Moonbound

Chapter Three

Axel

The paramedics worked fast, hands moving over her in that clipped, efficient rhythm that meant they'd done this a thousand times before and would do it a thousand times again. Neck brace, snapped into place with a Velcro rasp. Penlight flicked into each eye, left, right, left again. Two fingers pressed to the pulse point at her throat like they didn't trust the monitor to tell the truth.

The platform had gone strange around us. The fighters had vanished into the crowd the way cowards do, and what was left was a ragged circle of strangers with their phones raised and their mouths hanging open, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and turning every face a sickly shade of green. Somewhere behind me a child was crying. Somewhere else, a man was telling anyone who'd listen that he'd seen the whole thing, the whole thing, I swear to God.

I didn't hear any of it, not really. It all rolled past me like water around a stone. What I heard was her heartbeat.

Fast. Thready. Fluttering against the paramedic's fingers like a bird trapped in a closed hand. I'd have known the sound anywhere, now. I'd have picked it out of a stadium roaring.

I stood close enough to loom, which earned me a sharp look from the older paramedic, a woman with iron-gray hair scraped back from a face that had seen worse nights than this one, and a muttered sir, I need you to step back that I ignored completely. My boots stayed planted. My shoulders stayed squared. The wolf beneath my skin had stopped pacing and started something far more dangerous: he had gone still, every muscle coiled and ready, his attention locked onto the strangers' hands on her body like a hunter tracking the twitch of grass.

Lowen's hand landed on my shoulder. Not pulling me away. Just grounding me, heavy and warm, the way he'd done since we were pups and one of us needed reminding that snarling at authority figures rarely ended well.

Easy, he said through the link. His mental voice was low and level, the one he'd always used when I was a half-second from doing something stupid. She's breathing. She's alive. Let them work.

I know. I did know. I knew it with my head, the way I knew the sky was up. It didn't make the wolf any less ready to put every stranger in this station through a wall for standing too close to her.

Then breathe, brother. In through the nose. She needs us steady.

I breathed. It was a mistake, because the air still carried her scent, lavender and warm skin and a faint, coppery thread of blood, and the sheer force of it nearly buckled my knees all over again. I curled my hands into fists until my nails bit crescents into my palms and made myself stay upright.

"Ma'am, can you hear me?" The older paramedic tapped her collarbone lightly, firm but not unkind. "Ma'am. Open your eyes for me."

For a second, nothing. The smooth, pale oval of her face stayed slack under the harsh light, a dark smear of blood drying at her hairline, her lashes lying against her cheeks like spilled ink.

Then her eyelids fluttered.

Just barely. Just enough to send a jolt of relief through me sharp as electricity, so fierce it stole the air from my chest. A sliver of blue showed between her lashes, hazy and unfocused, the color of a lake just before dusk, and then it slid shut again.

"There you go," the paramedic murmured. "There she is. Good girl. Stay with me. Can you tell me your name?"

Her lips parted. I leaned in without meaning to, my whole body straining toward that small, cracked mouth like a plant toward sunlight. Nothing came out but a thin, pained breath, a breath that carried the faintest whisper of a sound that might have been the beginning of a word.

"That's alright, don't push it." The paramedic's voice gentled. "You took a nasty fall, sweetheart. Hit your head pretty hard. We're going to get you to the hospital and take good care of you, okay? Just rest."

The second paramedic, a lanky young man with a shaved head and tired eyes, was already unfolding the gurney, wheels rattling against the concrete. "On three. One, two—"

They lifted her together, a single practiced motion, and it was the smallest jostle, barely a bump when the wheels caught on a seam in the floor, that made my jaw clench so hard I felt a muscle jump in my cheek. She made a tiny sound, a catch of breath against the pain, and every instinct I owned went white-hot.

Careful, I snarled, and I didn't know whether I'd said it aloud.

The lanky one shot me a startled look. Lowen's grip on my shoulder tightened.

They strapped her down with quick, efficient tugs. A blanket went over her, gray and thin, the kind that smelled of disinfectant and old laundry, and it did something terrible to my chest to see how small she looked beneath it. How breakable. She had been walking through the world an hour ago with some sort of plan in her head, some place to be, someone waiting, and now she was a bundle of straps and monitors and a stranger's blood on the platform tiles.

I caught her hand before they wheeled her off.

I didn't decide to. It simply happened, the way breathing happens. Her fingers were slim and cool and utterly limp in mine, a faint tremor running through them, and the touch went through me like a current. Just for a second. Just long enough to feel that she was warm, that her pulse beat there under my fingers, steady even if it was far too fast.

And then I smelled it.

Lavender, bright and floral and achingly sweet. But beneath it, threaded so deeply that I had to close my eyes and strain for it, there was something else. Something that didn't smell entirely human. Not entirely wolf either. It was an odd, shimmering note, like cold air after a thunderstorm or the electric hush right before lightning, folded quietly under all the rest like a low bass line in a song you have to strain to hear.

