which is *demanding I keep moving* — and the demand is keeping me moving faster than my body should be capable of moving. Surge is at full volume the entire run, *stay-stay-stay-stay*, a steady metronome under everything else, and I am running on his rhythm as much as my own.

The pack heart comes up out of the trees. The healing house is lit. Soren has woken Paloma. I can see his shape in the doorway and Paloma's small steady silhouette beside him and Paloma is already moving toward me before I have come into the clearing because she has been doing this her whole life and she knows what an incoming emergency looks like.

I reach the porch.

Paloma takes one look at the girl in my arms and says, "Inside. Table. Now."

I get her inside. I get her on the table. Paloma is already moving — herbs, a basin, the kit she keeps stocked for exactly this kind of arrival, the kit she has had to use four times in her career and is about to use a fifth — and her hands are steady and her face is calm and she is the most welcome sight I have ever seen in my life.

"Cassian, hold pressure on the side wound."

"Yes."

"Soren, the lamp. Move it lower."

"Yes."

"Both of you. I do not care about the bond right now. I care about her vitals. I will care about the bond after I have stopped the bleeding. Are we clear."

"Yes," I say.

"Yes," Soren says.

"Good."

I get my hand on the wound on her side. The pressure makes her *flinch* — the smallest possible flinch, more of a twitch than a flinch, but she has felt the pressure, which means she is still in there somewhere, which means she is not gone yet, which means I have not been too slow, which means —

The bond pulses.

Soft. Steady. Warm. Already snapped, already mine, already telling me she is alive across the still-faint line between us.

She is alive.

*She is alive*, Surge confirms, very quietly, and I can feel him sit down in the chapel inside me and *wait*. He is no longer keening. He is no longer chanting. He is doing the thing he has done maybe six times in my life, which is *holding space*, which is sitting still inside me with his attention focused like a held breath. Reef is doing the same thing inside Soren. I can feel both of them through the twin bond. The two wolves who have been our spirits since birth are *witnessing*, and the witnessing is its own kind of prayer.

I am holding pressure on the wound of a girl whose name I do not yet know and the bond is humming in my chest and my brother is moving the lamp into the position Paloma asked him to move it into without being asked twice and the woman who has been the closest thing to a mother of half this pack is starting the work of saving the life of the third part of me.

She makes a sound.

It is small. It is hardly a sound at all. It is a *catch* in her breath, like she is trying to surface and the surface is too far up. I look at her face. Her eyelids do a thing — not opening, but *trying*. Her mouth moves. She does not make a word but her mouth has tried for one, and I lean down close to her ear because I cannot help it, because my body has decided I am going to be close to her and is not consulting me, and I say, quietly:

"You are safe. You are with us. I have you."

*Tell her my name*, Surge says, urgently. *Tell her I am here. Tell her —*

*Surge, she does not know what we are*.

*Tell her my name anyway*.

I do not tell her his name. I cannot tell her his name. She is human and she would not understand his name and there is a part of me already aware that we are going to have to *introduce* what we are to her, slowly, when she is awake, and that introduction is not going to happen in a hurried whisper while she fights for her life on a table.

But I do something else. I lean in, my mouth at her ear, and I say her existence into the room out loud the way her body needs to hear it: "You are mine. You are ours. You are not going to die tonight. Do you hear me?"

Her eyelids flicker.

For a single second, just a flash, I see her eyes again — the second time in twenty minutes, the second time since the snap. They are still grey-green. They are still unfocused. But they find me, and the bond — already snapped, already mine, already alive between us in a register I have only had for twenty minutes and may never be able to describe — *pulls*. It pulls between us. It pulls between us like a string drawn tight, and her dying body just *responded* to me being close to it, and on the other end of the bond I feel her, faint and faint and *there*, the bond doing the only thing the bond can do across a body this far down: keep humming on both sides, keep promising both ways.

*She heard you*, Surge says.

*I know.*

*Cassian, she heard you. The bond is — it is doing the thing on her side. She does not know what it is doing but she is responding to it. She is responding to us. Tell her again.*

I tell her again. I lean in, my mouth at her ear, and I say it slower this time, every word a separate sentence: "You. Are. Ours. You are *ours*. We have you. You are going to live."

The bond pulls again. Her pulse under Soren's fingers — I can feel it through the twin bond, Soren's hand on her wrist registering the change — *steadies*. Just a fraction. The forty-something beats a minute become forty-something steadier beats a minute, and Paloma — who has not stopped working — pauses for half a second and then says, without looking up: "Whatever you're doing, Cassian, keep doing it."

I keep doing it. I keep my mouth at her ear. I keep telling her she is ours.

Her eyes close. Her body goes slack again. But the bond keeps pulling, and now that the bond has tasted her conscious response it is *louder* on my side than it was before, like the bond has decided to broadcast harder because the thing on the other end of it just *answered*.

The bond is feeding me information I have not earned. I felt the *good* in the trees, when she went under and the snap landed. Now, with her gone again but the bond active and her body responding to my voice, I get more. Faint flickers. A kitchen. A letter on a table. A hand reaching for a knife block — not a knife, something larger — and the part of her that is fighting to stay alive even now is the same part that ran into our trees thinking *good*, the part that decided *anywhere but with him*, and I do not yet have the rest of the picture but the picture is starting to draw itself across the back of my mind in a way that is going to keep me from sleeping for the next four nights at least.

Across her, Soren has gone perfectly still again. He is getting the same flickers I am getting. The bond is feeding him the same way it is feeding me. We do not look at each other. We do not need to. The twin bond carries everything.

I am holding pressure on the wound of a girl whose name I do not yet know, and the bond is humming in my chest, and my brother is on her other side with his hand on her wrist counting her pulse with the precision he counts everything with, and Paloma is working with the calm of a woman who has been doing this her whole life, and I think — I think this very clearly, I will remember thinking it for the rest of my life —

*Whoever did this to her is going to die.*

I do not say it out loud. I do not need to. The bond carries the thought to Soren without my having to put words to it. Surge growls — low, deep, the only sound he has made since the snap — and Reef *agrees* through the twin bond, a quiet hard pulse that means *yes, when she is healed, yes*. Soren pauses for the smallest possible second beside me, and then he keeps moving, because we have work to do tonight before we have any other kind of work to do, and he sends back through the twin bond, clean and quiet:

*I know. Later.*

Later.

She is alive.

I will not let her die.

We have her now.