Chapter 390

ARIA

“I heard it,” Jordan said. His voice had the careful quality.

“That the curse doesn’t end with the bond,” I said. “That it ends with the caster.”

“I heard it,” Jordan said again.

“Do you know what that means?”

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“Not yet,” he said. “But I’ll know more by morning.” The quiet efficiency of someone who’d already started the problem-solving even while walking up a hillside in the dark. “Don’t discuss it tonight. There are too many unknowns and too many people present who are going to need sleep before they’re useful.”

“Ivory knows something,” I said. “More than she said. About the curse’s origin. About who created it.”

Jordan was quiet for a moment. “I suspected as much,” he said. “For a while.”

“Did you know she’d been searching? For someone with the bloodline? That it took two years?”

“No,” he said. “That I didn’t know.” He looked at the stretcher ahead of us. “She did it alone. Entirely alone. That’s-” he stopped, the specific pause of someone finding a word inadequate. “That’s very Ivory.”

We walked in silence for a moment.

“The wolf snarled at me,” I said.

“I know,” Jordan said. “I saw.”

“Ivory called him bad wolf,” I said.

“I know,” Jordan said. “I heard.”

“He looked like he was considering whether he agreed that he’d been bad.”

“He usually does,” Jordan said. “He’s been doing that since the curse years. Ivory would tell him off and he’d do the expression, and then she’d give him something to eat and it would be fine.” He paused. “The wolf is protective of her in ways that the man is also protective of her but in different registers. The wolf’s register is more-”

“Territorial?” I said.

“That’s the polite version,” Jordan confirmed.

I thought about the bond and the wolf and the difference between them. About calling for Kael specifically, the man, and what it had meant that the man had heard it clearly even through the strained and complicated mess the bond had been for months.

Something had worked tonight that hadn’t been working before. I didn’t want to look at it too directly-looking at fragile things too directly sometimes broke them before they’d had time to solidify. But it had been there.

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Chapter 390

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The pack gates came into view ahead. Warm light spilling from the main complex, the ordinary sounds of evening Shadowmere Guards at the gate who saw the stretcher and opened things wider and said nothing that needed saying because the situation communicated itself.

Kael spoke, just before we reached the entrance.

“You called me,” he said. Not loudly-quietly, aimed at me, level enough that it wasn’t being shared with the whole party.

“Ivory told me to,” I said.

“She told you to call specifically me,” he said. “Not the wolf.”

“Yes,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment. We were passing through the gate, the light changing as we came into the pack grounds, the dark of the hillside exchanged for the warm amber of evening fires.

“It was clear,” he said again. The same words. A different weight on them this time.

I looked at him across the stretcher, where Ivory was now being efficiently navigated toward the clinic with Nina managing everything.

“The bond has been strained,” I said. “I know that. I know it’s been – I know it’s my fault.”

“It takes two people to strain a bond,” he said.

I didn’t answer that immediately. Let it sit.

“I’m glad it worked,” I said finally. Simple. True.

He looked at me for a moment in the warm light of the pack grounds, with the stretcher ahead of us and Jordan behind and the ordinary sounds of Shadowmere all around.

“So am I,” he said.

Ivory, from the stretcher, without turning her head: “This is very sweet. I’m still in significant pain, if anyone is interested.”

“I’m aware,” Kael said, returning to the stretcher. “Nina is handling it.”

“Nina is excellent,” Ivory said. “I would still like to arrive at the clinic before the shoulder gets worse.”

“You should have thought of that before running down a hill on it,” Kael said.

“I was escaping,” Ivory said. “There was limited option.”

“You were running obstacle courses in the dark,” Kael said.

“That was before the escaping,” Ivory said.

“The sequence of events-”

“Is documented,” Ivory said. “In the guard’s report. Which I’m sure will be very thorough and will support my version of events entirely.”

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Chapter 390

“Your version of events,” Kael said, “includes running on a dislocated shoulder.”

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“It includes strategic use of existing terrain features,” Ivory said. “The shoulder situation was a secondary development.”

Jordan had given up entirely. I could hear him not laughing behind me with the specific effort of a man who was barely maintaining structural integrity.

We walked through the pack grounds toward the clinic with the warm light around us and the wolf somewhere inside Kael that had snarled at me and also had pressed its head into Ivory’s hand and made the low sound of something that had found what it was looking for.

The attacker had said the curse doesn’t end with the bond.

The attacker had escaped.

Ivory knew things she hadn’t told anyone.

The bond had worked tonight in a way it hadn’t worked before.

All of these things were true simultaneously, and none of them were resolved, and tomorrow there would be conversations that needed having and information that needed finding and problems that needed addressing with the specific sustained attention they required.

Tonight, Ivory was on a stretcher.

Tonight, help had come down the slope.

Tonight, I had called for Kael and Kael had heard me.

That was the shape of the day.

I held it carefully, the way you held something fragile that was also important, and walked through the gates of my pack into the light.

At the clinic entrance, Nina was directing the guards and Ivory was being moved from the stretcher to the examination bed inside. Kael went through the door with the immediate purpose of someone who had a destination.

I stopped at the entrance.

Ivory was lying on the examination table. Her face was still doing the controlled-pain thing, but now that we were in the light I could see more clearly what the bolt’s impact had done – the shoulder was visibly wrong, the joint displaced, and there was blood soaking through her sleeve that she definitely hadn’t mentioned.

She was bleeding badly. More than she’d let on.

Nina was already cutting the sleeve away with the clinical efficiency of someone who’d assessed the situation and was moving to address it. The blood was visible in the bright clinic light in a way it hadn’t been in the dark on the hillside, and the amount of it was not the amount from a surface wound.

Kael stopped.

He looked at the blood. At the arm. At Ivory’s face, which was still doing the controlled thing but was paler than it should have

been.

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Chapter 390

“Ivory,” he said.

“I’m fine,” she said immediately.