Iron Oracle

by Merry Ravenell

  He wasn’t listening, and I was sick of this nonsense. I shoved him off me. “Are you afraid now that I have a choice I might choose him? That maybe I won’t want you back?”

  Gabel snarled, “So we’re back to that, are we?”

  “You always do this! You always focus on the small thing instead of the big thing. Let Aaron make all the noise he damn well pleases if it gets us what we want!”

  “And how much dishonor must I suffer to know my Luna fucked the IceMaw Alpha?”

  “I am not your Luna and I haven’t done anything! I haven’t even kissed him! You repudiated me, remember?! I have no pack, I have no Mark, I have no mate!”

  “Haven’t even! So you thought about it, you just haven’t gotten around to it?!”

  “No!”

  “I am going to rip that Moon’s Eye out with both hands and piss in the socket!” He surged to his feet, the petals a storm around us and the void hot and burning with his rage. “I am not doing this to not have you back, Gianna! I will get you back, or I will rip the cosmos apart!”

  “Speaking of that,” I interjected, wanting to not talk about Aaron and remembering we had actual things to talk about and I didn’t want to argue in the grove with the little time we had left. “You need to stop telling people you’re going to punch the Moon in the Eye.”

  “Why? That is exactly what I’m going to do. Now more than before! Now I am going to plunge both claws in at once!”

  “Because it doesn’t make any sense. To everyone but you, me, Flint, and Hix you’re the one who repudiated me because I betrayed my Oracle vows. Why are you mad at the Moon? Kiery and Lucas are on to me, they just can’t prove anything because my Mark is gone, but it’s stirring up questions.”

  “Good.” Gabel glowered. “It should.”

  “Adrianna is going to go for my throat. The instant she decides that I’m less trouble dead than alive, she’ll kill me.”

  Gabel shrugged, dismissing this new threat with terrifying disregard. “The bell’s been rung, buttercup. I can’t stop now. I’m sure you’re a match for Adrianna.”

  “And if I’m not I was never worthy of being your Luna at all?”

  He ignored me. “After Shadowless, there is nothing left to distract me. I will come for SableFur because there is no where left for me to waste my time.” He curled his lips at me, exposing teeth that extended into hungry fangs. “I will rip Magnes into pieces and put a crown of his bones on my head.”

  “Ready or not, here you come?” I didn’t want to think about crowns or bones. There seemed to be only a crown for me.

  “Unless you have something else to distract me.” He lifted my hands in his. “Who did this to you, buttercup? I’ll start with them.”

  “Nobody. I cut myself holding a mirror.”

  “The Moon once more. I will start with Her,” Gabel growled. “You do look unwell, buttercup.”

  “You look like shit yourself.”

  “Do I? I think I look the part of the King-Alpha setting his kingdom in order for the return of his Queen. Marked with the glory of pain, and savoring it. I am alive to feel the pain. I am alive to know pain when my enemies only know coldness and death, parted from their broken bodies.” Gabel kissed the bloody bandages.

  I lunged forward and kissed him, holding onto him with my battered hands and trying to push the memory of the crown on the altar out of my mind. Gabel couldn’t be dead. No, that’s not what it meant. I knew that.

  Then what did it mean? I didn’t care about being a Queen!

  “I doubt the Moon-Bitch will give us enough time.” He told me as he pressed me into the soft ground.

  “Maybe if you didn’t insult Her,” I chided him.

  He kissed my throat, his tongue moving in a quick swirl around the hollow of my throat, then moved lower. “Have you missed me, buttercup?”

  “Less talking.”

  “We are short on time, aren’t we?” he lifted his gaze to the rotating heavens. “And I want you to remember my name when Aaron takes you to bed.”

  He pulled me back into the pile of petals. For a few moments his eyes reflected the stars and they circled his pupils, points of light orbiting a black hole. His hands gripped my thighs and pulled me astride him while he kissed me hungrily.

  “I’ll forgive your curiosity,” he whispered as he slid my body higher on his, and guided his cock into me. I arched my back and shuddered. His hands grasped my breasts, his thumbs rubbed my nipples, and I braced my bandaged hands on his strong chest. Blood smeared his skin. Traced the rivulets and patterns of scars on his chest. Like blood flowing through veins.

