The Luna's Time Loop

The Scent Of Another

The horn sounded again, closer, and the scout swore under his breath.

"Commander, we have to move. That's a full hunting party, not a patrol."

Through the trees the torches had multiplied. I could see them now, a line of fire moving through the black, and under the rain I could hear it, the crash of bodies through wet undergrowth, dogs somewhere ahead of them, a lot of dogs.

Sebastian didn't answer him. His head had turned toward the sound of Jax's voice, and something low and ugly was building in his throat, a growl that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the man calling my name.

"That one," he said. "The voice. Who is he to you."

I felt the question land somewhere it had no right to reach.

"He's nothing," I said.

"He's hunting these woods screaming your name."

"He's my betrothed." The word came out like a stone. "And if he finds me here, in your arms, it starts a war tonight instead of the one you're planning."

His arm went rigid around me. When he spoke again his voice had dropped somewhere cold and quiet.

"He calls a hunt to find his own bride," he said. "And you flinch at his name like it's a hand you've learned to duck."

I didn't answer. He heard that too.

The commander in him won out over the wolf, at least for a breath. He looked down the dark line of the trees toward the torches flickering closer, then back at me.

"You can't stand on your own," he said. "You'll be on the ground before you reach the tree line."

"Then I'll crawl."

He made a sound that might have been a laugh in another man. Then, before I understood what he meant to do, he shifted his hold and walked me toward the border himself, his arm locked around my waist, my side pressed the whole length of his. Every step his skin kept the cold off me. Every step carried me closer to the man who wanted me and further from the only thing that made the wanting bearable.

The ground fell away beneath us in the dark, roots and mud and slick stone, and he moved through it like he had been born in it, never once letting me slip, never once loosening the arm that held the frost at bay. I hated how easy it was to lean on him. I hated more how fast my body had learned to.

He didn't speak again until we were nearly through, and when he did it was almost quiet enough to lose in the rain.

"Whoever taught you to make yourself small," he said, "taught you wrong."

I couldn't answer that. No one had ever said such a thing to me, and I had nowhere to put it.

At the last row of trees, where the Silverwood wards began to hum against my teeth, he stopped.

"This is as far as I go," he said. "Past this line, your people can smell mine."

"Then let go."

He didn't, not right away. He turned me to face him, and for a moment the rain fell between us and neither of us moved. Up close the gold in his eyes had gone quiet, banked, watching me like I was a puzzle he had already decided to solve.

"I'll find you, little ghost," he said. "Whatever you are, whatever put that scent on you, I'm going to find out."

"Don't," I said. "You'll get yourself killed."

"There won't be a chance," I added, because I needed it to be true. "I'm to be bound at the solstice. After that I belong to him and the wards and none of this happens again."

Something moved behind his eyes. He filed it away. I saw him do it.

"We'll see," he said.

Then he took his hands off me and stepped back into the dark, and he was gone before the cold even finished swallowing me.

It hit like falling through ice. The static screamed up my spine. My legs buckled, and I caught myself on a wet trunk and forced one foot in front of the other, dragging my body toward the torchlight on nothing but spite. Every step was a bargain. Lift the foot. Set it down. Don't look at how far the torches still are. The cold had my jaw locked and my hands useless, and somewhere in the trees behind me an enemy was watching me crawl toward the man who wanted to own me, and letting me go.

The wardline took me like a slap, cold iron humming through my teeth, and for one breath the whole world tilted white. I found the last tree with both hands and hung there until the ground stopped moving. Behind me the woods had gone quiet again. He was still out there. I could feel it, the way you feel a fire at your back. Then even that was gone, and there was only the cold and the long walk in.

I broke out of the tree line into the wardlight, and a torch swung toward my face.

"Izebel."

Jax caught me by both arms. The silver flared through me at once, his touch burning down to the bone, and I flinched so hard he nearly lost his grip.

"You're freezing." His hands moved over my arms, my shoulders, checking me the way you check a thing you own. "You crossed the wards. Do you have any idea what's out there tonight? I had the whole guard in those woods."

"I got lost," I said. "I couldn't breathe in the house. I just walked, and I got turned around."

He went very still.

His head lowered toward my shoulder, my hair, my neck, and I understood a half second too late what he was doing. He was scenting me.

When he lifted his head, the worry was gone from his face, and what replaced it was worse. Cold. Flat. The look he wore right before he decided he had been wronged.

"There's a wolf on you," he said quietly. "A male. All over you."

"There's no one, Jax."

"I can smell him, Izebel." His fingers tightened until it hurt. "His scent is in your hair. On your throat. You've been pressed against someone out there."

"I fell," I said. "There was mud, a slope. I don't know what I rolled through."

"Mud doesn't have a heartbeat." He caught my chin and turned my face up to the torchlight, studying me the way a man studies a coin he suspects is false. "Mud doesn't leave a male's scent worked into your skin like he had his arms wrapped around you."

For a long moment he just stared at me, and I watched him weigh the truth he could smell against the woman he thought he owned. I made myself hold his gaze. I had learned, in more lifetimes than one, that the lie only holds if you don't look away from it.

"You want to know what's out there," I said, and I made my voice small, the way he liked it. "So did I. I couldn't sleep. I'm frightened, Jax. There's a war coming and everyone keeps telling me to smile through it."

It was the right shape of a lie. It gave him something to fix. His grip gentled by a degree, and he pulled me in against his chest, and I let him, because pulling back would have told him everything.

"This is why," he murmured into my hair. "This is exactly why I couldn't wait any longer."

Something cold that had nothing to do with the curse moved through me.

"Wait for what," I said.

He drew back just enough to look at me, and for the first time that night he almost smiled.

"I spoke to the Elders," he said. "The binding is moved up. We don't wait for the solstice. Three days, Izebel. In three days you take my mark, and after that no wolf in these woods will ever put his hands on you again."

Three days.

I stood in the arms of the man who was going to kill me, and I finally understood that the clock I woke up to had just started running.