The Luna's Time Loop

The Second Waking

The blade came first.

I felt it before my eyes even opened, cold and buried under my ribs, right where it had gone in the last time. My whole body locked around the memory of it, and my hands flew to my chest before I was fully awake.

My nails caught cotton, then skin. No blade. No blood. Just my heart slamming under my palm, too fast, like it was trying to get out.

I opened my mouth to scream, and nothing came. Something thick sat in my throat and curled tight around it, and the harder I pushed for sound, the more it squeezed. My eyes stung. My chest jerked against the pressure.

I knew this feeling. The curse had come back with me, wherever back was.

When I finally forced my eyes open, pale morning light filled the room. There was a canopy of silver silk above the bed, stitched through with the crescent of my house. My mother's needlework lay on the pillow under my cheek, and across the room stood the wardrobe with the split left door I had never let anyone mend.

My old room. The one from before.

Three months before the silver went in. Before the war took the valley. Before I learned how many ways a person could die and still wake up gasping in the same bed.

Loop two. I said the words in my head and hated how ordinary they sounded now.

I sat up slowly, and the room swung around me. My arms shook as they took my weight, like they belonged to someone weaker. The cold sat deep in my bones the way it always did after I died, a frost in the marrow with silver static crawling under the skin, looking for somewhere to ground itself. My fingers were half numb. I flexed them and felt nothing but the buzz.

Three months. I had three months this time, which meant I could change it. I could stop it, if I lived long enough to try.

Then I heard footsteps in the corridor, fast and certain, and I knew that stride before the door even moved. Long steps. The walk of a man who had never once been told no.

Jax.

The door swung open without a knock.

"Izebel."

He crossed the room in three steps, all shoulders and worry, dark hair loose around his face. Two hours ago, in a life he didn't remember, he had watched me bleed out and called it mercy. He didn't know that. Only I carried it.

"You screamed," he said. "The whole east wing heard you."

I hadn't made a sound. The curse had eaten every one of them.

"Bad dream," I rasped, and my voice scraped out wrong. He heard it, and his face pulled tight with that soft, smothering concern I used to mistake for love.

"Come here," he said, and reached for me.

I saw his hand coming, and I couldn't move fast enough. His palm closed over my bare shoulder, and it burned.

Not warmth. Not the weight of a hand. Silver. White heat sank straight through my skin and into the muscle, the way a brand does, the way his touch had turned ever since the loops began. It felt like he was pouring molten metal down my arm, and I ripped back so hard my spine hit the headboard.

"Don't," I hissed.

The word came out cracked and furious. His hand hung in the air where my shoulder had been.

"Izebel." He blinked at me, hurt and confused, with something underneath the hurt that I liked even less. "I only touched you."

"I know." I dragged the blanket up between us like it would help. "I know. I'm sorry. I can't. Not right now."

He stayed crouched beside the bed, too close, and his scent filled the space around me. Cedar and warm skin. A scent I had loved since we were children in the training yard. Now it made my teeth ache.

"You flinch every time lately," he said quietly. "From me. Only me."

There it was, the suspicion sliding out from under the worry.

"I'm tired, Jax."

"You look at me like a stranger."

I made myself meet his eyes. The boy I grew up beside. The man who was, right now, three weeks into a plan with the Cult of the Eclipse that would one day put a silver blade in my chest to save me from a war I had never asked him to fight. He didn't know that I knew, and I couldn't let him see it.

"I just need air," I said, and swung my legs off the bed before he could answer.

The floor was ice under my feet. Good. Cold was something I could use.

"It's barely dawn." He rose with me, his hand lifting again on instinct.

"Don't."

He froze. For one long breath we stood there, a heartbeat of space between us, and I watched him decide whether to press. The old Jax would have pulled me in anyway, told me I was being difficult, made it sound like a gift.

"Fine," he said instead, careful now. "Walk. But stay inside the wards."

I was already moving. I grabbed a cloak off the chair and didn't look back at him, because if I looked at his face one more second, the silver crawling under my skin was going to claw its way up my throat and I would say something I could never take back.

I went down the servants' stair, out the low door, into the grey.

It was raining, fine and cold and steady, the kind that soaked you slow. It hit my face and I gulped it down like the first water in days. Away from him the burn faded, and the static in my arms dropped from a scream to a hum. But it didn't leave. It never left when I was alone.

My feet knew where they were going before I did. Past the kennels, past the last torch, toward the tree line where the wards thinned and the boundary woods began, black and dripping.

I shouldn't cross. The other side was disputed ground, crawling with enemy scouts, and everyone knew it. I crossed anyway. Inside those walls Jax was awake and thinking, and every stone held his scent, and I would rather freeze in enemy woods than let him put his hands on me again.

The trees closed over my head, and the rain drummed against the leaves. My breath came out in white clouds that the cold ate at once. I got maybe two hundred steps in before the woods went wrong.

The rain sounded the same, and the dark looked the same, but the quiet changed. Every animal noise stopped at once, no drip of movement, no wing. There was only my own pulse, loud in my ears, and the crawling certainty down the back of my neck that told me I was not alone anymore.

I stopped walking.

"I know you're there," I said. Stupid. Brave and stupid, the way the loops had made me.

A shape peeled out of the black between two trunks. Big, bigger than any man had a right to be, his shoulders blotting out the little grey light that came through. Rain ran off him like he didn't feel it. He moved without a sound, slow and unhurried, the way a thing moves when it has already decided you can't run.

I ran anyway. Three steps, maybe four, and he caught me between one heartbeat and the next.

One arm hooked my waist and hauled me back against a wall of chest, and his other hand clamped over my mouth, wide and rough and warm.

And the world went silent.

Not quiet.

Silent.

The static died, all of it at once. The silver frost that had gnawed my bones since I woke, the buzz in my numb fingers, the phantom cold sitting behind my sternum where the blade had gone in. Gone. His skin met mine, and every screaming nerve in my body simply stopped. For the first time since I woke, the thing in my throat let go and I could breathe.

I gasped against his palm. Air rushed in, whole and easy and mine, and my knees buckled with the shock of it. His arm took my weight like I weighed nothing.

I didn't fight him. God help me, I clung. My fingers found his forearm and dug in and held, the way you hold anything that keeps you from going under, and I pressed back into the heat of him without deciding to. My whole starving body pulled toward the one place the pain wasn't.

Above me, he went very still. I felt the breath leave him in a low, rough drag against the top of my head, felt his chest expand slowly behind my spine as he pulled the rain-soaked scent of me in deep.

A sound rolled up out of him. Not a word. Lower than that, a growl that started in the chest at my back and climbed, rough and wanting, until I felt it more than heard it. The hand over my mouth flexed, and his arm tightened around my waist, dragging me closer until there was no rain left between us at all.

He put his mouth close to my ear.

"Little ghost," he said, his voice all gravel and heat. "What are you."

It wasn't a question. It was a claim. And his wolf, I could feel it, was already answering for him.