The ferals would not leave the forest alone.
They did not charge; they circled. Their howls rose and fell like a tide, surging close enough to prickle skin, ebbing to a distant, ragged wail that threaded through the pines. Every so often came the scrape of claws on bark or the heavy brush of a body dragging through bracken just beyond the outer watch. It felt less like being hunted and more like being measured, weighed, counted.
The pack chose a hollow not far from the healer's stream, where the trees grew tight and the ground dipped to make a natural bowl. Fires were kept low and banked; smoke curled thin and pale rather than loud and black. Tents of canvas and stitched hide crouched in a loose ring, with a gap left clear where the stream cut past dark stones. Wolves moved in pairs, trading places on the rim with the clockwork of a drill—no calling out, no clatter, just bodies passing information with tilts of chins and the set of shoulders. To a stranger it would have looked like instinct. To Elara it looked like discipline.
There were not many humans to fret and pace—half a dozen at most, the rest either sleeping under shock or pretending to. Those few who did stay up tended their own fear as if it were a fire they could keep small by stirring. They jumped at the nearer howls, pressed closer to the glow, watched the shadows as if watching could make them behave. One of them—the boy who had carried water in Ravenholt's yard—sat with his head on his knees and flinched every time tooth met tooth out in the dark.
Elara settled on a fallen log beside the main fire, close enough to feel its warmth along her shins, far enough not to be in anyone's way. She'd washed the worst of the blood from her hands; it wouldn't come clean from under her nails. The heat and the resin-sweet smell of pine pitch were almost enough to make her eyelids heavy. Almost.
Caleb paced. He did it without shouting, without theatrics, but the tension in him clanged like metal. Three strides past the fire, turn, three strides back, heel grinding the same patch of earth to mud. He'd stopped trying to count the howls a long time ago. Every sound out there sounded like the last thing you heard before a door came down.
"You'll wear a trench to the stream," Elara murmured.
He stopped on the turn and looked at her, a sharpness in the set of his jaw that would have started a row on any other night. It passed. He blew out a breath and sat beside her, shoulders hunched. "This isn't safety," he said, softer. "It's just… quieter danger."
"They'll hold," Elara said, and heard how certain she sounded. It surprised her.
Caleb's mouth tugged, not quite a smile. "You sound like one of them."
She glanced at the nearest pair of wolves on the rim—shadows in motion, eyes catching firelight in brief glints—and back to him. "I sound like someone who knows we wouldn't last ten paces out there without them."
He scrubbed his hands over his face, then let them fall. "I hate this."
"I know."
"Not being able to do anything. Not being… useful."
"You carried Corin out." She nudged his shoulder with hers. "You were useful."
He swallowed and looked away, the motion tight through his throat. The fire popped. One of the wolves on the rim—Delta by the way others made space around him—tilted his head toward the south, and two lean shapes ghosted that way without a word.
"Do you think she'll wake tonight?" Caleb asked, voice low, as if the trees could punish hope.
"Probably not." Elara pictured the healer's hands, green light in the gap where flesh should have been. "But she'll wake."
His fingers found hers, rough and warm, and they sat like that, hand in hand, while the forest tested its edge and found it firm.
---
Luke made his rounds with two younger wolves in tow, both all eyes and straight backs, desperate not to let their new Delta see them slack. He was careful to keep his shoulders square and his pace measured—no limping, no wince when he raised his left arm to gesture, nothing to betray that his shoulder had been torn and bitten not long before. When he stopped near the fire, the younger pair flowed on, and he took the moment to check in with Amber, who had claimed a log as a desk and was sketching a map of the hollow with a coal-stub on a scrap of canvas.
"North and west are quiet," Luke reported. "South side's getting more curious."
"Curious isn't a word I'd use for it," Amber said dryly, but nodded. "Double the southern pairs. Rotate every half hour until moonset, then one hour. Keep it silent."
Luke signed assent and turned to move. His gaze snagged for a heartbeat where Elara and Caleb sat, hand in hand by the fire. Elara felt the look rather than saw it; when she glanced up, he had already picked up his patrol again. It left a small ache behind her breastbone she pretended not to notice.
Garrett came in from the rim a little after that, dropped in a crouch by the fire opposite Elara, and warmed his hands as if he were only any man with cold fingers. His golden presence bent the space without trying to. Humans around the fire noticed and sat up straighter without meaning to.
