Page 69 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

Dane nods once. It’s the smallest thing a man can do and more than I ‘ve ever been given. Nyxiana steps out into the open ground and turns her left wrist over. The star flares once, hard, bright enough to put color on the faces nearest her and throw the shadow of her arm on the boards behind her. Then the air in front of her opens.

Suddenly there’s a door standing open, and the light coming through it isn’t morning light. Every wolf in that yard takes a step back from it. It’s impossible to look straight at it. She turns and holds her hand out to me. The hum comes up under my sternum hard enough that I have to set my feet. It’s the strongest it has been since last night, and this time I know where it’s pointed.

She puts both fists in my shirt and pulls me down to her and kisses me.

Her hands come up on either side of my jaw. I pull her in close against me and kiss her back like a man who might not get another one, because I might not.

Nobody in that yard makes a sound.

She lets go. I put my forehead down against hers.

“In case,” she says.

“In case.”

I take her hand.

We go through together.

Chapter 40

Nyxiana

The door takes us both at once. There’s no dark, no distance. One step out of a Colorado morning and the next one lands somewhere else entirely, the only thing I carry across is his hand in mine. Then I’m standing, and I stop breathing for a second, because I’ve walked into four realms since this started and none of them looked like this.

The chamber is enormous. I can’t find a wall in any direction. Light comes down in long columns. Gold, green, a blue I have no name for. Where the columns cross, the color runs together and pours out across the floor in sheets. There are shapes overhead. I can’t tell whether somebody built them or whether they’re simply more of the light. Whatever holds this place up, it isn’t stone.

The air is warm. It’s not the weather, it’s the temperature of a bath, and my body wants to let go of everything it’s holding. This is the most beautiful room I have ever stood in.

There’s no scent in it. Every other realm I’ve walked into, I smelled it before I saw anything. Wet rock and old blood in the quarter. Cut grass and charge in Doria. Here there’s nothing. In a room this beautiful, that’s the first thing wrong with it. There’s no sound either. It’s not that it’s quiet, there’s just nothing. I can hear my blood moving, nothing else. Something goes over me while I stand there. It works down my body the way a border ward checks a stranger at a gate, takes its time about it. Then it leaves me alone. The star on my wrist is the only reason it does.

I turn to check Valen. He’s standing straight, hasn’t moved since we came through. He didn’t reach out a hand for balance, isn’t squinting into the light the way I am. He belongs here. This place checked me at the door and decided whether to let me stand. It hasn’t come near him at all. It doesn’t need to. Whatever this realm is made out of, he’s made out of it too. His eyes move over it, gray and unhurried, going left across the chamber and back again, the same way they move over any place he walks into for the first time. Far out across it the light starts to gather. It’s not travelling, it’s thickening. One part of it turns solid white and keeps getting brighter. I set my feet and bring flame up at my fingertips, just enough to work with. I’m getting ready to fight whatever is coming out of that light. Valen is watching the same place with his head tilted, open, curious about it.

“Valen,” it comes out sharper than I intended.

“It isn’t a threat,” he says.

“You can’t know that.”

“No.” His eyes stay on it. “I know it anyway.”

“How?”

“Same as I knew which stone to put my hand on in Drakoria.” He leans toward it instead of away. “It’s the only answer I’ve got.”

I keep the flame where it is but stop bracing. Five figures come out of the gathered light, each one roughly the size of a man. Behind each something enormous is folded in close. Wings, probably. I can’t hold any of it long enough to be sure because every time my eyes settle on one the brightness pushes them off sideways.

One comes forward and the light around him eases enough so that I can look. Dark skin, dreadlocks all the way down his back, wings that open wide enough to take up the room, white the whole way through, held out instead of folded. He isn’t a giant. He’s the size of a large man and no more than that. It’s the way he stands that fills the room. I want to take a step back from him and I couldn’t tell you why.

Bancroft. My mother described him to me when I was a girl. She said he was the law itself, that he had never apologized for what the law does to people. She didn’t tell me how it feels to be in a room with him. I don’t think she had the words. The one beside him is easier to look at. Golden hair that drifts and settles as though there’s water in this room. Gold eyes, warm, and a great deal older than the warmth makes them look. White wings held closer to his back than the first ones.

Samuel. My grandfather. He held me the day I was born. He came to my mother’s house every year of my childhood, never came empty-handed. Out of everyone I’m related to, he’s the one who has never wanted a single thing from me. He’s standing forty feet away and looks glad to see me. The other three stay back. Bowen. Rainer. Gavin. My great-uncles, the five of them brothers, and the last time anybody said those four names out loud in front of me it was four women on a porch in Colorado arguing about which one of them was the most romantic.

“You carry the Star.” Bancroft’s voice arrives without any air moving. “All four points of it, and the fourth on your own arm. Say why you have brought it here.”

I open my mouth. Then the light in the chamber changes, every one of the five turns their head at once, I know why before I look. Faelan is standing thirty feet from the Council. He doesn’t arrive. He’s just there. No door, no light, no step out of anything. The realm that went over me at the gate and decided whether I was allowed doesn’t touch him at all, because he’s already been in here long enough to be part of the room. I haven’t laid eyes on him since a balcony in Doria. The gray has spread along his jaw, down the backs of both hands, he’s stopped putting any effort into covering it.

“It’s finished,” he says to the Council. “Two thousand years and it’s run its course.”