Iron Oracle

by Merry Ravenell

  There was no moon through the thick, snowing clouds, just an endless, murky dome of sky that reminded me of the Place Beyond The Tides.

  Eventually the two scouting wolves returned, little balls of snow on their paws and in their ruffs. They returned to human form and quickly dressed before telling Gabel, “The SaltPaw are back, Alpha.”

  “Back?” I asked before Gabel could even form a word around his feral anger.

  “Back, Luna. We scouted the houses, everyone seems accounted for.”

  Gabel snarled.

  I grabbed his bicep. It was cold, it was late, it was snowing. This had gone on long enough. He was tired, I was tired. What was he going to do? Go down there and slaughter all of SaltPaw for outsmarting him? We couldn’t afford to linger here, and we weren’t going to take the SaltPaw with the handful of wolves we had.

  The SaltPaw weren’t worth anything. Gabel had said as much before he had come down here the first time. They’d been something for the IronMoon to do. A notch on the belt. A box to tick.

  “Buttercup,” Gabel growled.

  I growled back and yanked, dragging him back a few steps. “They aren’t worth this!” I hissed. “You’re just pissed because they outfoxed you and they’re about to do it again. You think you aren’t being played as an idiot? You are. This is how you play right into Aaron’s hands!”

  He growled at me, deep and threatening, for questioning him in front of the scouts.

  “Don’t growl at me like that,” my voice rasped in the darkness. “I am your Luna and your Oracle and your mate and the mother of our pups and I will tell you when you’re being foolish!”

  He snapped his head to the side, spat out a half-bark, half-gasp of anger, and growled at the scouts to get back into the lead car.

  I stayed on my side of the car, wary of his anger but unrepentant.

  “Do not question me again in front of scouts,” he finally growled at me.

  “Don’t go chasing whales and I won’t have to,” I retorted.

  He growled, malevolent and eyes burning ocean-blue even in the faint winter-night light.

  The anger and fury seared me, and I curled up against the door, glaring at him over my shoulder.

  “I cannot look weak,” he said.

  Black, smoldering anger like lava and ash seeped under my skin, and it wasn’t mine. I looked out the window, shuddering, and containing whimpers. His rage hurt, and I didn’t want to fight the wall of his dark anger.

  This shouldn’t be happening. Weren’t we past this by now?

  My belly hurt. I wrapped my arms across myself and huddled up against the window, the cold burning into my skin.

  A Glimpse

  We didn’t get back to IronMoon until the afternoon. Gabel and I had not said a word to each other since we had left SaltPaw, and I hadn’t slept, and neither had he. He looked more haggard than he probably wanted me to tell him, with almost two days of scruff on his normally clean-shaven jaw that only drew out the circles under his eyes. I was sure I looked like roadkill. I felt like roadkill. Flat and well-jerked by summer sun.

  The Bond punished us when we snarled at each other.

  Flint greeted us on the front steps, gleaming with steaming sweat from training. Eroth and Ana flanked him, Ana thinking this whole greet-the-leaders when they returned silly. The Master of Arms noted each of us, then asked, “Where is First Beta Hix and the others?”

  “Remaining in the south until the situation is stable,” Gabel said, voice impatient and taunt.

  “And the MarchMoon?”

  “Dismantled. They are IronMoon now.” The tightness of Gabel’s voice increased.

  Flint glanced at me for a cue. I twitched my head. Gabel still seethed under that tired skin—he had not forgiven me for questioning him in front of the scouts.

  Flint changed the subject. “Gardenia is dead, Luna. We have disposed of her body without ceremony.”

  “Is Cook still here?” I asked.

  Flint nodded. “He understands she made her own end and had infinite chances at redemption.”

  “One chance too many,” I muttered without thinking.

  I was so tired. My brain shifted in a bed of sand.

  Dragging myself up the stairs sapped the last of my energy. Forget the shower, forget food, I just wanted to sleep. I wearily stripped off my clothes, and even that was too much effort. I collapsed onto the bed with bra, panties, shirt and one sock still on.