"How long?" Elara asked.
"Until they're bored," Garrett said. He might have been speaking of weather. "They don't keep edge pressure like this for long once the blood moon crests. Dawn will thin them to a drizzle."
Caleb's mouth pulled. "Dawn is hours away."
"Mm." Garrett's eyes tracked the rim. "Better than days."
Caleb grunted, not satisfied, but left it. The boy with his head on his knees had fallen asleep between one howl and the next, shoulders shivering under his blanket.
Elara's gaze slid to the gap where the stream ran, to the darker trees beyond, to the place she knew the healer's hut must be. There was no light. She tried to take comfort from that. If something were wrong, Amber would not be drawing maps.
The ferals pressed closer near midnight. You could tell by the way the wolves' heads rose together, the way the outermost pair's weight shifted to their toes. Something bumped the edge of the camp proper—a body more impatient than cautious—and a warning growl rolled round the rim, low and joined, no throat louder than the next. The bump did not come again.
"It's like they're testing a fence," Caleb muttered.
"They are," Garrett said. "They do it every blood moon."
"And you do this every blood moon?" Caleb's voice sharpened, not quite able to keep the accusation out.
"We prefer to be in the mountains on nights like this," Garrett said, unbothered. "Fewer doors to hold shut. But we make do."
Caleb's hand tightened on Elara's. His palm had gone clammy. She turned her fingers to lace with his, the small act of fitting their hands together a thing she knew how to do.
"You should sleep," she said.
"You sleep."
She shook her head. "I will. Later."
He made a face. "Stubborn."
"You like me that way."
He huffed something that wasn't a laugh and wasn't not. "Sometimes."
Luke's shadow passed again, quiet as fog. He murmured a timing to the next pair and took their place until they slid in to relieve him. Elara watched him by not watching him, the way you watch a fire and pretend you are seeing only the shape of the flames.
---
Sleep crept up the camp in pockets. One of the women—the one with the singed hair from the kitchens—curled on her side and breathed with the hiccup of someone who has cried themselves as empty as they can and found that there is still something left. A man nodded sitting up, jerking awake every few minutes, neck bent at an angle that would make him groan in the morning. The wolves did not sleep; they rested like runners poised at the line, muscles loose but ready.
Elara's eyes grew grainy. Every blink took an extra thought to reverse. Eventually she let her head tip against Caleb's shoulder and let the crackle of the fire pull her down.
The nightmare came as it always did.
The door. The fists. The shouted begging, the words she had never learned to stop hearing: Please—my son—let me in— The bolts whining as someone on their side tried to lift them, the guards dragging him back, the sudden heavy quiet and the pool of blood that found the gap under the door and forced its way through like something determined to be seen. The smell—iron and heat and salt.
Her heart galloped. Her throat closed. She braced to wake and find herself shaking, to blink the camp fire back into shape and swallow the bile.
The dream shifted.
The door did not rattle; it broke. Splinters flew like startled birds. A figure shouldered the frame aside as if it were a curtain. Gold strode into blood and made it step back.
Riven.
She knew the breadth of him even before his face resolved. The way the room found a new centre around his body. The stillness of his eyes. He did not snarl the fear down; it simply could not stand where he stood.
The screams died. The blood inched away from his boots as if it had mistaken him for a boundary.
He crossed the space to her in three strides. His presence was heat without smoke. He smelled faintly of pine and something bright and metallic, like the cold edge of a knife in moonlight. When his hand lifted, she did not flinch. His thumb brushed her cheekbone, callus catching on her skin, the touch impossibly careful for a man who could break a door with his shoulder.
"You are not prey," he said, and his voice was a thing you could lean on.
"I—" Her mouth would not obey. The old panic had nowhere to go. It ran to her fingers and made them shake.
His forehead tipped to hers, a brief press that felt less like possession than like permission. "Stop running from it."
"From what?" she asked, and the question was a breath and a challenge and a plea.
"From yourself."
He closed the last inch between them.
His mouth was warm. The kiss was not rough, not a claiming. He tasted of heat and pine and iron and something that made her chest go tight and her knees go weak. His hand slid into her hair, cradled the back of her skull, held her exactly steady in a world that would not stop moving. She forgot the door; she forgot the blood. There was only the solid press of his body, the parting of her lips under his, the certainty running through him like a current she could step into and be carried.
