Moonbound

Chapter two

Axel

"Come on, man, your girlfriend can survive without you for five minutes." I clapped Lowen on the back hard enough to make a point. "A sports bar just opened downtown. Old times. You can be my wingman, help me pick up some chicks. You remember how to do that, right, or has Vivyan surgically removed that part of your brain?"

He gave me a look that was equal parts guilt and exhaustion, the exact expression of a man trying to do math he already knew the answer to. I decided to do it for him.

"Vivyan," I called down the hall, letting a thread of alpha authority creep into my voice just to speed things along, "I'm taking your boyfriend out. Pack business. We'll be back later."

"Seriously, Axel, pulling alpha orders so you can go party?" Her voice came back sharp with disappointment, and not entirely wrong.

"You're leaving me no choice, considering he's been dodging my calls and acting whipped for a month straight. Why can't he go out for one night?"

Lowen sighed the sigh of a man who'd lost this argument before it started. "I told her I'd take it easy on the going-out-and-drinking front. She thinks it looks bad, us being in a relationship and all."

"Well, you're going out with me, which is a completely different category of thing. Now grab your jacket before I drag you out by it."

He threw up his hands, grabbed his jacket off the hook by the door, and followed me out into the hall like a man walking to his own sentencing.

"If we're getting properly intoxicated," he said as we hit the street, "we're taking the subway. I'm not wrecking the Jaguar's suspension parallel parking drunk again."

"Always the responsible one, Lowen." I grinned. "Fine by me, more chances to work the crowd."

He rolled his eyes, and we fell into step, the city rising up around us in its usual assault of smells and noise, hot garbage and street-cart grease, exhaust and perfume and somebody's cigarette, horns leaning on each other in that particular key of city-traffic fury. It had taken our wolves a long time to adjust when we first moved here. The first few months, the overload had been almost unbearable too many smells stacked on top of each other, too much noise with nowhere to let it out. You learned to compartmentalize eventually, to file most of it under background and only flag what actually mattered.

It also helped that being one of exactly two Alpha wolves in the city meant almost nobody wanted to test us. Lowen and I had both put in the hours training, conditioning, keeping our bodies sharp enough that we were never caught off guard and word travels fast in wolf circles. The packs who'd crossed our territory had mostly either fallen in line or quietly rerouted around us. It didn't hurt, either, that staying in that kind of shape tended to draw a certain amount of female attention we were both happy to accept.

We took the stairs down into the subway, and my nose immediately regretted the decision, old urine baked into concrete, the ghost of a hundred years of rats, a smell that made my face scrunch up on reflex every single time. Still the fastest way anywhere, especially with a night of drinking ahead of us. The platform was jammed, Friday night, everybody funneling somewhere better and my wolf went instantly, uncomfortably alert at the density of bodies packed in around us.

We hadn't been standing there thirty seconds before a scuffle broke out a few feet ahead two guys squaring up, voices raised. Lowen and I exchanged a look and drifted closer, close enough to intervene if it turned serious, careful to stay out of a human fight that wasn't ours to referee.

That's when I caught it.

A thread of lavender, faint and floral, cutting clean through the subway stink like a single ray of light through fog. Gone again almost as fast as it arrived. I turned my head, trying to place it, but the crowd shifted and the scent scattered with it.

The fight escalated fast, a shove that turned into a real swing, one man's momentum carrying his fist's target backward into the crowd. And directly in that path, oblivious, stood a woman who never saw it coming. She went over the edge of the platform in a single ugly motion, arms pinwheeling, and dropped straight down onto the tracks below.

Something in my chest lurched before my brain had even finished processing what I'd seen. I mind-linked Lowen — now — and neither of us hesitated for even half a second.

I hit the track bed hard, boots slamming concrete, and the lavender scent hit me full force this time, warm and close and unmistakably hers. My wolf went absolutely still inside me, and then, in the next breath, feral.

Mine.

She's mine, he snarled, low and certain, some ancient recognition clicking into place so hard it nearly buckled my knees.

She was unconscious. Blood at her hairline, one ankle bent at an angle that made my stomach twist violently. Every base instinct I had screamed to find whoever had done this and tear them apart with my bare hands, and it took real, physical effort to leash that and focus on her instead.. my mate, hurt, needing me now, rage later.

Somewhere above, people were already shouting for an ambulance. And underneath all of it, I felt the air shift, that specific pressure change that meant a train was coming, close, fast, the tunnel already humming with it.

"Lowen now, we need her up on the platform." He didn't waste a second, vaulting up and leaning his whole body back down over the edge. "Pass her up, careful."

I lifted her as gently as panic would allow, she weighed nothing, folded against my chest like something breakable and handed her up into Lowen's arms. Her bag had burst open in the fall, its contents scattered across the tracks, and in the half-second before the train's headlights swallowed my vision whole, I spotted a small wallet lying a few feet off.

I don't remember deciding to grab it. Wolf's reflexes took over, and I was up and over the platform edge with the wallet in hand as the train screamed into the station behind me, close enough that I felt the wind of it against my back. The crowd gasped audibly at how close it had been. A human wouldn't have made it. I didn't bother explaining that I wasn't entirely human.

Paramedics arrived within minutes and dropped to their knees beside her, hands moving fast and clinical over the ankle, the head wound, the pulse at her throat.

She was still unconscious.