Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Ten — Dreaming in His Dark

Kendra POV

The ground was wet.

That was the first thing — not the sound of it, not the sight of it, but the physical reality of cold mud under my palms before my eyes had even processed where I was. I pushed myself upright and the world assembled itself around me in pieces: grey sky, low and heavy, no sun anywhere, no horizon line distinguishable from the color of the air. Fog sitting in a way that wasn't weather but something older, something that belonged to the ground rather than falling from above.

And the fighting.

It hit me in waves — the sound first, which was nothing like I would have expected, no metal clanging, no human shouting, but something more animal and more wrong, a collision of enormous bodies and the specific violence of things that were not fighting the way people fought. They were fighting the way creatures fought. The way things fought when the objective wasn't territory or honor but survival at its most fundamental, the oldest calculation there was.

The wolves were massive.

I need to be clear about that because the word wolf doesn't cover it. These were not wolves the way I understood wolves — not the animals I'd seen in documentaries or the distant shapes in national park footage. These were enormous, the size of something that had no business existing, the size of something from a different world entirely. Moving through the fog with a speed that was disorienting, bodies like shadows that had learned to have weight. Dark fur, pale fur, grey, every color of something that hunted at night.

And the other things.

The pale ones.

They moved differently — too fast, too precise, something wrong in the mechanics of how they covered distance, like they were cheating physics in a way that only registered after the fact, like your eye caught the destination and had to guess at the path. They were white in the way that nothing alive was white — drained of something, evacuated of warmth, skin that looked like it had been made for a different light source than this grey sky or any sky. They fought with their hands and they were strong, genuinely strong, not human strong.

I was not in this fight. I had been dropped into the middle of it the way dreams did things — no preamble, no explanation, just suddenly here and everything already in motion.

I moved. There was nothing else to do. I ducked under the arc of something enormous passing overhead, felt the displaced air of it move my hair, hit the ground on my forearms and knees and scrambled sideways and came up behind what I thought was a boulder but was actually a broken section of something larger, stone, old stone, like a wall that had been here longer than the people who remembered building it.

My palms hit mud. The cold of it went through to the bone.

I looked up.

One of the pale ones was looking at me.

It had noticed me the way predators notice things that are separate from the fight — not as a threat, not as an obstacle, but as a different category of problem entirely. It was still and it was looking at me, and its eyes were red in a way that wasn't anger, wasn't anything human, just the color of something that fed on color rather than reflected it. Its mouth was open. The fangs were real and they were long and the blood on them was fresh and dark and it was not being self-conscious about any of this.

It was not afraid of me.

It was interested in me.

The calculation happened behind those red eyes — I could see it, couldn't explain how I could see it but I could, the way you know sometimes in dreams that you know things without cause. It was deciding. It was deciding about me specifically, about whether I was worth the interruption, about something particular that I was apparently worth, and the answer it arrived at was yes.

It moved toward me.

I scrambled backward. The mud was everywhere now, cold and slick, my hands finding no purchase. The pale thing moved through the chaos of the battlefield like it was walking through a room — not rushed, not desperate, simply coming, with the absolute assurance of something that has never had a reason to hurry because nothing had ever required it.

I closed my eyes.

I opened them.

The quiet was the first thing. The complete, total, specific quiet of a room with no outside noise reaching it, insulated in the way that only a very particular kind of room was insulated — not empty quiet but full quiet, the quiet of a space that had been inhabited long enough to absorb the outside world and hold it at a distance.

Dim. The kind of dimness that wasn't darkness but light at its most intentional — low and warm, coming from the two globe lamps on either side of the bed, round and soft, throwing circles of amber onto surfaces that deserved them. A thin strip of light ran along the perimeter of the ceiling, recessed, barely more than a glow, and the room existed in the space between those two light sources.

The accent wall opposite me was extraordinary — black, a deep matte black, covered in geometric panels that fractured across the surface like something between lightning and broken glass, all angles and planes, and running through every seam of it were fine lines of rose gold that caught the lamp light and held it, turned it warm. The kind of wall that had been designed to mean something, to make the room feel like the inside of something particular. Masculine. Deliberate.

The floor was dark hardwood under a rug so deep it looked like it absorbed the space above it. Floor-to-ceiling glass along one entire side of the room, and beyond it: night, Washington night, the kind of dark that had trees in it rather than city lights, the forest pressing close against the glass with that particular Pacific Northwest intimacy.

The bed was enormous.

California king. Platform height, sitting low to the ground the way furniture sat when it was secure enough not to need elevation. The headboard was tall and tufted, dark grey velvet, and the sheets were silk — dark grey, deep charcoal, rumpled the way sheets got when a large body spent time in them and made them its own. I was in the middle of them. I was wearing only my bra and underwear and the sheets were against my bare skin and they were very, very good sheets.

The room smelled like the forest.

Not like the woods you walked through, not like the outdoor smell of wind and generic trees — like a specific forest, a specific quality of earth and pine and something darker and deeper underneath, something that was warm despite the cold associations of the outdoors, something that was familiar in the way only things you've known for a long time without naming could be familiar.

I had smelled this before.

I had been smelling this for twenty-three hours in the cab of a truck and telling myself not to enjoy it.

I was in Bryan's room.

The understanding arrived calmly, without panic, the way dream-logic delivered facts — complete and unremarkable and accepted. This was his space. This was where he had slept, where the sheets had taken on his warmth and his scent and the particular impression of him. And I was in his bed in my underwear with his sheets against my skin and the room smelled exactly like him and I felt —

Safe.

That was the word that arrived before I could choose it. Calm. The specific soothing quality of something that had always operated below my ability to control it — the smell of him doing the thing it had always done to my nervous system regardless of what my brain had to say about it.