When he drew back, the world snapped into hard focus.
She woke like she had been dropped.
The fire had burned down to a cradle of embers. The cold had crept closer. Her skin was damp, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her fingers. For a wild, stupid moment she thought the heat against her cheek would be his hand and she would look up into gold. It was Caleb's shoulder.
He stirred when she did. "El?" His voice was sleep-hoarse and soft. "Nightmare?"
She swallowed, throat tight. "Yes." The word came out thinner than she meant it to.
He turned his head and kissed her hair, then her temple, a touch that knew its place even when everything else had forgotten it. "You're safe," he murmured. "I promise."
Guilt flooded up fast enough to make her dizzy. She let her head rest against him, let him be what he was to her because anything else right now would break both of them. "I know," she said, and wished she felt it cleanly.
A shadow moved at the lip of the firelight.
Luke lowered himself to sit on the ground at the foot of her bedroll, legs crossed, back to the heat, eyes on the dark. He didn't look at her or at Caleb; he watched the trees like a man reading a language they wrote on the air. A younger wolf drifted near as if to offer to take his place; Luke shook his head once. The younger one faded back to the rim.
Caleb's spine went a shade tenser. He did not pull away. He set his jaw and pretended this was fine.
Elara drew her blanket up and lay down, the log still at her back, the fire painting the inside of her eyelids red when she closed them. The camp creaked and breathed around her. Somewhere on the southern edge, a feral tested the boundary again and was met with the low, unanimous warning of wolves who did not intend to be tested into failure. The sound rolled round the hollow and smoothed the night down.
Sleep came slower and more complicated the second time. She did not dream of doors. If she dreamed at all, it was only of the place where gold had touched her and left a mark that did not show on skin.
---
Dawn nibbled at the edges of the trees and turned the stream to a ribbon of pewter. The ferals' voices thinned as if someone had taken a thumb and smeared them across the horizon. The wolves on the rim changed their pace; the tension in them shifted from hold to wait. Somewhere in the healer's direction, a wood pigeon took the liberty of cooing as if the world had never known teeth.
Amber stood and stretched her spine until it clicked. Garrett rolled his shoulders and set three deltas to pick their way to the southern rise and back. Luke pushed to his feet, stiffness tugging at his mouth only as high as his cheekbone would allow, and took a sponge of water from a skin to wipe blood that had crusted at the edge of his bandage. He didn't make a production of it. He didn't glance to see if anyone was watching.
Caleb woke with a start and caught himself before he reached for a weapon he didn't have. He looked at Elara first, as if checking she hadn't been a dream, and something in her chest loosened for a moment that had nothing to do with guilt or Riven or wolves. Just this: the boy she had loved before the blood moon, still in the morning, still himself.
"Morning," she said.
"Morning," he managed, voice wrecked, and scrubbed his face with both hands.
"Eat," Amber said to anyone who looked likely to faint, and tossed a wrapped heel of bread and a strip of dried meat to the boy who had slept with his head on his knees. He caught them like someone handing him back something he hadn't expected to see again.
"How long do we hold here?" Elara asked Garrett.
"Until the moon's itch is out of their bones," he said. "Another night, perhaps two. Then we move."
"To Ravenholt."
He watched her for a beat in which nothing else existed. "If that is what is ordered."
She didn't blink. "It will be."
Something like approval tugged at the corner of his mouth. He dipped his head—once, brief—and went to send a runner to the east ridge.
Luke came nearer then, not quite at her shoulder, not quite not, and looked out through the trees where the light was making lace. "You slept," he said.
"For some value of the word," she said, and stifled the flush that tried to climb her throat. "Thank you for sitting."
He nodded. "This is why I'm here."
Caleb glanced up at that and measured Luke with a look he used to reserve for problems he could lift with his arms. He didn't rise to it. Not yet. Daylight dissolved grudges into tasks.
The camp breathed deeper as the sun climbed. The first day after a blood moon was always like this, Garrett had said once when she'd asked him nothing at all: thin, threadbare, but wider than the night before. If you could keep everyone together through the part where fear sounded the loudest, you could make choices again.
Elara rolled her shoulders back and let the new morning sit there. There would be time for arguments later, and orders, and the walk into ruins with her heart in her throat. For now, there was bread, and water, and the quiet knowledge that all the howling in the world had not moved the line.
They had held. And she had not broken. Not this night.