The Wrong Mate(Maraivon's Secrets, Book1)

There is a world folded inside this one. You have passed it a hundred times without knowing. It lies just behind the ordinary, the way a reflection lies behind glass: the same mountains, the same rivers, the same moon. Only there, the moon hangs closer. Larger. And it never quite sets. Its people call it Varunanga (~the veiled realm). No map holds it. No road leads in. Only those born with the old magic in their blood can cross over, and only the wolves have ever been born with it. They were dying once, the stories say. Hunted, scattered, starving at the edges of human towns. Then the Moon Goddess opened Varunanga to them, and they went in, and the door closed behind them, and the humans forgot they had ever been there. The humans still forget. That is the point. Inside, the wolves built kingdoms. The greatest of them is Varenhold, carved into the mountains beneath that enormous moon, and for seven thousand years it has been ruled by a single family. House De Volfang. The crown that never bends. The blood that never fails. LUCIEN The tonic tasted like a funeral. Lucien De Volfang drank it anyway, the way he had every night since he was a boy, and let the bitterness crawl down his throat. He was a prince. Everyone bowed to him and worshipped him like a god sent down to rule over them. They sang songs about him and his family; the royal bloodline known as the Maraivōn. But what use was a Maraivōn ruled by an iron-fisted mother? A Maraivōn who drank bitter tonics by night, brewed from a flower called Nishagandha (~night fragrance). And rightly so: it bloomed only in Varunanga, and only at night. White petals that opened for the moon and folded shut before dawn, like flowers that had something to hide. His mother had taught him to grind them with salt and iron filings until the paste turned gray. His mother had taught him a great many things, most of them with a blade in her hand. The effect came fast. A cold palm pressed flat against his chest. Then, the quiet. Not silence. Nothing could make a Maraivōn silent. Not completely. His blood still moved with its own pulse and its own will—the old hum his people called the Raktanāda (~blood-song), which made lesser wolves lower their eyes and humans step aside without knowing why. But the tonic pressed it down, and down, until all that was left was a low, flat drone. Something that might pass for an Alpha's song, if nobody listened too closely. Nobody could ever be allowed to listen too closely. He had been eleven the first time she tested him. She had sat him at the long table in the Moon Hall, laid his hand flat beside a candle, and told him to keep his blood quiet while the flame did its work. Every time his hum rose, she moved his hand closer. By the end of the night he had learned to keep his song as flat as a winter lake while his skin blistered, and she had kissed the top of his head and said, "Good. Now they can never take you." He still had the scar. He still didn't know whether she had meant it as love. She was at court in Varenhold now, as she always was, waiting to hear whether he had passed this test too. "You took it dry again." Kieran's voice came from the doorway, rough with the cold he'd carried up the stairs. He smelled of woodsmoke and rain. Lucien didn't turn from the window. "Water makes it worse." "Water makes it bearable." Kieran crossed the narrow room, set a glass on the sill, and took up his place—half a step behind Lucien's left shoulder, close enough that their arms almost touched. A guard's distance, to anyone watching. To Lucien, it was the only place in any world where he could breathe. Kieran's blood-song rolled out of him like thunder. Deep. Unhurried. Beside it, the little that was left of Lucien's own song simply vanished. That was the point. That had always been the point. "Better?" Kieran asked. "I'm fine." "You're gray." "I'm always gray after." Lucien flexed his fingers. The numbness was spreading the way it always did: into his hands, his tongue, the soft places behind his ribs where feeling was supposed to live. Twenty-two years old, and he had never decided whether he hated the tonic for what it took from him or loved it for what it hid. He hated most things. It was simpler than sorting them. Below the window of the inn, Briar Falls glowed like a child's drawing of a town. Paper lanterns swung between the lampposts. A Ferris wheel turned slow and gold at the far end of Main Street. Somewhere a band was murdering a song with a fiddle in it, and hundreds of humans were laughing as if nothing in the world had ever gone wrong. Hundreds of humans. And every one of them should have been forgetting. That was what Maruvana (~the forgetting) did. The old magic wrapped Varunanga's people like a second skin, so that when human eyes passed over one of them, the memory slid right off again. A stranger with too-bright eyes at a gas station. A man on a dark road who moved like something built to run on four legs. By morning—nothing. A smudge. A dream half-remembered, and then not at all. Except here. In the last month, three humans in Briar Falls had reported wolves at the edge of the woods. Wolves too big to be wolves. Two of them had described a man stepping out of the trees where one had been standing. Tall. Dark coat. Eyes like coins in moonlight. And they had remembered him the next day. And the day after that. The Moon Council did not like it when humans remembered. "The council could have sent anyone," Lucien said. "They sent the crown prince," Kieran said, "because royal blood is supposed to be strong enough to reweave a failing Maruvana." A pause. "An Alpha prince's blood." Lucien said nothing. "They're testing you, Luce." "I know." "If you stand in that square and nothing happens—" "Then I'll make something happen." Lucien finally turned. In the lamplight, Kieran looked the way he always looked, which was like a problem Lucien had never been able to solve. Dark hair falling into dark eyes. A jaw that had been broken twice on Lucien's behalf and set slightly crooked once. A mouth always one breath away from saying something it shouldn't. Four years older. A full head taller than him. The only person in two worlds who knew what Lucien was. In Varunanga, Omega sons did not live past their naming. Everyone knew it. The midwives listened to a newborn's blood-song, and if a boy's hummed soft and high instead of low and commanding, the elders took him away, and the family was told the Moon Goddess had called him home. As far as Lucien knew, he was the only one who had ever been kept. He could feel the thread between them now. He couldn't see it—Omegas never saw the threads, only felt them—but it had been there every hour since the first full moon after his eighteenth birthday. A warm pull just under his breastbone. Steady as a pulse. Running straight to the man in front of him. Kieran could see it. He had told Lucien once, in the dark, what it looked like. "How does it look tonight?" Lucien asked. Something in Kieran's face gave way. His eyes dropped to the space between them, to something only he would ever see. "Bright," he said softly. Lucien let himself have it. One second. One. He let his forehead fall forward against Kieran's collarbone and let that thunder fill every cold, numb corner of him. Then he stepped back and picked up his coat. "Let's go fix their memories." * * * The crowd parted for him. Nobody looked at him directly; humans never did. But shoulders turned aside as he passed. Conversations faltered. A father lifted his little girl out of Lucien's path without breaking his sentence, and could not have said why if anyone had asked. Humans couldn't hear the Raktanāda. But they felt royal blood the way animals felt a storm coming. Lucien walked through the noise and the cinnamon and the frying sugar with Kieran a half-step behind, and he let his senses spread outward—past the humans, past the lanterns, out to where the Maruvana should have been lying over the town like a sheet of still water. It was there. Mostly. But it was wrong. Thin. Rippling, as though something underneath were pushing up against it. "Well?" Kieran murmured. "Something's breathing under it." "A wolf?" "No." Lucien frowned. It didn't feel like any wolf he knew. It felt like a door left open in the dark, letting the cold in. "I don't know what it is." And the weakness wasn't coming from the woods, where the sightings had been. It was coming from the center of the square. From the stage. "Ladies and gentlemen," boomed a voice through a crackling speaker, "the moment you've all been waiting for—" Lucien stopped walking.