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“Did you really sleep on the floor?”
“Only so many bunks. I’ve slept on less comfortable floors. Shower is down the hall to the left.” His amber eyes never left my face, but it was impossible to tell what he was really thinking.
I gathered up some fresh clothes from my bag. “I can tell something’s on your mind.”
“My mind is never empty.”
He offered no further insight into what was on his mind, simply observed as I gathered up my things to head to the shower.
As I squeezed around him, he captured the back of my calf. “Winter.”
A jolt went through me—shock, and under it,somethingreacted, sending another secondary jolt through my nerves right into my core, and a rush ran across my hips and thighs.
I yanked my leg out of his grip. My skin echoed with his grasp. It still burned,burned, as I plunged myself under the freezing cold shower, sweaty clothes and all.
The biting cold felt amazing, but didn’t sink past the surface of my skin, and my calf echoed from his touch.
“No, no,” I whispered, shaking under the freezing cold water. “This isn’t happening. I just slept too long.”
I soaked myself until my fingers turned white and lost feeling, but I wasn’t cold. Notinside.
I fumbled in my bag for panties and a smaller plastic bag I’d shoved deep into the corner. Without thinking, I swallowed three MoonDark edibles.
Not that MoonDark would stop anything if it’d already started.
But it was almost summer, not winter, and Sterling wasn’t nearby.
So I had to be wrong.
Icouldn’tbe going into heat.
The Law, In Liquid Form
Searle and two Archivists carefully looked through the next Collection, skimming for illuminations or key phrases in the high-prestige mating documents. Very occasional references tobathing in tearsoreating tearscontinued, but all mention and illumination of the limpets and vials were gone.
I tried not to think about the reverse sunburn feeling wrapping my entire body, or the muffled, muddled feeling as the MoonDark slid itself over me.
We located more records involving squabbles with statements likeno tears were shedorSo & So refused to shed tears, and they were always linked to the same Alpha of the era that was linked to the tear-baths.
The last contemporary mention of using the tears was around 1200, right before another major war. Around 1300, the Chronicler of the day had provided their own statement to a powerful Alpha’s embittered negotiations with another Alpha. The Chronicler, clearly a bit salty, had mentioned something to the effect ofgee, it’d be nice if we still had the vial. It was the only record we’d found mentioning the vial directly. She described it as containing a wondrous liquid that looked like spring and winter nights. A tiny drop of the liquid inside would dissolve a bond, or two drops (one on each partner) would create a bond, and that much blood had been shed over control of the vial. Its power was jealously guarded since there was no way to replenish the liquid. It basically read as the dark age version ofand this is why we can’t have nice things.
Then the account moved on to the more important matter of sheep and goat cheese.
After that, it disappeared from history.
“So… it… creates and destroys matebonds?” I asked nobody in particular. Maybe I sounded stupid. Between the MoonDark and unholy sunburn, Ifeltpretty stupid. But if the vial had been lost around 1200, that matched up fairly close to the records when I’d started to see more and more references to “Alpha wisdom” spotting a “weak” bond. Had everyone just played proper for a century or two, then given in to temptation?
“That’s what it sounds like,” one of the Archivists said, just as gobsmacked as me.
“But why the limpets?” I asked. “What did the limpets have to do with it?”
Demetrius, in another room, said, “I think I’ve found that.”
We shuffled into the other room, where Demetrius sat with an exquisite, ancient, seventh-century full-page illumination.
It was a night scene of a white she-wolf with blue eyes and very bloody paws frisking through a green meadow with a brown wolf. The she-wolf was depicted as nursing, and on the grass nearby were three fat puppies sleeping in a pile while the full moon was in the sky. In the background down the hillside, very small, were two dead human bodies with their wrists tied together by a multi-colored braided rope and covered in limpets. The puppies were newborn, eyes not open yet. Two silver-blues and a brown.
The full moon was depicted with a gold band around the middle, and the brown male wolf had the pendant (vial?) speared through his paw, while the white she-wolf had a hole in her paw. The blood trickled across the grass to the pups, and the grass had a smiling face on it.
