Episode1
The dream would always start the same way.
And a wood in silver fog, a grove of trees that were arms in skeletal shape, and were reaching out to a bleeding moon. In the darkness, somewhere, there was a glowing pair of golden eyes--too bright, too steady to be human. They pursued her patiently like predators, staring at her, waiting. And just before she rose, a deep growl shook in the fog and shook against the bone like a kind of warning that belonged to her alone.
Lyra Cole gasped awake with a leap of her heart. Her sweat, the moistness of her nightgown had wet the thin cotton, and her window was open and the chill of the night flowed over her. A shaking hand reached across the chest and said in the dark, It was only a dream.
But the reverberation of those golden eyes went on.
The hour on her bedside clock struck beyond the hour of midnight, and was inexorable and irritating. She groaned up and rubbed her temples. Work in the morning. Piles of bills on the kitchen table. Rent overdue. Dreams had no place in her life-- not dreams which tore at her sanity.
By the evening when she was off shift, the sky had turned purple with bruises. It was a long, solitary stroll home, a small road winding around the woods on the outskirts of the town. She did not like it, more than she usually liked it, too quiet and dark--yet, the quietness was almost, now, less than before, as though the trees were eavesdropping on her.
Her footsteps filled with fallen dead leaves. The pale swollen moon crept between the trees. Lyra drew in her jacket and shivered at the hissing of the wind in the pines.
Then she heard it.
Footsteps.
Not her own.
She stopped. The sound stopped. The breath came puffing in the air, short and shallow, and she struggled to make herself proceed. Footsteps resumed--slow, slow, slow, keeping time with her.
Her blood beat rose up in her throat.
She quickened her stride. So did the invisible disciple.
The trail split, one of it toward the highway, the other deeper into the woods. Her instincts yanked her feet in another direction, and as sharp and animal and inexplicable as they were, their cries cried safety toward the road. Into the shadows.
Branches grated over her arms. The woods now appeared to be breathing, moving. Behind her, the footsteps grew faster, heavier, and inhuman.
She broke into a run.
The wood engulfed her, the air full of earth and something metallic--something which smelled too much like blood. Lyra had stumbled into an opening, and heaved his chest and stood still.
Gleamed with the dark eyes golden.
They stepped nearer and the beat of paws on the ground was heard. A wolf came out of the shadows that she had never seen before--vast and black as the moon, bristling with its fur, its fangs gleaming in the moonlight.
The breath of Lyra stopped in her throat. All her instincts cried that she could run. But her legs refused.
The wolf bent down its huge head. Not to strike. Not to lunge.
To bow.
What followed the growl was not an animal but could not be human. A word on the edge of a snarl, mean and refusing.
“Mate.”
The world tilted. Black stormed in. Lyra fell and the final thing she saw was the ball of gold in the eyes of the beast as it burnt her, and then she was seized by strong hands, too hot, too possessive.
As her eyes opened once more, she was not in the forest. Stone walls rose overhead, the odor of fire, musk, and something Borg-manly dogging the atmosphere. And not in sight was the monster who had been whispering mate.
Panic surged up her throat. Lyra stood up, and her palms rested against the fur-carpets that she had not encountered before. The bed under her was very large, of dark wood, hung with fur, which smelled of having been stolen out of other worlds. The firelight in a stone fireplace sent shadows across the walls.
Her first thought was escape. Her second was that she felt pain in her body in an inexplicable way, such that she said her veins felt too hot and her skin too alive. She tightened her chest, and shuddered at the slow thud of her heart. Something in her was different.
It weighed so heavily that its silence was broken, and the sound of footsteps came. Confidence. One by one they linger delaying on the rock.
He saw Lyra glimpsing inside the room, on the opposite side of it, where there was a gaping archway. And then he appeared.
Not the beast from the clearing. Not entirely.
A man stepped into the light. Large-shouldered, long, with his messy black hair falling down across his forehead. His eyes--that golden fire of her dreams--fixed on her and he kept her there like a pin in her soul. Shadows hung about him as second skin, underlining the high edge of his jaw, the predatory power in his walk.
Her breath stuttered. Every bit of her shouted danger, but her body failed her--heat crawled across her cheeks, her heart jumped up like it was greeting him, before her mind could greet him.
“You’re awake.” There was a gravel-laced low voice, in which he never asked, always took.
Lyra’s mouth went dry. “Where am I?”
His lips smiled--not a smile, but the shadow of a smile. “Home.”
She felt as though she had been hit with the word like a shackle-bolt around her wrists.
She pushed back against the headboard, nails in the wood carved. “Take me back. Whatever that is--I do not belong here.
His gaze didn’t waver. If anything, it burned hotter. You are where I want you.
Lyra shook her head, and her voice grew even though the fear in her throat was making it tight. You are bringing me here against my own will.
“Dragged?” He leaned his head, with his golden eyes, and there was a moment when the air in the room seemed to have become thick with something invisible. “No, little one. I saved you. Alone in those woods you could not have kept warm through the night.
The mention of it made her chest tighten, the way he walked, the look he had, the unbelievable proportions of the wolf. She tightened her hand, and tried to keep her voice even. “That thing—it was you.”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No shame. He moved nearer and the firelight flashed the barest spark of fineness along his teeth. “And you didn’t run.”
"I cannot move," she spat, holding the furs about her, and as though they would protect her against him. “You’re a monster.”
He paused on the edge of the bed over her. One heartbeat he was silent. Then lowering his voice made it less dangerous.
“Monsters don’t kneel.”
The words gave a shiver to her spine. He had bowed to her. At her feet a beast, which humbled itself--why?
Her throat tightened. “Why did you call me… that word?”
He looked dark and hungry and darker in his golden eyes. He bent forward near enough she could feel the warmth of his body. Close enough, she could smell the smoke and the wild earth that he exhaled that seemed to her like chains.
Since it is what you are, he said. “Mine.”
Lyra could have sworn her heart was hitting her in the ribs. She had the desire to scream, to deny him, to tear her way out. But as the eye of his gaze met hers, the words choked her.
And in this silence she perceived with chilling vividness: her life would never be hers again.