Then the sound.

Low. A rumble. Something that lived in the chest rather than the throat, deep and resonant, not exactly a sound you heard so much as something you felt against your sternum from across the room.

I looked up.

Bryan was standing at the far end of the room.

Shirtless.

I want to be accurate about what shirtless meant in this specific context, because it wasn't a neutral descriptor. He was built the way I had been studiously not examining for the last several years, and in the full, unmediated context of a room without the benefit of shirts or truck cabs between us, it was — a lot. The chest I'd been peripherally tracking in various states of coverage was all here, all of it, the breadth of his shoulders and the definition of his chest and the taper of everything down toward —

Black sweatpants.

Hanging dangerously low. Criminally low, the kind of low that served no functional purpose and was doing something very deliberate. The V of him — the cut muscle at his hips, the lines of him that converged downward at the kind of angle that made it impossible for a person with eyes to look at and feel nothing — was right there. And below the waistband, the faint dark trail that started just below his navel and disappeared south, which was a visual detail I had no business registering with the specificity I was registering it.

He was unbelievably, unfairly, profoundly sexy in a way that my body processed several seconds before my brain had anything coherent to say about it.

The heat went through me instantly. The warmth of the room and the warmth of the sheets and the warmth of his scent all became one thing and my body responded to all of it at once — pooling low and urgent and insistent, the throbbing between my legs going from ambient to impossible, my mouth actually watering, my heart picking up the way it did when something was very much happening and was not going to stop.

I bit my lip.

His nostrils flared.

That was all — just that small motion, just the slight expansion of his nose in the warm light, and then his mouth moved in a way that was barely a smirk but was absolutely one. Like he knew. Like whatever had just happened in my body was information he had received and filed and was not neutral about.

He moved toward me.

Not fast. That was the thing about it — if he'd moved fast it would have been something I could respond to, something I could put a reaction to. He moved slowly, deliberately, the way something moved when it had no urgency because the outcome was not in question. Each step across the dark hardwood placed with purpose, the low lamp light following the planes of his body as he came, and he watched me the entire time with those hazel eyes gone dark and deep, and my chest rose and fell in a way I couldn't control.

He reached the bed.

He placed one knee on the edge of it. Then his hands — both of them, large and warm, braced on either side of me, and then he was hovering above me, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his skin, close enough that his scent was no longer something in the room but something surrounding me entirely.

"Been a while," he said, low and unhurried. His voice was different — the controlled, clipped quality I'd been managing for the last several days was gone, replaced by something that lived deeper in his chest, something rougher and more honest. "Been a long time since I didn't have to pretend I wasn't watching you."

My heart rate was doing something significant. "Bryan—"

"Been a long time," he continued, like I hadn't spoken, like the conversation was happening on his schedule, which based on the available evidence it was, "since I didn't have to lock every part of this down before it got anywhere."

His hand moved. Just one, just the slide of his palm from where it was braced beside me to the curve of my waist, and the contact of his skin against mine went through me like a current — warm and deliberate and unhurried, his palm spanning the side of me with the easy authority of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

"You have no idea," he murmured. He dipped his head, and I felt — felt, not heard — the slow drag of his nose along the line of my neck, from below my ear to my collarbone. His breath was warm and the contact was barely anything, barely the lightest touch, and my whole body arched toward it against my own instruction. "How long I've been waiting for this."

His voice in that register was its own entity. Low and dark and deliberate, shaped by the specific patience of someone who had been holding something a very long time and was in no hurry now that they didn't have to.

His hand moved along my ribs.

This is a dream, some portion of my brain announced with significant urgency. This is a dream, this is an incredibly realistic dream, this is NOT—

Bryan chuckled. Against my neck, the sound went straight through me. Low and warm and private, like he'd heard the announcement and found it mildly amusing.

"Kendra."

This is a DREAM—

"Kendra."

The voice was different.

I came up out of sleep like breaking the surface of water — sudden and disoriented, breathing too fast, blinking at a darkness that was the wrong darkness, at a ceiling that was the wrong ceiling, at windows showing highway lights going by at seventy miles an hour instead of Washington forest.

The truck.

I'm in the truck.

I blinked. Pressed both hands flat on my thighs. Took one breath, then another. The cab was flooded with night air from all four open windows, cold and immediate, and my heart was going at a rate that had no polite explanation.

I looked over.

Bryan's hands were on the wheel at ten and two with the tight grip of someone exercising a significant amount of deliberate control. His jaw was set. His eyes were forward. He had every single window down — the wind in the cab was a sustained roar — and his knuckles were white.

He glanced over at me with an expression that was specifically pained and specifically frustrated in a way that had clearly been sitting there for a while, and the combination of those two things on his face while I was sitting with the very fresh sensory memory of the last several minutes of my dream was an experience I had no words for.

"You talk in your sleep," he said.

The bottom fell out of my stomach.

Oh God.

Oh God oh God oh God oh God—

"What—" My voice came out wrong. I cleared my throat. Tried for casual, landed somewhere south of it. "What did I say?"

His jaw tightened. He looked back at the road.

"Mostly mumbles," he said. A pause. "Random stuff."

I stared at the side of his face.

He stared at the road.

The windows were all the way down. The cold air was doing exactly nothing for my face, which was a temperature it had no reason to be if the content of that dream was classified. All four windows open at full highway speed, his knuckles white on the wheel, the specific look on his face of a man managing a situation.

Mostly mumbles.

Random stuff.

I pulled my blanket up to my chin, turned very deliberately toward my window, and stared at the dark highway going by.

It was a dream, I told myself.

It was just a dream.

I told myself that several more times.

None of the repetitions did what I needed them to do.