  “I will wake you for dinner,” Gabel said.

  “Where are you going?” I mumbled.

  “The pack will talk if I am not present.”

  “Most of the pack isn’t here,” I reminded him. “Come to bed, Gabel.”

  “No. I am fine.”

  “You are not fine. You are exhausted and being unreasonable about SaltPaw. Come here.”

  “No.”

  I groaned. Demands wouldn’t work. Gabel was flinging himself against his chains. He’d probably go obsess over the defiant SaltPaw, and he was exhausted, and that combination wouldn’t end well. I tried a different tactic. “I won’t sleep well if I know you’re prowling around. It’ll worry me.”

  Gabel caved as if I had sliced a blade across the back of each hamstring. “Only if you take off the rest of your clothes.”

  “Even right now?” I whined.

  He nodded, something stubborn and anxious seeping through the Bond. “Clothing is a shield. It is impossible to relax if one is about to jump up.”

  I cracked my eyes open. So that was his aversion. Not modesty, but the same thing that made these rooms have no windows. He was a lupine. Clothing might have been natural to me, but he had acquired it much later in his life. It was an armor, a guise, a different set of fur to hide the one he had worn in his youth.

  “Deal,” I agreed. I found the energy to squirm out of my remaining attire.

  Gabel watched, and only once I was naked did he take off his own clothes and collapse next to me.

  “They outsmarted me,” he said, staring at the ceiling, as if he could not believe it. “They ran and hid somewhere. The whole pack.”

  I moved closer. “Are you more upset that they outsmarted you, or that they did it by running?”

  “That an enemy would outsmart me with cowardice.” Under his tired, stunned voice there was a thread of cold iron. “What did they hope to accomplish? That I would think they did not exist? Humiliate me? An enemy who is dishonorable I can understand, but not one who is a coward. Cowards submit, or run away to hide. They also don’t come back. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  I curled up against his arm and smoothed my palm across his strong chest. “You want it to make more sense than it does. Some things simply are, as illogical as they seem.”

  “Who would accept an Alpha that is such a coward? How do I deal with a pack who will behave like cowards? I can deal with idiots, fools, weaklings, but how do I deal with such debase cowards?” Gabel’s voice rattled around in his throat with frustration.

  “You don’t,” I said gently. “They aren’t important. They’re a distraction. Aaron or Magnes are using them to distract you. Don’t give the SaltPaw more attention than they’re worth.”

  “You seem very convinced this is Aaron and not Magnes.”

  I tensed, remembering the tall IceMaw Alpha, and the crush of his prestige against me, and how my Mark had responded to him, slithering and warm under my skin.

  Gabel gave me a very, very long look, then turned over onto his belly, and said nothing else.

  A voice summoned me out of my dreams.

  It didn’t wake Gabel, who slept on next to me in the dark, grey-tinted room where the air moved like water currents.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed, stood, opened the door.

  No one on the other side. Gabel slept on.

  Shifting blue-white light washed the hallway, moonlight shining on clear, moving water. The currents pulled, and I drifted towards Gabel’s office, up the stairs, through the door. The Moon itse
lf hung in the sky just above the trees, absorbing the whole of the massive window, and bathing the office in moonlight.

  How bizarre. Gabel’s window faced south.

  Light and water played over the empty room, stroking and pulling my hair with a thousand familiar fingers.

  No, not empty. Not quite.

  Flint stood by Gabel’s desk, his eyes distinctive jungle-green in the blue-silver, tattoos gleaming shadowy blue, twisting and moving in the currents. He was completely naked. The tattoos extended to the point of his hips, downward, entangled his groin, genitals, and inner thighs. The moonlight imbued light in the ends of his golden hair, moving over it as one might fondly stroke a pet. In his hands he held the large blue tourmaline spear Gabel had claimed for himself.

  The moonlight flooded the blue stone’s surface. Light brewed within its belly and illuminated Flint’s hands. The edges of his tattoos lifted off his skin to admire the glow.

  His meaning was clear. I said, “No.”

