The Vampire Lord's Wolf Bride

Chapter 4: Moonlight and Earth

Selena.

When he said her name, his voice changed. Soft, like silk. Nothing like the way he said mine.

I thought of Selena taking my hand and telling me to come visit anytime. I thought of Helen saying I needed a child, and soon. And it finally clicked. Selena hadn't sent him here because she felt sorry for me. She'd sent him because she saw this game more clearly than I did.

Silver Moon women don't take anyone's pity.

"Get out," I said.

He lay with his back to me. Didn't move.

"Selena talked you into this. You didn't come because you wanted to. So go."

His answer came back cold. "I'll leave at first light."

And he settled back down, back still turned.

I climbed out of bed, pulled on a robe, and sat down at the desk.

All those nights he never came, I told myself there was nothing to be sad about. Tonight he came, and that's what finally made me sad.

I know husbands and wives are supposed to share a bed. I also know he has never once thought of me as his wife. Earlier, when he'd clamped his hand over my mouth, his fingers had pressed against my cheek. Cool to the touch.

Vampires run cold, all of them. And still, for that one second, my heart hammered like it had lost its mind.

A dull ache rolled through my palm, that ugly scar burning under the skin again.

The candle on the desk was still lit, its flame shivering in the draft that slipped through the window frame, the glow warm and brimming, ready to spill over. Something in my chest felt ready to spill over too.

I started thinking about the pine resin smell on Dad's clothes. Mom's bone broth. The sound of the whole pack's claws tearing up frozen earth on a full moon run. That huge round moon over the snow peaks.

That's when a shadow slid across the window.

I didn't think anything of it at first. Kayla likes to walk the outer wall on her night rounds. A third floor ledge is no different from a hallway to her, and now and then she throws a shadow across the window as she passes.

Then my nose twitched. Wrong.

Kayla smells of rust and dry hay. I'd know her blindfolded. Whatever was drifting in from outside wasn't her.

I held my breath and eased the window open.

Night wind poured in, cold enough to lock my jaw. I leaned halfway out. Nothing. The courtyard sat empty, moonlight laid over it so white it stung.

I was pulling the window shut when the scent hit me.

Faint, nearly lost in the wind. Frozen earth. Pine needles. And that raw animal musk you only find in a den where wolves have slept.

A werewolf?

Impossible. Besides me and Kayla, there's no third wolf in this castle.

I drew a slower, deeper breath, and only then caught what lay beneath the wolf scent: a thin, cold thread of blood. Cedar. Old leather.

A vampire, then. A vampire steeped through with the scent of a wolf pack.

I gripped the sill and searched the dark. There, at the top of the flying buttress across the courtyard. A figure.

The moon was bright, and I saw him clearly: a man in a long dark coat, standing at the buttress's highest point, wind dragging at his hem and his hair. He didn't move. He just stood there, face turned toward me.

Not Darian. Not Marcus. Not any face I knew in this castle.

But the wolf inside me went quiet.

Not the crushed down quiet of the seal. Quiet like... safety. Like being small again, tucked behind someone who'd take the hit for you.

I don't remember ever feeling that. My wolf remembers.

I stared at the figure, and he watched me. The night was so still I could hear wind threading the cracks in the stone. The candle swayed behind me, and he stood motionless on the buttress, like a statue someone had carved and forgotten on the castle roof.

Then he moved.

Not toward me. He turned and slipped along the buttress's edge into the shadow of the wall without a sound. Too fast to be walking. It looked like flying.

A vampire who carried the scent of wolves.

I hung over the windowsill, staring at the spot where he'd vanished, for a long time. The wind scrubbed the last of his scent away, until there was nothing left but moonlight lying cold on the stone.

Deep in my chest, my wolf let out the smallest whimper. Not grief. More like she was calling a name.

And I couldn't remember a thing.

I didn't raise the alarm. I closed the window, and as I turned, two soft knocks sounded at the door. Kayla's signal.

She was standing there with a bowl of hot soup when I opened the door, her eyes asking the question for her: Is he gone?

I nodded.

She handed me the bowl, stepped inside, and swept a glance toward the window. Then she stopped dead.

Her nostrils flared.

She'd caught the scent.

Her reaction scared me. The knife dropped from her hand and rang against the floor. She went rigid where she stood, eyes flooding red in an instant. Her lips trembled, and a raw, scraping sound climbed out of her throat, like she was fighting with everything in her to speak and couldn't.

