Page 36 of Dark Mate

I came out of a place like the one they want to put her back in. The hand that fed me. The blade that marked me. Ordained hands. Ordained patience. They don’t kill what they can keep. They smooth it. They pour the quiet in and call it kindness and use what’s left of it. They’d take her back to her cup and her smiling and her cage, and in a season she’d be smooth again—the heat gone out of her like I was never here.

No.

I count what I’ve got. Not much. The rut’s deep in its second turn and it’ll break soon; I feel it coming the way I feel weather.Then I’m loose, and fast, and the metal things will learn what kind of dark they wandered into.

Till then I do what my body’s already doing without asking me.

I pull her in tighter. I feed her at every lull—berries, meat, everything I can get into her. I want strength on her. Muscle laid into all that soft, fire in her, her own legs strong enough under her to run, because when they come I might not be able to hold her and fight them both at once, and a mate who can run is a mate who lives. The drive to do it sits in me deeper than the rut. Older. Build her up. Get her strong. Get her ready for the day the dark opens.

She doesn’t know yet. She’s down here learning my body and her own, learning she’s allowed to want a thing and reach for it. I won’t take that off her with what’s circling up top. Let her have the dark a while longer. Let her get strong in it, where it’s only me.

She stirs against my chest. Her face works in her sleep, the small line back between her brows, the dark getting at her even down here where nothing else can. Her mouth moves. Words come up out of her, thick and half-shaped, dragged from somewhere under the surface.

“…s’cold,” she says. Then nothing. Then softer, pitched young, frightened: “Mama?—”

Something in my chest pulls tight enough to hurt.

I don’t know who that is. I know the shape of the wanting in it. A small thing in the dark, reaching for a hand that isn’t coming. I know that one from the inside.

I bring my mouth to the crown of her head and let the hum out lower, deeper, until it sinks past her ear and into the bone. Her face smooths. Her hand crawls up and flattens on my chest, over the heart, and on a breath she says one more thing—clearer now, not to the dark. To me.

“…stay.”

“Here.” The word comes out of me cracked and wrong, rusted from how long it’s been since I had a use for it. But it’s true, and she’s asleep, and asleep is the safest time I’ve got to set a true thing loose in the open. My arms close around the whole small weight of her. “Here.”

Soon she’ll see the light. The canopy. The whole size of the world they kept off her.

And somewhere past the tree-line, the soft ones and their made things will be waiting for her to come down out of the canopy.

They’ve come for what’s mine before, the Ordained. Another name. Another dark. They took me, and kept me, and cut me, and left me to heal crooked.

They will not have her.

I’ll be the thing in her dark they have to get through first. And I have spent every year since the change learning exactly how their kind dies.

18

ELLIE

It comes for us in a lull, and I feel him know it before I know anything at all.

We’ve been sealed together so long I’ve stopped thinking of us as two separate things. The knot holds. His cock rests soft and huge inside me, the rut banked down to embers between surges, his arm heavy across my ribs, the dark warm and total and smelling of us. And that’s the thing. I’ll understand it later. The smell of us. Weeks of it pouring out of the nest into the canopy like a signal fire. Sex, venom, blood, the cum that’s been keeping me fed. A beacon, in a world full of things that hunt by scent.

I’m half under, drifting in the place between sleep and the next surge, when his body turns to stone around me.

Not the rut-tension, not the wire that pulls taut before he takes me. This is colder. Every muscle locking at once, his breath stopping, his arm going from heavy to a band of iron across my ribs. His head lifts off the furs. And a sound starts in his chest that I’ve never heard from him—lower than the hum, older, a vibration that isn’t for me. A warning. The thing a predator makes when a bigger dark moves into its dark.

“What—”

His hand covers my mouth. Not rough. Final.Quiet.

Then I hear it.

Something in the passage. Big. Bigger than the small busy things that click through the wood at night, this is mass, weight, the slow drag of a body that fills the space it moves through. Claws finding purchase in heartwood. A wet, heavy breathing that isn’t his. And a smell rolling ahead of it that turns my stomach, rot and musk and old kills, the breath of a thing that eats and eats and has come down here following the scent of us, weeks of the beacon we’ve been pouring into the dark.

It’s coming for the smell. For the source of the smell.

For us.