Fated to the Lycan king

Chapter 5

Two days later I was sitting on the floor of Yara's room watching her draw.

She had filled half a sketchbook since we arrived. The building. The window angles. The Valerian streets below. And in the margins of every page in the spaces between the larger drawings small repeated sketches of a face I recognized and was not going to comment on.

"You are drawing him," I said.

"I am drawing architecture," she said.

"In the margins," I said. "That is his jaw."

"It is an interesting jaw," she said. Without looking up. "Architecturally speaking."

I pulled my knees to my chest and looked at the ceiling.

"Tell me again," she said. Still drawing. "The part about when he pulled you close."

"I have told you that part four times," I said.

"I know," she said. "Tell me again."

"Yara...."

"The sparks specifically," she said.

"There is nothing to understand about the sparks," I said. "They happened. They were there. I am not going to think about them."

"You think about them constantly," she said.

"I am not going to think about them out loud," I said.

She turned a page. Started a new drawing. I watched her hand move across the paper quick and certain the way it always did when she was thinking through something by drawing it.

"Do you think it is real," she said. Quietly.

"The bond," I said.

"All of it," she said. She looked up at me. "Do you think it is real."

I looked at my hands.

"I don't know how to think it is not real," I said. "When I am in the same room as him my body...." I stopped. Started again. "It is like the first time you hear a song that you feel like you have heard before. And you haven't. But something in you has." I looked at her. "Does that make sense."

She looked at me for a moment.

"Yes," she said softly. "That makes a lot of sense."

She looked back down at her sketchbook.

I opened my mouth to say something else.

The window exploded inward.

Not the glass. The whole frame. Tearing out of the wall and spinning across the room and Yara grabbed my arm and we hit the floor behind the bed before the sound of it had finished happening.

Something moved through the space above us.

I felt it before I could locate it. Not cold exactly. Wrong. The air had become wrong in a specific way that hit the base of my throat and sat there and every nerve in my body was firing at once.

"Don't move," I said. Low.

"Not moving," Yara said. Her hand on my arm very tight.

The wrong thing moved through the room. I tracked it by feel the way the air changed as it passed the way the wrongness shifted location. It was looking for something. Moving with the deliberate quality of something that had been sent with instructions.

Voices in the corridor. Running.

The door came off its hinges.

I raised my head enough to see over the edge of the bed.

Caelan stood in the doorway.

He took in the room in under a second. The destroyed window. Us behind the bed. The wrong thing in the air near the window that I still could not see but could feel with every nerve I had.

His eyes locked on the corner.

The wrong thing moved toward us.

He crossed the room in three steps and put himself between it and us and spoke a single word in a language I had never heard before that landed in the air like something physical. The temperature dropped sharply. The wrongness pushed back against him and I felt it the pressure of it real and heavy and he did not move. He said the word again. Lower.

The wrongness pushed harder.

His jaw was tight. His hands at his sides and something was moving in the air around them that I could feel below vision. He was not the version of himself from the corridor or the room or any conversation. He was something that had been alive for a very long time and knew exactly what it was facing and was not going to move.

The wrong thing made one more push.

He said the word a third time.

And it was gone. Like a flame going out.

The room was just a room again with a destroyed window and plaster on the floor.

Yara's hand on my arm had not loosened.

Caelan turned around.

His eyes found me immediately and he crossed the distance and crouched down and his hands were on my face before I had finished understanding it was over. Moving over my face my shoulders my arms. Checking. Nothing measured about it. Nothing controlled. Just immediate and thorough.

"Are you hurt," he said.

"No," I said. "We are okay. What was..."

"Are you hurt," he said again. His hands still on my face.

"No," I said. I put my hand over his. Without thinking. Just did it. "Caelan. We are not hurt."

He looked at me.

Something moved through his face that came and went fast. He looked at my hand over his for a moment one brief glance down and then back at my face.

Then he stood. Looked at Draven in the doorway.

"Tighten everything," he said. Back to the council voice. Flat and final. "Every entry point. Nobody in or out." He looked around the destroyed room. "Get them somewhere without exterior windows."

"Yes my lord," Draven said.

Caelan looked at me one more time. Then at Yara.

Yara was sitting on the floor looking at where the window used to be. She turned her pencil over in her fingers slowly. End to end. End to end.

Lucas appeared in the doorway behind Draven. He looked at the room. At us on the floor. At the destroyed window. At Caelan. He came and sat on the floor beside us and put his arm around me and said nothing and his presence was solid and familiar and I was extremely grateful for it.

Caelan stood in the center of the room looking at the corner where the wrong thing had been. His thumb pressed against the inside of his opposite wrist once. Then he straightened.

"Pack whatever you have," he said.

I looked at him.

"We are leaving Valeria," he said.

"When," I said.

"Tonight," he said.

He looked around the room one final time. At the destroyed window. At the corner.

"It is time," he said quietly, "to visit my dear brother."

His voice when he said brother was the voice that filled rooms without effort. The one that left no space for anyone to misunderstand what was coming.

I thought about the statue in the square. About the smile carved into the timber. About the seal holds plaque on a carving that turned out to be a real person's face.

I thought about him saying I enjoy a good chase with that warmth in his voice.

I thought about my hand covering his without asking me first.

I got up off the floor.

"One hour," I said.

He looked at me.

"Give us one hour to pack," I said.

Something moved in his expression.

"One hour," he said.

I nodded and turned to help Yara up and did not look back at him because whatever was on my face right now was not something I was ready to share with anyone yet.

Including myself.