Page 84 of Feral Keep

“Here,” he says.

A root hollow. The base of a massive oak, the trunk split and regrown into a natural cavity large enough for both of us if I curl against his chest. The opening faces away from the path we’re walking. The interior is dry, and the tree-structure protects it from the wind. He moves to it. Begins shaping it—pulling loose material from the cavity, testing the walls, clearing the floor with his hands. The hands that build homes, building one here, now, in the middle of the canopy where the air smells like root-rot and growing things, for a single night.

I watch him work.

He’s the broadest Shade in the territory, his blood-crimson skin catching the last light like it’s storing it for the night, his white horns gleaming, his silver hair falling across his face as he bends to sweep debris from the hollow, his wing membranes folded against his back, the leathery surfaces flexing with his movements. The muscles underneath the skin move like they’re all connected. His tail sweeps the entrance, coiling around a branch and snapping it clear with the casual strength of something that weighs nine feet’s worth of matter.

Tomorrow I walk back into the worst place I’ve ever been. Tonight I sleep in a nest this man built me in under five minutes.

Watching his hands do this, quick and sure and gentle all at once, eases something in my stomach that’s been sitting tight since we left the warren this morning. It doesn’t erase the dread of tomorrow. It just sits next to it.

He lines the hollow with ferns. Layers them thick. Adds the fur he carried—rolled and strapped across his back, the one from the warren that smells like us: sex, smoke, the mineral warmth of his skin. He spreads it over the ferns and tests the give with his palm. Satisfied.

He turns to me. Opens one arm.

I go to him. Not because I need comfort. Because I want his body around mine the way I want food, air, heat. The hunger that hasn’t faded since the rut broke, the bone-deep need to be close, to feel the massive chest expand against my back with every breath.

He wraps around me in the hollow, the fur under us, the canopy darkening above. His arm rests over my belly, his knees drawn up behind mine, the impossible length of his body curving around my smaller frame. His wings fold forward, the membranes draping over us like a second blanket.

The smell of the camp reaches us.

Faint. Miles away still. But there—the specific stink of too many bodies in too little space, of chemical smoke from the generator, of cleared-and-regrowing vegetation, hacked and burned. A smell I know the way I know my own sweat. Four years of breathing it, my nose learning that scent-memory the way an animal learns its territory.

My body reacts before my mind does.

The flinch. The freeze. My muscles lock all at once—the large ones in my legs, the ones in my chest that control breathing—and my breathing goes shallow and fast, like I’m already running. It’s the automatic silence that kept me alive: don’t move, don’t make noise, the Eunuchs patrol at night and the ones who move get pulled from the barracks. My hands clench in the fur. My jaw locks so hard my teeth grind. The pregnancy weight in my belly suddenly feels like something trying to trap me, make me an easy target.

Red’s arm tightens.

Steady. The pressure of a body that already knows how to read mine, that answers before I know what I need. His mouth at the crown of my head. His breath in my hair. The low, sub-vocal rumble in his chest that isn’t language—it’s the sound he made during the rut when I woke from nightmares, the vibration that travels through his ribcage into my spine and tells my nervous system I’m here, I’m here, you’re held, you’re not alone in this.

His other hand moves to my belly. Spreads across the swell. Holds.

I breathe.

In. Out. The smell of camp on the air—diesel and human waste. His smell underneath it—blood-warm, mineral, the musk of a mated Shade that my body recognizes as safe in a way that goes deeper than thought, deeper than the fear. The two smells layered on each other. The old world and the new one, neither winning. Me caught between them.

“Still scares you,” he says, reading it plain on my skin.

“Yes.”

“Good.” His jaw is tight against my hair. His arm doesn’t loosen. “Scared—means you know what it is.”

He’s right. My eyes fall shut on it. The fear isn’t weakness. The fear is the memory of what the camp did to me, alive in my body, keeping me honest. I’m not walking into this blind. I’m walking into it knowing exactly what it costs.

His hand finds mine, the massive crimson fingers wrapping around my fist, loosening it, threading between my smaller fingers until our hands are locked. His thumb rests on my knuckle, the steady thud of his heartbeat through the contact, present, unmistakable. His heart is the size of my head, the blood moves through his body with the force of a young predator in his physical prime.

“Tomorrow,” I say.

“Tomorrow.”

I don’t reach for him tonight. He doesn’t reach for me. We lie in the root hollow with the smell of camp on the wind and the twins turning inside me and his hand holding mine. His wings fold around me—the membranes settling like a second fur, the delicate structures flexing gently. They’re not delicate at all. The wing-structure is designed to carry his full weight through air. But here, wrapped around me, they feel like the gentlest thing possible.

The canopy shifts above us. The dark comes complete and total. The kind of dark that only exists under a closed canopy, where the moon can’t reach. I can’t see my own hand in front of my face, but his heartbeat is there against my back, steady as a drum.

I don’t sleep for a long time. When I do, I dream about fences. But in the dream, they’re already torn open, and the women are walking through the gaps with their hands empty and their faces turned toward the canopy. They’re walking toward me. Lisa is in the lead. Gretchen behind her. The barracks women follow like they’ve been holding their breath for four years and they can finally breathe out.

Red’s arm is around me when I wake. The dawn is grey—that pre-light time when the canopy is still dark but you can feel the sun coming. The smell of camp is stronger. Close enough now that it’s not just a trace on the wind. It’s a thick presence, moving toward us.