  “I’m not curious about him,” I gasped as I sank down his full length. My spine drew into a tight bow, and I cried out, the Bond surging and alive again. I opened my eyes. The heavens rotated above us. “I don’t want to talk about him. Fuck me until I can’t see straight.”

  Laughter. “The mouth on you. Look at me, buttercup. Not at Her.”

  I obeyed, breathing hard. His fingers dug into my hips, roughly guiding my motion on his cock. Petals rained around us in an unseen breeze. Drifted and stuck to the blood smeared on his chest. Hot starlight coiled inside me, tightening and tightening like a serpent about to strike.

  “Don’t hold back,” he groaned. One of his hands raked my breasts, twisted a nipple, sent a shock of pain/pleasure through both of us.

  The serpent struck both of us, blinding and aching, I opened my mouth to scream, everything fractured—

  I woke in a bed that wasn’t mine. In a room that wasn’t mine. Naked, except for changed wraps on my hands.

  With a throbbing bruise on my shoulder, and a matching one on my hip, and my thighs sticky.

  And First Beta Lucas looking at me from the foot of his bed.

  Back of Beyond

  In my memory, I had been with Gabel, in the grove, and it was his seed on my thighs.

  But I was in Lucas’ bed?

  Terror lashed my heart to a crazy rhythm that left me faint and struggling to breathe. Had I done something with Lucas believing he had been Gabel?

  Lucas, right ankle perched on left knee, sat in a chair at the foot of his bed.

  Paralyzed and confused, I didn’t dare say anything. My brain sloshed and throbbed against the inside of my skull, and I felt feverish, like I had been in the sun too long. The sticky, dried feeling on my thighs needled me. What had I done? Who had done it? How? Had it been Gabel?

  It had to have been Gabel.

  Had I been... writhing about moaning in the flesh and they had come in and found me like that? How mortifying.

  Did they think I was sleeping with a SableFur? That a SableFur had had his way with me?

  And if I could have sex with Gabel in the grove... how would I explain if I got pregnant?

  Oh shit.

  Could I get pregnant? If Gabel had me in the grove, could I get pregnant in the real world? What would that mean if we conceived a child? Would the baby be normal?

  Well, I’d be gone from SableFur by then, one problem solved, and Gabel would know how, even if nobody believed us. Who cared about that. I wasn’t Gabel’s mate right now, so if I conceived a child outside of the matebond and he claimed it... big deal. People might actually be soothed if they thought Gabel claimed my offspring but it wasn’t biologically his.

  Why, though, was I in the middle of Lucas’ bed?

  The RedWater wolves slept on the floor. Could they tell me what had happened?

  Lucas did have very soft sheets. They were bleach-white, but didn’t smell freshly washed, and he had a rather plain quilt that his grandma had probably made for him as a kid stretched over top. The rest of the room was the sort of messy-clean I’d have expected from a confirmed (if reluctant) bachelor.

  We stared at each other.

  No way. I was not talking first. I knew this tactic, and I felt shitty enough that talking was an effort. He observed how I looked about, pale, stricken, confused, my reactions told him a ton of stuff. He was the on
e who needed to start explaining. How, why, when... and had it been Gabel I had been with, or someone else.

  “Nice bruises,” he said.

  I stayed quiet.

  He glared at me. It was not feigned.

  “What day is it?” I decided to ask. Speaking made me swoon into the pillows.

  “You’ve been gone for three days.” His voice reached me across the roar in my ears.

  Three days.

  Three days. If I had been gone for three days, then Magnes and Adrianna had to know. Oh, passing these tests had become elementary now. They probably wanted me gone. Why had the Moon wasted so much time taking me to the temple?!

  Lucas stood up. He retrieved something from the top drawer of a small table and walked over to me.

  He dropped the small bag of items and leaned down, arms on either side of me and shoved his face in mine.

  I shoved myself back against the pillows. He leaned closer, staring at something on my face. He placed his hand over my left eye and pulled the lids apart. I screeched and tried to yank away, he grabbed my neck and shoved me down, pinning me by my throat. My eye dried and started to water.

