The Alpha who was Meant to Kill Me

Chapter 3.2

My chest caved around the word. I could not breathe. I could not weep. The Shadow Gladius in my hand hummed, low and deep like a living thing turning over in its sleep, and the smoke curling off its edges lifted up around me, wrapped around my shoulders, my ribs, my throat. It did not burn. It did not choke. It was the dark equivalent of warmth. It pulsed against me with a beat that matched my own heart, beat for beat, and it whispered something I felt more than heard.

Hush. Sleep. I have you. I am always yours.

The shadow in the blade knew me.

And in the smallest, stillest corner of me, a corner I had never looked into by daylight, I knew the shadow back.

I sat up with a cry that I clapped both hands over before it reached the camp.

The fire had burned down to coals. Alec slept like a man dropped from a cliff, mouth open, one arm over his face. The soldiers snored and shifted in their blankets. No field. No bodies. A deer somewhere off through the trees stepped on a twig and I flinched so hard my teeth clicked.

My palm was slick. I looked down.

The black sheath was in my hand.

How?

I had left it buckled beside my pack, ten feet away. I had not reached for it. I had not opened my eyes. It was in my hand, and the leather was warm where my fingers gripped it, warm the way it had been when Leo said Dothia, warm the way something is warm when something else is alive inside it. A thread of shadow curled out of the mouth of the sheath, thin as a breath of smoke, and wound once around my wrist before dissolving back into the dark.

I stopped breathing.

Did I do that?

Did it do that?

My sealed wolf was on her feet inside me. Not pacing now. Standing, alert, hackles up, and looking in the direction of the sheath like the sheath was another wolf.

I was on my feet before I decided to stand, moving soft and fast past the sleeping soldiers. I did not stop until the trees swallowed me and the camp was only a glow behind my shoulder.

My knees gave out.

I pressed my forehead to the bark of a tree and tried to remember how to breathe. The dream. The dream. The dream was a warning. I dug my fingers into the dirt. Tears traced down my face and I did not notice when they started.

What if the stories were true? What if the blade was a mouth waiting for me to open it? What if the shadow inside it was not a gift but a hunger? What if Alec had always been the price?

"Little bird?"

His voice, low and scared, cut through the dark.

"Little bird."

He was on his knees beside me before I could answer. His arms came around me and pulled me into his chest, and his hand moved in long slow circles between my shoulder blades the way he used to when I was small and afraid of thunder.

"I've got you. Breathe. Deep breaths. I'm here. I'm always here."

"I had a dream. I think." I pressed my wet face to his shoulder. "Alec. What if I'm what they said? What if I'm the one who brings the fire?"

"That could never happen." He rested his chin on the crown of my head. "I know it."

"When I woke up the sheath was in my hand. I didn't pick it up. It was in my hand, and there was shadow, Alec, there was shadow moving on it like it was breathing. What if something is calling for me to draw it?"

"Then you'll finally know what your father and I have known your whole life. That you were born to wield a shadow, not be eaten by one."

I pressed my cheek harder against him. "In my dream I killed so many. So many, Alec." My voice cracked. "And you were one of them."

He went very still.

Then he tightened his arms around me. "It was a dream."

"Alec."

"You're you. Sheath or no sheath. Drawn or no. You could hold that blade for a thousand years and every shadow it ever cast would still belong to you, not the other way around. Have some faith in the girl I raised half of."

I squeezed my eyes shut. "I don't want the sword. I don't want to change anything. Can't I just keep being me?"

"You're always going to be you, little bird. And I'm always going to be here."

"Promise?"

"It's a rough job. Somebody has to do it."

I laughed against his shirt, wet and ragged. He kissed the top of my head, ruffled my hair with rough affection, and hauled me up to my feet.

"Come on. If we don't sleep we'll fall off our horses tomorrow."

He walked me back to camp with his arm tight around my shoulders. I knelt and slid the black sheath back into its place on my pack, slow and deliberate, the way you would return a sleeping animal to its den. The shadow was still. The leather was cool again. Whatever had reached for me in the dark had gone back to wherever it lived when no one was looking.

When I turned, Alec had already rearranged our blankets so they overlapped at the edges.

"What are you—"

He dropped down and pulled me with him, tucking me against his chest.

"This time you're not sneaking away."

"Don't you think this is a little inappropriate?"

"Luckily for us, you think of me as a brother, and I find you the most annoying kind of sister. Also luckily we aren't actually siblings, so no." He closed his eyes, and his voice dropped to something softer than the words. "Get some sleep, little bird."

I let my head settle under his chin. My wolf curled up small behind my ribs, still watchful, still pointed toward the place I had laid the sheath, but calmer now with Alec's heartbeat steady against my ear.

If the Shadow Gladius dreamed, tonight it dreamed alongside me.

And somewhere under the reach of my thinking, a part of me that did not have words wondered why the blade had felt, in the dream, like something I was holding for the second time.