  He offered me the spear of tourmaline.

  “No,” I repeated.

  The Moon hung outside the window, Eye unblinking.

  Flint shifted the stone to one hand, and placed the other on my shoulder. He pushed. The weight of the Tides bent my knees. He pressed the tourmaline between my breasts. The rough edges dug into my skin. I could not move forward, nor back, nor up, or evade the tourmaline’s summons.

  The currents pulled my resistance away, pulled my fingertips around it.

  I cradled it in both hands, looking down into the illuminated depths, my resistance and fear gone, and only obedience remaining.

  ~*~ Through The Stone ~*~

  I needed to scream. I wanted to scream.

  I could not scream.

  I clung to the memory that the Tides only went so deep, and that this rushing blue hell would take me somewhere. I couldn’t fall forever, I wouldn’t drown forever, and I clung to it, claws and nails digging into iron resolve. If I never did anything else, it had to be this thing.

  Do not scream!

  My mind shrieked and screamed, pounding on my chest wall to let the screams out, to open my mouth.

  Between

  Endless, warm, liquid darkness.

  My eyes adjusted to the dim, red light captured in the liquid that suspended me. I breathed in. Warm liquid rushed over my tongue and into my lungs, but no coughing fit or even a gag came of it.

  A shift within the liquid prompted a glance to the side, nudging me in that direction, until I bumped up against a filmy membrane of some kind. I reached out, touched it, saw it was laced with tiny veins flowing with red blood.

  **Look.**

  Beyond the filmy membrane was the world I knew, and a yard, and a house I knew extremely well, an overcast winter day. On the porch much of the ranked Shadowless watched a solemn conversation between two smaller groups of wolves.

  “Kiery,” I breathed the name of the SableFur Oracle, who stood to one side, while Gabel and Flint stood to the other. She had been Anita’s replacement as SableFur’s serving Oracle, and she had also been one of my teachers. Between them was... me.

  On my knees, in the snow, hands behind my back.

  Kiery was saying something. I shoved my whole face against the membrane.

  **The words are not important.**

  My fingers dug into the membrane, trying to puncture it and rip through it to stop whatever was happening.

  **It cannot be stopped.**

  I understood then that this was a thing that would come to pass. Something the Moon Herself would see come to be.

  Whatever Future Gabel was saying to Future Me twisted our Bond. I felt the words and regret and anguish and I clung to the membrane, sobbing.

  Other Me screamed and wept.

  Kiery directed two SableFur warriors pull me off my knees and take me away. Long chains twisted with fangs dragged behind me, endless and impossibly long.

  I stabbed and pulled and punched the membrane, but the scene did not change.

  Defeated, I pled, “Why?”

  **Look.**

  The membrane shifted, rotated, and in the dark murkiness, a single vein extended from the edge of the membrane, to the other side, thick and pulsing.

  The Bond. My Bond with Gabel.

  A blue thread of light drifted down, draped itself across the Bond like a string, wrapped twice, then yanked tight by unseen hands.

  The Bond shuddered. Each end surged with pressure but the constriction point did not budge.

  ** Look **

  I waited for the Bond to wither from lack of blood flow, but it did not. The agony was excruciating, the Bond should have died, but the blue thread did not let it die anymore than it let it thrive.

  “I don’t understand,” I wept to the voice.

  The contents of the membrane shifted again, this time splitting into two panes. In one pane I saw Future Gabel once more speaking to Future Me. In the other pane, the blue cord suffocated the Bond.

  At that moment of constriction Other Me screamed, and Other Gabel turned away, but put his hand on Flint’s shoulder to brace himself against the agony.

  **All must believe. Even the two of you must only have faith left.**

  “Why?” I wept to the voice I had known my entire life and never heard in words before now.

  **Change from within and without. You will understand when it comes to pass. Do not fight it. Your hearts will break, the pain will be great, you will both despise Me for this, but you must each be in the place where I need you most.**

  “And this isn’t together?”

  **Not in body.**

  I sobbed.

  The warmth overpowered me, and the liquid flooded my body again.