I opened my eyes. Lowen was staring at me over the gurneys, his brow furrowed, and I knew he'd caught it too.

You feel that? I asked him.

Yeah. His expression had gone confused and wary, the same questioning sharpness behind his eyes that I felt behind mine. She's not just human.

But she's not one of us either.

What is she, then?

Neither of us had an answer. Neither of us cared enough about the answer to let it slow us down.

"Family?" The older paramedic was looking between the two of us now, one hand on the gurneys rail, her voice cutting across the din. "Anyone we should call? Husband, boyfriend, sibling?"

"We're not family," I said, before Lowen could decide how to phrase it more delicately. My voice came out rougher than I intended, scraped raw somewhere beneath the ribs. "We pulled her off the tracks. We don't actually know her."

The paramedic's expression did a complicated thing: surprise first, then something close to respect, a softening around the eyes that the long night hadn't yet managed to burn out of her. "Well," she said slowly. "Good thing you two were there. You boys have any idea how many people would've stood on that platform and filmed it?" She shook her head. "We've got her wallet?"

I'd almost forgotten. It was still in my hand, a slim thing of dark leather, warm from my grip, and I held it out along with the rest of what I'd managed to snatch from the track bed before the train came through. A lipstick in a dull rose shade. A phone, the screen spiderwebbed in one corner. A folded receipt, soft with handling.

The paramedic flipped the wallet open long enough to read the license under the platform's glaring light.

"Celeste," she said. "Celeste Marchetti."

Celeste.

I turned the name over in my mind like something I intended to keep. It sounded like starlight. It sounded like something spoken in a language I'd once known and forgotten. My wolf, so silent, so watchful, lifted his head and seemed to taste it.

"Thank you," the paramedic added, softer, tucking the wallet into a pocket of the gurney's blanket. "We'll take it from here. Hospital's Mercy General, if you want to follow."

They wheeled her up the long ramp toward the street, the gurney's wheels rattling, the crowd parting around them like a tide. I watched until the pale shape of her was swallowed by the glare of the exit, and something inside me went with it, a thread pulled taut that I could feel straining the farther she went.

"Come on," Lowen said quietly. "Before you walk through a wall."

We followed. We caught a cab at the curb, a battered yellow thing with a cracked vinyl seat, a pine air freshener swinging from the mirror, and the stale smell of fried food and someone else's cologne. The driver had a radio turned low to some talk show, a man's voice droning about the weather. I gave the name of the hospital without discussing it, because there had never been a version of tonight where either of us did anything else.

The city slid past the window in streaks of neon and wet black asphalt. A neon sign flickered pink over a pizza place. A woman in a red coat laughed under an umbrella. None of it touched me. My wolf had gone quiet in that particular way he did when something mattered too much for noise, just watching, just waiting, patient in a way I'd never been built for. I could feel him in my chest like a held breath.

I stared at the ambulance's red lights ahead of us, blinking through the dark, and thought about a hand slim and cool in mine.

"She's ours," I said finally, low enough that the cab driver wouldn't catch it over the radio. The words came out of me like a confession. "Both of us. You felt it too."

Lowen didn't answer right away. He sat very straight beside me, his jaw tight, one hand gripping his knee hard enough to whiten the knuckles. He was staring out the window at the passing city, at the glow of a thousand lit windows that held a thousand lives, and I knew exactly what was sitting behind his silence.

"Vivyan," he said eventually.

His voice cracked on the name, just a little. It almost undid me.

"Vivyan isn't your mate, Lowen. She never was." I said it as gently as I knew how, which admittedly wasn't very. "You know that better than anyone. You've known it for a while, I think. You just didn't have a name for what was missing." I turned to look at him. "This is different. This is the moon goddess handing you something you don't get to argue with."

"I know how it works," he snapped, and then dragged a hand down his face, and when he spoke again it was softer, ragged at the edges. "I grew up with the same stories you did. I know what a mate is. I just—" He broke off, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. "I don't know how to end three years with a girl who did nothing wrong. Nothing, Axel. Except not be the one thing I needed her to be."

He sounded so tired. So lost. In all our years, through every fight and scrape and bad decision, I'd rarely heard my steady, careful brother sound lost.

I didn't have anything good to say about that, so I didn't say anything at all. I just reached over and set a hand on the back of his neck, the way our father used to when we were boys, and held it there. Some problems didn't have Wingman solutions. Some nights couldn't be fixed with a laugh and a drink and a bad idea.

This was going to be the first thing in either of our lives that didn't come with an easy fix. We both knew it.

Up ahead, the ambulance turned into the hospital's bright, humming drive, its lights washing red across the wet pavement. The cab slowed. And somewhere behind that bank of sliding glass doors, a woman who smelled like lavender and starlight and something neither of us had a name for was lying very still, waiting to wake up.

Neither of us said another word until the cab stopped.