  “What the hell is that!” Lucas snarled.

  I couldn’t breathe. What the hell was what?! My ears hummed and I gagged. Romero had tried to strangle me. I clawed at Lucas with my bandaged hands and tried to kick him. “Get off me!”

  He yanked his hands away. He snatched the bag off my lap, upended it and shook the items out. The runestones and the shard of mirror. He grabbed the mirror and shoved it at me. “Look.”

  Shaking, I picked up the mirror, the prickle of its power intact, and raised it to my face. In the pitted, rust-marked surface I immediately saw what he was talking about. The bottom of my left eye’s iris was pocked with a white-grey crescent moon. The tips of the moon pointed upwards to cup my pupil, while the fat curve dipped downward, and it floated in a field of hazel.

  What is happening to me?

  Is this the price I pay for using the tourmaline?

  I looked at Lucas, shaken and trying to hide it, but it’s hard to hide how shaken you are when you’re actually shaking.

  He pointed at the items. “Tell me what they mean.”

  “You know what they mean.” He had been at dinner. His beloved Kiery had translated them, even if she had spared him the purest translation.

  “Tell me the secret,” he snarled. “Tell me why a war is about to break out, and no one but me seems to recognize it. Gabel did exactly what you said he’d do. Yesterday evening he took his forces out of GleamingFang, all his forces, and right now is razing Shadowless. Aaron is in RedWater. GleamingFang is undefended but Aaron’s not taking it. And you, in deep meditation clutching a tourmaline with bruises forming on your body as it happened, and then reeking of sex, and now your eye.”

  Reeking of sex? Awkward. Verrrry awkward. So Lucas had brought me down to his bed to watch me, and while he had been watching me—

  Oh my.

  Oh my.

  Was there wet spot on his sheets?

  Maybe one day we’d look back at this and laugh... but probably not.

  Ana would laugh. She’d laugh at this, funny or not, no matter what. Because on some level, this was sort of cosmically, horribly, hilarious.

  “Ask Anita.” I touched my eyelashes and looked again at my marked eye. What was the Moon doing? One of the RedWater wolves got up onto the bed and curled up next to me. The frigid, icy tips of his fur made me shiver.

  “Oh, I’m going to ask Anita.” He took the mirror, and the stones back. “I’m going up there today to ask her.”

  He leaned close again, sniffing my neck, my shoulders. He looked me full in the face, his features having taken on a darkness that bespoke a coming shift. He yanked the blankets off me and shoved my thighs apart. I kicked. He slammed my legs to the mattress.

  The thing about... that stuff... is that it doesn’t dry clear. It sort of looks like dried toothpaste. And my thighs were still streaked.

  Lucas needed absolutely no more confirmation at all something completely fucked up was going on his pack, and the scent of his prestige, authority and fury erupted into my nose. He snarled, looking between my eye and my thighs, teeth elongating into fangs as he tried to sort out who the threat was, what it was, and what he had to protect his pack.

  Oh shit.

  Oh shit shit shit shit.

  “Do not move,” he growled.

  Lucas wasn’t nearly as fearsome as Gabel, but that made him even more dangerous. Gabel’s rage ran deep, his violence intense, but it didn’t lash out into all directions like a panicked, angry ocean. Gabel was always in control. Gabel delighted in being the master of fear and pain.

  Lucas was spooked and all his male instincts—and probably the ones that told him Kiery was his mate, even though she rejected the terms—were on high alert. I was the outsider. I was the harbinger.

  Lucas hadn’t decided who needed to die.

  I didn’t think he’d be willing to hear Magnes.

  Lucas stormed out of his rooms. He was gone long enough I debated if I wanted to get out of bed, but he had told me to not move, and he had meant it, and I didn’t really want to end up with a claw in my gut. But I decided that I was going to get up and get the stuff off my thighs. Moving probably meant leave my rooms, not literally stay on the bed.

  My head swam as I stood up. I caught myself and stumbled towards the bathroom. My hip had a huge lump on it, all black-red from dried blood and it hurt like hell, and my shoulder matched, sending throbbing pain through my fevered body.

