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Some blood splattered his shirt. His cheek throbbed and felt warm—he must have gotten cut when he took that elbow. No matter. The fight was over. These wolves were beaten.
He pulled off his shirt and went back to the bed he’d claimed. Ignored the scent of blood and defeat and resentment and anger. This wouldn’t be the end of it, but it would be the end for tonight.
Lies
Elder Luna Marcella of AmberHowl was talking, but her words didn’t make any sense.
Clearly, I’d died back in New York and had been burned along with the Christmas tree and its candy canes and my pack had consumed my portion of the leftover turducken, and now this was some sort of strange test from Gaia at Judgement.
Given how badly my side hurt, and how bitten in two I vaguely recalled being, stood to reason I was very dead. Except if I was dead, why was the hair dangling in front of my face brown and not red?
Had Sterling, SnowFang, all of that—been some sort of weird delusion I’d had while in a coma?
Because what Marcella was telling me made it sound like I’d just lived some other very strange life, and I’d always been an AmberHowl, and I’d taken a nasty blow to the head.
She seemed to know I didn’t have a very good grip on reality from the way she sat patiently in an uncomfortable-looking chair, hands folded neatly in her lap, one knee over the other. She was wearing heels with no stockings. Her shoes had bright red soles.
Fabulous. Reminded me of the heels Gazelle had picked out for me.
My brain stumbled through a forest of cobwebs. “Sterling.”
“It’s best if you don’t think of him,” Marcella said.
Speakinghurt, and took way more energy than it should. “Is he real?”
Give me a bonus point for surprising Marcella. She twitched like a bug had just bumped into her face. “Yes, he’s real. He’s alive.”
“Am I dead?”
She had clearly come prepared with an extra helping of patience. “No, you’re alive.”
Had we had this conversation before? Maybe. It seemed like things I already knew. So this was all “real” and Marcella wasn’t Gaia wearing a mortal skin to test me on something. Which also meant that pain in my side was real,andI’d just been told to not think about Sterling.
“And he’s my mate?” I managed to twitch my left hand and raise my head enough to look at the fingers. My wedding rings were missing. My acrylics had been pulled off, with no evidence they’d ever been there at all. The skin had lingering bruises. My right hand hurt when I flexed my fingers. Broken bones from the fight in the locker room, or somewhere else? And my hair appeared to be the wrong color. I was also not in a hospital, but a small, private clinic. And my brain was trapped in that cobweb forest and rolled around pathetically trying to make it make sense.
“It’s best if you don’t think of him,” she repeated.
My brain ground forward through the cobwebs. I’d been bitten in two by a bear, recently stitched back together, and my life in SnowFang mated to a strange wolf named Sterling Mortcombe had been a coma-delusion. And I’d been talking enough nonsense my Luna was up to date on my fantasy life. I wasactuallyWinter of AmberHowl.
Reassuring and crushing. That meant therewasn’ta war brewing in the arctic, the mate I lovedwasn’tgoing to duel a near-Elder Alpha in the summer, my father hadn’t sold and abandoned me, I hadn’t been cut with silver, and I wasn’t trapped in a political hellscape with my species on the line. I was some common wolf in an Elder Pack and my Luna was trying to explain something to me about my upcoming mating to the secondary First Beta, Searle.
Which was good in the sense thatthank Gaia, I don’t have to deal with any of that shit. But sad because if Sterling was alive and real andnotmy mate, I’d been crushing on him while I had an upcoming mating to Searle. And I only vaguely knew who Searle was, and I’d never met him, which meant I’d either lost my memory or a good old dose of “Alpha Wisdom” had decided we were mates.
It sat like glass shards in my brain, and the glass shards didn’t have the decency to cut through the cobwebs. So now I was rolling around in cobwebsandglass.
It was just not my day. Week. Month. Whatever.
But this didn’t feel right. She didn’tfeellike my Luna, and I didn’tfeellike AmberHowl or SilverPaw. Ifeltthe imprint ofSnowFangon my instincts.
Marcella paused in her attempt to explain whatever this situation was with this wolf named Searle.
I summoned my pain tolerance and energy to shift my left arm forward enough so I could try to look down at it. My side howled in pain, stitches pulled and tore,everythinghurt. Even moving sucked energy right out of my marrow.
A silver scar, still red and angry and in the crude shape of FrostFur’s sigil marred my skin.
My brain flailed in its cobweb and glass trap while nothing made sense.
“Sterling,” I rasped at her. “Where. Is. Sterling.”