  I woke up screaming.

  I flailed, screaming, sobbing, sunlight stabbing into my eyes, and rough hands grabbed me.

  “What were you doing?!”

  Gabel’s voice.

  I grabbed at him. “Gabel!”

  He was shouting, almost shaking me, his fingers clamped over my biceps with fury. “I found you in here with that goddamn stone again and—”

  “The Moon. She—” I stopped. Where the hell was Flint? Had Flint really been here and handed me the stone? I struggled to sit up all the way.

  I was in the office, bright daylight, no moon hanging just outside. I blinked, the rush of blood and air bitterly cold, and I shuddered all over.

  “This,” Gabel yanked one of my bruised wrists to his lips, kissed it, “this is—”

  “Shackles,” I whispered. My skin was blue and purple and rubbed raw from the chains in my vision. The skin between my breasts had burn marks in the shape of the tourmaline edges where I had clutched it to me.

  The spear had fallen to the side. I reached for it.

  Gabel snatched it and flung it away. It smashed into the bookshelf and then to the floor, splintering the wood panels. “I am throwing that into the river!”

  “No, no!” I knew he couldn’t. He’d need it. I didn’t know why or how, I just knew he’d need it. “You can’t! I don’t know why, Gabel, but you can’t! I am going to be taken soon and you need it with you and—”

  “Taken! Taken where?!”

  “The SableFur.”

  “What are you talking about? Did you hit your head?” He grabbed my hair and yanked my head towards him, examining me all over for bumps and gashes. “No one is taking you anywhere! Especially not the Moon-damned SableFur! I will die before the SableFur get their hands on you!”

  “You’ll have to let them take me.”

  “The fuck I will!” He gathered me up in his arms, ignoring my resistance, got to his feet and stormed down the hallway.

  “Where are you—” the rocking motion of being carried made me a little woozy, my brain sort of sloshed and a queasy feeling grabbed my stomach. Gabel’s anger rose hot and thick into my nose. He kicked open the door to our room, carried me into the bathroom, and before I realized what was happening, he had stepped into the shower and cold wa
ter splattered both of us.

  He set me down when my squirming and squealing convinced him I was coherent.

  “This is absurd.” I tried to get out of the shower. He grabbed me and didn’t let go.

  “Are you awake yet?” he growled.

  “I was awake the moment I woke up! Gabel, I’m freezing.” I shivered and my teeth chattered. Unlike the previous time, I had returned to this world with almost total clarity.

  “You were gone again.” He clutched me against his chest and pinned us both under the ice-cold water. “You hate that tourmaline, and I find you with it?!”

  “How long was I gone?” I tried to push away from him because, dammit, the water was cold!

  “Two days! You beg me to come to bed so you can sneak off to that damn stone?!”

  He thought I was the one out of her mind, well, he wasn’t making much sense ranting and shouting under the water and grabbing me like he was going to shake all the sense clear out of me.

  “What did you ask it?” He grabbed my face in his hands. “Tell me what you asked it.”

  I tried to paw at his flailing, grabbing hands but it didn’t work. His frantic anger made me dizzy. “I didn’t ask it anything! The Moon made me.”

  “The Moon made you.” Scorn dripped from his voice. “Bullshit the Moon made you.”

  “She called me to Her. So I’d know what is coming. What can’t be changed.”

  “No,” Gabel said. “No, Gianna. No. Visions of the future are what might happen. Not what will happen.”

  “Not this future. Not this one, Gabel. The SableFur will come for me. Kiery will come with them. You’ll repudiate me—”

  “No!” Gabel shouted and shoved us both under the icy water again. “No! I will not!”

  I squirmed out from under the water, gasping, “The Moon needs you to. The SableFur will take me with them!”

  “Why?!”

  “She told me for change within and without. She wants me inside SableFur, and you outside, and everyone to believe that our Bond has been broken. But it won’t be. You’ll speak the words, but She won’t sever it. It will hurt. Everyone has to believe it. Even we have to know only on faith! It’ll happen at Shadowless, very soon.”