  “I do look like shit,” I told my reflection. I looked like I had been sick for weeks, and now my eye. I found a washcloth and dabbed at my thighs.

  Just a little while longer. Soon it would be over. Now things were moving on their own, and I just needed to catch up and steer.

  Maybe sex with Gabel had been a bad idea.

  If it had been Gabel at all. Well, if Lucas had been staring at me and there wasn’t anyone on me... then it either had to have been Lucas or Gabel, and I didn’t think it was Lucas, which brought me back to the same question of where was the grove, and what happened if I conceived a pup in there?

  One of the RedWater wolves followed me.

  “He didn’t... you know... did he?” I asked the wolf. “I mean, Lucas.”

  The wolf shook his head.

  Okay, not that that had seemed remotely possible. Lucas was in love with Kiery. Maybe he occasionally kept someone else’s company, but he wasn’t the sort of sleezeball who preyed on incapacitated women.

  Romero had been that kind of sleezeball.

  The door to the rooms opened and Lucas came in carrying some of my clothing. “What are you doing?”

  “Cleaning up,” I retorted. I tossed the washcloth into the bathtub and carefully stood. “Or do you think I want to walk around with gunk on my legs?”

  “I’d like to know who your spirit-lover is.” Lucas threw the wad of clothing on the bed. “Get dressed.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “We’re going to go see Anita.”

  “How have you explained a naked me in your bed to Kiery?”

  “I don’t have to explain who I sleep with to Kiery,” Lucas growled.

  “I think you do,” I needled him. “Does she know where we’re going, or are you keeping that from her? It’s Oracle business, isn’t it?”

  “Get dressed.”

  “What is Magnes going to say when you disappear with me?” Anita lived hours away. Lucas couldn’t just disappear without tipping his hand to Magnes.

  “I think he’s busier summoning Aaron here for an explanation on why Aaron hasn’t attacked GleamingFang.”

  “Aaron isn’t empire building.”

  “He took Gabel’s southern holdings, but he won’t take GleamingFang when it’s undefended?”

  “You aren’t there. You don’t know what the situation on the ground is.”

  “Get dressed.” He sat
down in his chair to watch. “We’ll leave when you’re ready. Oh, and be ready in ten minutes.”

  Lucas wasn’t one for conversation. I put my feet on the dashboard and stared out the window as he drove us to Anita’s. Talk about a place I never wanted to be again.

  Ever.

  “You aren’t acting like a Queen Luna.” Lucas observed about two hours into the drive.

  “I’m not a Queen Luna.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Damn sure.” I rubbed my lips with my index finger and tried not to think about the bone crown with its veins of blood. Bones had a blood supply. The crown had been a living thing, now that I had had a few uninterrupted hours to think about it.

  Which made me more convinced (and terrified) than ever that it was my crown.

  But where was Gabel’s crown? And there had been no bowls. There had been the set of runestones: three by three, three runes, three sets of stones. Obsidian, tourmaline, clear quartz.

  I pondered the selection of clear quartz over milky white quartz. I didn’t understand the symbolism. Clear quartz meant that to use the stone you usually had to tilt it towards the light to see the carving to indicate what the stone’s rune was. Why not just use milky quartz? Most of the quartz runestones I had seen had been the milky variety.

  Flint would know.

  Lucas snorted.

  “Do you see a Mark? Do I look like a Queen to you?” I growled at him. “I give exactly no shits about being a Queen. The only reason I got dragged into that conversation was because of Gabel.”

  “So what is Anita going to tell me?”

  “Like hell I know. I’ll be interested to hear it myself.”

  “You know what all this is about.” He pounded his fist on the steering wheel. “You know, Gianna! You know why all this is happening.”

  “I only know part of it. I haven’t figured out the rest. But aren’t you a smart First Beta, figuring out that Anita is the key to it. Probably.” I was so not in the mood, I had a headache, and the Moon showing me a crown meant for my head but not Gabel’s was not cool. I did not want to be a Queen Luna, or a Lady Luna or even a Luna.