The Luna's Time Loop

The Calming Lock

I crossed the room before I decided to.

I didn't run to him so much as fall toward him, and the second my hands closed on his forearms the cold went out of me like a tide pulling back. The static died. The blade behind my ribs went quiet. I could breathe, all the way down, for the first time in two days, and my whole body sagged with the relief of it.

I hadn't known how loud the pain had been until it stopped. The silence of it rang. My legs shook, not from cold now but from the sudden absence of it, and I pressed my forehead to his chest and just breathed him in, rain and pine and something darker underneath, and let the shaking run itself out.

He smelled of the outside, of cold rain and crushed pine and the long dark he had walked through to reach me, and under all of it something warmer I had no name for and didn't want to look at too closely. His hand settled at the back of my head, heavy and sure, and held me there like he had every right to.

His hands came up and closed over mine, and he let me hold on.

"That bad," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Worse when you're not near." I hated admitting it. I said it anyway. "It gets worse every day."

He looked down at me, and the gold in his eyes moved. Up close, inside, out of the rain, he was even bigger than the woods had made him, and he had walked into the heart of enemy ground to stand in my room, and we both knew what that meant even if neither of us would say it.

"I told you I'd find out what you are," he said. "So tell me."

"I don't have time to make you believe it." I tightened my grip on him. "I have two days. Then they put a mark on me that takes my blood and my wolf and probably my life, and the man giving it to me is selling your packs to the Cult of the Eclipse to do it."

His whole body changed. The ease went out of it. His hands came up to my arms and held me back from him just far enough to see my face.

"The Cult of the Eclipse is a story we tell pups to make them behave," he said.

"Then the story is standing in my father's chapel wearing an iron pendant," I said. "I heard them tonight. Jax and a hooded man, working out how my blood buys your packs."

He was quiet, and I felt the growl start low in his chest, felt his hands tighten around my arms, and for a moment the wolf in him came very close to the surface and it was not looking at me.

"Why tell me," he said. "I'm the enemy. You were raised to want me dead."

"Because you're the only one in either of our worlds with no reason to want that mark on me," I said. "And because when you touch me, I can think. I can't fix any of this if I can't even breathe."

For a moment he didn't answer. His thumb moved once across the back of my hand, rough and slow, like he was weighing something heavy and coming down on one side of it.

"Then we don't let them put it on you," he said. Not a promise. A plan. "Two days is enough. I've broken harder things in less."

Something in my chest let go that had been clenched since I woke three months in the past. For the first time in a hundred lifetimes, I wasn't carrying it alone.

Then, far down the corridor, a door opened.

Footsteps. Two sets, unhurried, the heavy tread of guards on their round. Getting closer.

I felt Sebastian go still against me, felt the wolf come up behind his eyes, weighing the door, the window, the walk of the men beyond it. He could have gone. One step to the sill and he would have been rain and shadow again. He didn't move. He put himself between me and the door instead, and that small thing, that choice, undid something in me I had been holding shut for two days.

And then the fear did what two days of dread had not. It cracked the last thing holding my wolf down.

She came up out of me in a rush, the way she had in the walls, only worse. There was nothing to bite down on now. My spine wrenched. The bones in my hands broke and reformed, wrong, too fast, and the pain of it whited out my sight. This was not a shift. A shift has a rhythm, a giving-over. This was my own body turning on itself, my wolf feral with two days of terror and a hundred deaths, trying to claw free through skin that couldn't open fast enough to let her.

I heard myself make a sound no human throat should make. My nails split. The floor was cold and hard under my cheek, and then it wasn't the floor anymore, it was everywhere, spinning, and the pain came in waves that each one promised to be the wave that finished me. Two days of swallowed terror. A hundred remembered deaths. She wanted out, and she did not care that out meant through.

I was going to come apart. I could feel it, the way you feel a seam giving. She was going to shred me getting free.

"Sebastian." His name came out broken, half a howl.

He moved.

Between one breath and the next the man was gone and the wolf was there, huge, filling the room, black as the space between trees. He hit me and bore me down, not gently, all his weight pinning my half-shifted body to the floor before I could turn on myself.

Then his jaws closed on the back of my neck.

Not to wound. His fangs pressed into the scruff, deep and certain and absolute, and held. It was the oldest gesture his kind had, older than packs, older than words. A dominant wolf taking a feral one by the throat of the neck and saying, with his whole body, be still.

And my wolf, wild as she was, knew it.

The fight went out of me in stages. The tearing stopped. The bones eased back. His weight held me down and his fangs held me still and his strength poured into me through that single ancient grip, and my wolf stopped trying to kill us both and went quiet under him, submitting, drinking him in. The panic drained out through the place his teeth had claimed. I came back into my own skin slowly, shaking, human again, pressed to the floor beneath a wolf the size of a horse with his mouth still gentle on my neck.

For a long moment neither of us moved.

Then the fangs eased away. The great head lowered until his brow rested against my temple, and he breathed me in, and something passed between us that had no name and needed none. His wolf had chosen. I felt it settle, deep, in a place the curse could not reach.

I lay under him and felt my breathing slow to match the great bellows of his, and for the first time in two lifetimes nothing in me hurt. Not the cold. Not the blade. Not the old bruised thing behind my ribs with Jax's name on it. Just the weight of a wolf who had crossed a war to hold me together, and the warm press of his brow against my skin.

"I'm here," a low voice said, the man surfacing through the beast. "You're not coming apart. Not while I'm holding you."

I turned my face into his fur and shook and let myself, for one breath, be held.

He shifted, the great dark body curving around mine, a wall of warm between me and the whole cold world. His heart beat slow beneath my ear. After a while, mine steadied to meet it.

The room had gone perfectly still.

Too still.

The footsteps in the corridor had stopped.

I lifted my head.

The door to my chamber stood open. I hadn't heard it. And in the doorway, torchlight at his back, stood Jax, staring at the enemy commander crouched over his bride two nights before the mark.