"Kayla?" I went to steady her. "What's wrong?"

She seized my arm, nails biting into my skin. Her eyes stayed locked on the window, tears sliding down her face, and not one word would come.

"You know him?" I asked. "The man out there just now, you know him?"

She let go of me, bent to retrieve the knife, and dragged her sleeve hard across her face. Then she shook her head.

She was lying. Her knuckles had gone white around the hilt. I didn't push. I lifted the bowl and drank the soup down in one go, a scald of heat running from my throat all the way to my stomach.

At some point I fell asleep at the desk.

When I opened my eyes the sky was going gray, my neck was too stiff to turn, and someone had draped a blanket over me. Kayla's.

The court etiquette manual under my arm had a drool stain soaked through half the page. Perfect. If Helen saw this, I'd be hearing about it until dark.

I flipped the manual open to dry the page and found a line from yesterday's copying that I'd circled over and over without noticing:

"The wife of a Lord shall take his will as her will, and his joy as her joy."

I picked up the pen and added one crooked word beside it:

Bullshit.

I felt better after that.

For days afterward, I moved like I was coming down with something.

No strength for work, no taste in my food, no real sleep. I kept snapping awake in the dead of night and staring at the window, sure that shadow would come back. It never did. Just moonlight on empty stone.

Liam never came again after that night.

Helen, on the other hand, treated the whole thing as the joy of the century. She told everyone she passed and walked like there was wind under her heels. One morning she carried in my tea with her eyes shining and asked whether my body was feeling any... changes.

I nearly sprayed the tea across the room.

The man slept with his back to me and left at dawn without a word to spare. But I swallowed it before it got out. No point making her miserable.

Three years married, sure, but by wolf reckoning I'm barely past my milk teeth, and next to vampires who stack up centuries, I might as well be a newborn. Still, I'm not clueless. All those nights Kayla smuggled me down to the Shadow Town tavern, I saw plenty of blood servant couples wrapped around each other in the corner booths.

After that day I went to see Selena, she was the one who started visiting me.

The first time she came, I was hunched over the desk copying the manual with a jug of ale swiped from the supply yard at my elbow: copy a line, take a swallow. She stood in the doorway a moment, presumably working through what she was looking at.

She sat down, leafed through my copywork, and somewhere in there the face I'd doodled on the "wife of a Lord" page made her laugh out loud. After that, somehow, we were just talking.

I told her that back north I loved watching stars. I could lie in the grass all night doing it. She said she'd lived by the sea before she came here, that she and her sisters used to sneak down to the docks on summer mornings to watch the sun come up. I said I missed my phone. Missed scrolling videos, ordering takeout, gaming on the couch till the middle of the night. She blinked, then burst out laughing and said she missed movie theaters. The smell of popcorn. Squeezing into a row of seats with her friends for a horror movie so they could all scare each other stupid.

Then we both went quiet for a while. This castle has electricity, technically, but the lamps stay dim as embers about to die. Phones get no signal. Not a sound from the outside world makes it in. Both of us had been lifted out of our old lives and dropped here like an afterthought.

"Well, since none of that's on the table," she said suddenly, "why don't I teach you Eventide?"

I'd never heard of it. She said it was a game the court nobles loved: two players facing off with dice and pieces, and whoever captured everything the other had won the board. You could bet on it, too.

The word "bet" perked me right up.

She ran off and came back with a set. The board was dark walnut, the pieces black and white, obsidian and carved bone, cool against the fingers. She taught me the moves with real patience. Genuinely tireless about it.

After that she came by with the board every two or three days. She was easy to talk to, no airs about her, and she'd even toss me the odd compliment. Once she noticed the braided deer sinew cord on my wrist and said the handiwork was lovely. Mom braided it for me.

I got carried away and said next time Dad sent someone with supplies, I'd have Mom braid one for her too.

Only after it was out of my mouth did I remember. Dad hasn't sent anyone in three years.

Selena didn't answer. She lowered her head and rolled her dice, pretending she hadn't heard. She's like that. Warm one moment, then abruptly, unaccountably quiet the next.

One day partway through a game, Selena stopped rolling. She held her teacup, thumb tracing a slow circle around the rim, like she was weighing something.

"Avira," she said, lifting her eyes to mine, "when do you plan to go see Lydia?"