THE BLOODMOON ACCORD

CHAPTER THREE: What Howls in the Dark

The howl came again, closer this time, and wrong in a way that raised every hair on Sera's arms too long, too layered, like something wearing a wolf's voice without understanding what it was for.

"Stay here," Dorian said again, already at the door.

"Absolutely not." Sera was moving before she'd finished deciding to, bare feet on cold stone, moon-restlessness burning off into something sharper and more useful. "That's coming from the border. My captain is at that border, Dorian. I am not standing in a tower counting candles while something kills him."

For a moment she thought he'd argue. Instead something in his face shifted recognition, maybe, of an argument he wasn't going to win, or didn't entirely want to. "Then you stay behind me," he said. "And you do exactly what I say, when I say it. This isn't pride, Princess. Whatever's out there took down six of my mother's border scouts last week and left nothing behind to bury."

They went down through the palace at a dead run, Dorian's guards falling in around them in a loose, practiced formation that told Sera this wasn't the first time they'd scrambled for this bell. Torchlight streaked the black walls gold. Somewhere ahead, she could hear Queen Nyx's voice, cold and clipped, issuing orders that sounded less like panic than long, grim practice.

The gate stood open when they reached it, and beyond it, the tree line was on fire not burning, she realized as her eyes adjusted, but lit from within by a sickly blue-white light that pulsed like something breathing. Wolves and vampires stood shoulder to shoulder along the wall, an alliance made of pure necessity, weapons drawn, faces uniformly bloodless.

And staggering out of the tree line, half-carried by two Noctarian scouts, was Kade.

"Kade!" Sera was over the wall and running before anyone could stop her, wolf-fast, and she didn't care that a dozen vampire guards flinched back from the sudden blur of her. Her captain's face was gray, a wound at his shoulder cauterized black at the edges like it had been burned rather than cut, and his eyes, when they found hers, were glassy with shock.

"Wasn't a wolf," he rasped. "Wasn't anything. It had a wolf's shape and it *wasn't a wolf*, Sera, it didn't have a scent, it didn't have a heartbeat, I put my blade through it and it just" He stopped, shuddering. "There were others behind it. Coming from Noctarian ground too. I don't think it's picking sides."

Dorian had gone very still beside her, staring past the wall into the dark. "How many?"

"Lost count past a dozen," Kade said. "They hit both patrols at once. Ours and yours. Like they wanted us fighting each other in the confusion instead of them."

"They did," said a new voice, and Sera turned to find a vampire woman she hadn't met, dark-haired, sharp-eyed, dressed for the field rather than the court, blood not her own drying along one forearm. She looked at Dorian with the ease of long familiarity. "Cousin. Your mother wants you at the wall. Something's climbing it."

"Isolde." Dorian's jaw tightened. "This is Princess Seraphine's captain. Get him to the healers, and get someone who isn't terrified of wolves to guard the door while they work."

Isolde's gaze flicked to Sera assessing, not unkind, but very obviously cataloguing her for later then to Kade, and something like respect moved behind her eyes at the state of his wound. "You put a blade through one of those things and you're still standing," she said. "That's either very good luck or very good training. Come on, Captain. Let's see which."

She hauled Kade's arm over her shoulder with a strength that startled a pained laugh out of him, and Sera watched her captain who did not warm to strangers, who had spent his whole life distrusting exactly this kind of confidence go, if not soft, then at least visibly less braced for a knife in the back.

There wasn't time to think about it. The wall erupted in shouting.

Something had come over the top.

It landed in a crouch that no living thing should have been able to survive wrong angles, joints bending in directions that made Sera's stomach turn and when it lifted its head, she understood exactly what Kade had meant. It wore the shape of a wolf the way a puppet wore the shape of a man: close enough to be recognizable, wrong enough to be obscene. Its eyes were empty sockets lit from within by that same sick blue-white witchlight, and when it opened its jaws, no breath came out. No scent. No heat.

Nothing living at all.

"Hollow Order," Dorian said, low, already moving to put himself half a step in front of her, which she noted, furiously, and did not have time to argue about. "Don't let it touch you. Whatever magic is holding it together, it spreads on contact."

The thing lunged.

Sera moved on pure instinct, wolf-fast, ducking under its first swipe and driving her elbow into the joint of its foreleg hard enough to hear something crack that shouldn't have been able to. It didn't bleed. It didn't cry out. It simply reoriented, mechanical and patient, and came at her again and this time Dorian was there, faster than anything she'd seen move, catching its jaw in one hand and *tearing*, and the thing came apart in a spray of black ash and cold blue light that scattered across the stones like dying embers.

For a moment, neither of them moved. Dorian was breathing hard, which she hadn't known vampires did unless they wanted to, his hand still black with ash to the wrist, and he was looking at her with an expression that had nothing careful left in it at all.

"You could have died," he said.

"So could you."

"That's not the same thing." His voice cracked slightly on it, and she watched him hear himself say it, watched him realize exactly how much that sentence had given away. Around them the fighting was dying down more Noctarian guards pouring through the gate, more of the hollow wolves crumbling to ash under coordinated strikes but for one suspended second the battle might as well have not existed at all, because he was still looking at her like the fact of her being alive was the only thing in the world that mattered.

"Dorian." She didn't know what she meant to say next. She didn't get to find out.

"Your Highness." A guard's voice, urgent, cutting between them. "The Queen requests you at the eastern wall. Now."

Something shuttered closed behind his eyes not gone, she thought, just put away, filed somewhere safer for later and the careful court prince slid back into place like armor. "Go to the healers' hall," he told her. "Check on your captain. I'll come find you when this is contained."

"Dorian"

"Please, Sera." Her name, not her title, low and urgent, and it did something to her chest that the whole rest of the night hadn't managed. "I need to know you're safe. Let me have that much."

She went.

The healers' hall was chaos vampire and wolf blood mixing on the same stone floor for the first time in a hundred years, healers of both kingdoms working side by side out of pure necessity, and in the middle of it, propped against a wall with a fresh bandage at his shoulder and Isolde crouched in front of him, deadly serious, pressing a cup of something dark into his hands, was Kade.

"Drink it," Isolde was saying. "It's not poison, Captain, contrary to whatever your wolf instincts are screaming at you. It'll close the wound faster than your body will do it alone."

"Forgive me if I'm not eager to drink whatever a vampire hands me."

"Forgive me if I'm not eager to explain to the wolf princess why her captain bled out because he was too proud to take a healing draught." Isolde's mouth curved, sharp and unimpressed. "Drink it, or I'll hold your nose like a child. I have done it before. I will do it again."

Kade drank it. Sera, watching from the doorway, filed that away for later with the particular attention of someone who'd just watched her own heart do something reckless on a battlefield and recognized the shape of it happening to someone else.

She didn't have long to enjoy the observation.

A healer came rushing past her, white-faced, calling for the Queen, and Sera caught the tail end of what he was shouting to another healer as he passed words that turned the whole warm, chaotic relief of the healing hall to ice in her chest.

"wasn't just an attack, it was a message there's something carved into the ash where they fell, it's in the old tongue, it's a name"

"Whose name?" Sera demanded, catching the healer's sleeve before he could get past her.

He looked at her with the particular dread of a man who has just realized he's talking to the one person in the palace who least needs to hear this.

"Yours, Princess," he said. "It's your name."