Silver in His Veins

He came the next night. Finally. The way storms finally come.

I felt him before the knock — the scorched bond lighting its broken wires — so I had the door open before his knuckles touched it. And there he was, the Alpha who'd broken me, looking like he hadn't slept since the moon. Greyer than the clearing. Thinner at the edges.

"You let Varek of Blackpine into this hut," he said. Level, which I was learning meant he was holding something near its breaking point. "Alone. At night."

"You don't get to be angry about who visits me." I should have feared him. I didn't, and that frightened me more. "You made me a stranger in front of everyone I've ever known. You don't get to stand in my doorway and play the—"

"You're bleeding." It came out wrenched. "Through the bond. I've felt it for a week. You've been bleeding into the dark and I've had to sit in that house and pretend I can't feel you fraying by inches."

I went still.

"Let me see," he said, and the please buried under it undid something in me.

I shouldn't have let him in. I let him in.

He crossed the small room and lowered himself in front of where I sat — slower than a man his age should, one hand bracing the chair — and laid two fingers against the scorched place over my heart. Heat poured off him, too much heat, a fever banked under the skin. The bond, even ruined, even refused, sang where he touched, and I watched the same helpless recognition cross his face.

"It's supposed to fade," he murmured. "A clean rejection fades. This won't. Not for either of us." His hand spread flat over my heart and his control cracked straight down the center. "I have wanted to come here every single night."

"Then why didn't you?" My voice shook. "You felt the bond light. I saw your face come apart. For half a breath you wanted it as much as I did — and then you stood up in front of three hundred wolves and threw me in the dirt for the curse on my throat."

"It was never the mark." His forehead dropped, nearly to mine. "God, Aria, it was never the mark. I rejected you because—"

He reached to push the hair back from my scarred throat, gentle, and his sleeve fell back from his wrist.

And I saw it.

Silver. Fine threads of it, tracing up the veins of his forearm like frost spreading across a window. Climbing toward his heart. I'd seen frost like that exactly once — on the arm of a border wolf they'd burned and buried last winter and never named the sickness out loud.

The Hollowing.

I caught his wrist in both hands before he could pull it back. He let me. He went very still, the way men do when a thing they've hidden a long time is finally seen.

"You're dying," I breathed. "That's why. Not the mark. You rejected me because completing the bond would pour this into me."

"It moves through the bond first." His voice was barely there. "Mate to mate. I have watched it take everyone it touched. I would not do that to you. I would rather you hate me alive than—"

The door slammed open.

Cold air and torchlight — and Elder Maeve, who'd read the bloodlines of Ironhowl for sixty years, in the doorway with the old healer behind her. Maeve's ancient eyes went from the silver climbing Kael's arm to the silver crescent on my throat, and her hand rose, shaking, to point at the scar.

"I came to see the impossible thing with my own eyes," she rasped. "The girl who lived." Her voice broke wide. "That is no curse, Kael Ashford. That is a Silvercrest healer's mark — the blood that mends the Hollowing. We burned our own cure as a curse for thirty years." Her finger swung to the silver in his veins, then back to me, and the whole world narrowed to what she said next.

"She is the only thing in this valley that can save you. And the only way her blood reaches you—"

"—is the bond," I finished, the cold all the way through me now. "The bond he tore apart in front of everyone."