Moon's Debt

Chapter Four : The Problem With Strays

Dax's POV

I am not a man who makes decisions based on feeling.

I made that conclusion about decisions a long time ago. After the last time, I let my feelings lead and ended up standing over a grave in the rain, understanding too late that the Moon Goddess is not cruel on purpose; she just doesn't particularly care about the collateral.

So when my scouts drop a half-dead Ashveil omega at my feet in the forest and I feel something pull hard in my chest like a hook-catching cloth, I make a decision. I put her in the guest room. I am going to Thessaly. I go about my business.

This is the rational choice.

My Beta, Ren, follows me back to the main hall with the energy of a man who has a lot of opinions. He is organizing into a queue.

"You felt it," he says.

"I felt something," I say. "Don't make it a thing."

"Dax. Your eyes went gold."

I stop walking.

"For about four seconds," Ren continued, because he had never once in his life known when to stop. "When you picked her up. Gold, full shift, then you locked it down, but I saw it, and so did Cas, and Cas had already told Pria, so essentially the whole. "

"Ren."

"Yeah?"

"Go do something else."

He does. Ren is an excellent Beta because he knows exactly when to push and exactly when to withdraw, and right now he withdraws all the way down the corridor and around a corner. I can still feel him listening, but that's fine. I don't say anything worth listening to.

I go to my office, and I sit behind my desk, and I look at the wall.

The Hollow has existed on the edge of the continent's awareness for three generations, feared, avoided, and quietly grateful for both. We survive by being a closed system. We do not take in strays. We do not open our border to wolves with Ashveil pack markings and bond-severance wounds and eyes that look at you like they are deciding whether or not you're trustworthy.

I had a mate. Her name was Lyra. She died in a border dispute eight years ago before the bond was completed, and the half-formed loss of it nearly broke my wolf permanently. I rebuilt myself around a very simple premise: the Moon Goddess gives and takes according to her own logic, and the only protection against her whims is to not want too much.

It has worked well.

And then Sera.

Thessaly comes to me before she goes to the girl; this is how I know she is managing me, because Thessaly always speaks to the person she thinks will be harder to convince first.

She sits across from my desk and tells me everything. The bloodline. The curse. The suppressed bond. The gold-silver shift color that my own scouts reported after Sera crossed the border when her wolf surfaced briefly against her control.

I listen to all of it without interrupting.

Then I say, "She doesn't know any of this."

"Not yet," Thessaly says. "I'll tell her. I wanted you to know first."

"Why?"

She tilts her blind face toward me in that way she has that makes a person feel directly examined. "Because you need time to decide to be a decent man about it before she looks at you for clues about how to feel."

I look at her for a long moment.

"Go tell her," I say.

On the third day, I went to her doorway.

I tell myself it's a check-in. Packmaster responsibility. She is on my territory, under my roof; therefore, she is my logistical concern.

She looks up at me from the edge of the bed, and the pull in my chest does the hook-and-catch thing again, and I press it down.

She asks about the old man, Fen. My scouts confirmed his death this morning, a wolf who spent thirty years as a council elder, who knew about the bloodline records, who had the courage to slip a girl a map on her way out the door, dead in his home, ruled accidental.

I told her.

She goes very still. Not fragile, still. Processing still. Like she is taking the information and building something with it rather than being buried under it.

It wasn't an accident, she says.

No. It wasn't.

I leave because if I stay in that doorway any longer, Ren is going to materialize from somewhere and make significant eye contact with me.

That night, I ran to the border.

It's a maintenance habit every other night, wolf form, the full perimeter, and it has nothing to do with the fact that running burns off the particular kind of restless energy I've been carrying since the forest.

At the eastern edge of the border, close to the Ashveil side, I stop.

My scouts have been watching. Three days have passed since Sera arrived, and this morning there was movement: an Ashveil envoy and two wolves stopped in neutral territory. They spoke to a border merchant. Asked questions.

They were looking for her.

Which means Caelum Ashveil or someone in his pack already knows she came in this direction.

I sit in wolf form in the dark and think about this.

The reasonable thing is to let her go. Give her what resources she needs and send her to neutral territory. She has the bloodline information; now she can pursue the council case herself. She doesn't need the Hollow's involvement, and the Hollow does not need Ashveil's attention.

This is the rational choice.

I turn back toward home.

I think about her sitting on that bed in the cedar-smelling room, taking the news of a dead man who died for helping her, and deciding to be angry about it instead of afraid.

I think about the sound of my own wolf when she gets close. Not panic. Recognition.

When I reached the packhouse, Ren was sitting on the steps. It is midnight. He is eating an apple because Ren has the instincts of an absolute gossip, and an apple apparently makes it look casual.

"The Ashveil envoy," I say. "Double the watch on the eastern border."

Ren takes a bite of the apple. "Are we keeping her?"

I walked past him into the packhouse.

"Yes," I say.