Fade (27 page)

Said descendant angel came through the door first, and like he had in my kitchen, walked immediately to Chelle’s side, his eyes already trained on her and her alone. The display was as beautiful and as private today as it had been in my kitchen so many days ago.

I averted my eyes only to find Dace’s gaze trained on me in exactly the same way. The way he looked at me sent something soft and warm running through me. We stared at one another for a long moment as I drank in the sight of him. I didn’t think I would ever, could ever, get used to him. He looked exhausted, with faint shadows around those glorious green eyes, but not even sleeplessness made him any less breathtaking. I’d probably seen hundreds of guys as gorgeous as him in my life, but that changed nothing. Dace alone stole my breath.

“Hey,” I murmured, hoping he didn’t hear the awed quality to my voice.

“Hey,” he murmured back, amusement glinting in his eyes.

Damn. Had he heard my thoughts? Or was he just responding to my greeting? Did it matter?

“How is the pack today?” The worried question bounced around in the back of my mind all the time since I met Buka.

“All safe.” He reached out, gently tugging on a lock of my hair.

I sighed, grateful for his answer. Buka and Kalei, even that unnamed wolf, were all okay. No one had been killed because of me.

“Buka was outside the house this morning,” I told him, pitching my voice low so as not to interrupt the reunion occurring on the other side of the small table.

I saw that reunion out of the corner of my eye. Gage squatted in front of Chelle, his large hands upon her cheeks. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against his. I had absolutely no doubts that they had been made for each other. Did Dace and I look like that to the casual observer?

“Not Buka,” Dace said, recapturing my full attention. “Kalei.”

“Kalei?” My eyebrows shot up. Why in the world would—?

“Your dreams,” he answered my unspoken question, leaning against the wall beside my chair.

I turned more fully in his direction.

“What about my dreams?” My brow furrowed as I tried to sort out what he meant. I remembered those dreams vividly, and they unnerved me as much as ever, but I didn’t see how Kalei knew about them.

“You dream loudly,” Dace said after a minute. I opened my mouth to ask what exactly that meant, but he forestalled me, holding up one finger as if asking me to please let him finish. “I’ve been watching them. There was something there.” He frowned and tilted his head from side to side as he tended to do when he couldn’t figure out something. “I shared them with Kalei.”

“You shared my dreams with Kalei?” I didn’t quite shout the words, but I might as well have done so.

Gage and Chelle both jumped and turned in our direction.

I cringed in silent apology.

“It was important,” Dace said, shrugging one shoulder.

Ugh.

“They were my dreams, Dace,” I enunciated each word carefully, calmly.

“I know that.” He seemed faintly amused again, as if he couldn’t figure out why I’d be upset with him sharing my dreams with Kalei without even asking me.

The urge to kick him resurfaced.

“But I needed her opinion.”

“What did you see?” Gage asked before I could yell at Dace.

“A myth,” Dace answered. He cocked his head to the side, looking at me. “More than one, actually. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I never know what you’re talking about,” I grumbled, feeling petulant.

He nodded as if he expected that answer. “Do you remember the story of Sköll and Hati?”

“The wolves that swallow the Sun and Moon and usher in Ragnarök?” I asked, my nose twitching in distaste. As if the world ending in a great battle pitting brother against both didn’t suck enough, it supposedly had to die in total darkness, too. Ever since Dad told me the myth years ago, I’d hated it.

“Yes,” Dace said. “Do you remember that part of your dream?”

I froze as realization dawned. The twin wolves chasing something came looming into sharp focus. The fear that we were doomed if they caught what they were chasing, the unease they made me feel … I shivered at the memory.

Dace took my reaction as confirmation. “You dreamed of Fenrir and what Ragnarök is supposed to look like, too. Remember the giant wolf snapping the thin chain? Fire exploding into the sky and the world drowning in rain?”

My skin crawled as he recalled those images to the surface of my mind. They disturbed me. A lot. Particularly the massive wolf snapping the little chain binding him and tearing through the earth. Even in my dream, the world quaked when that chain snapped, like it knew something terrible had happened, and it trembled in fear.

“What did Kalei think about her dreams?” Gage asked.

Dace caught my eyes, his expression somber. “That’s why she was out there this morning. She wanted to keep watch.”

“For what?” I asked, scared I already knew the answer. Scared that this is what I’d been waiting for. What I’d been certain was coming for me and Dace.

“To see if Sköll and Hati came,” he answered quietly. “She thinks you dream true and they’re coming.”

That dormant part of me that I’d felt at the rave surged forward as soon as he said it, knocking me breathless as it screamed in defiance in my head. I swayed in my chair, my vision blackening.

Dace and his wolf both sat up a little straighter in my mind.

The thing inside me snarled.

“Don’t!” I warned Dace, gripping the arms of the chair when his fear surged sharply upward. I might as well not have spoken at all.

His wolf slipped his bonds so quickly, so powerfully, Dace didn’t even have a chance to stop him. The animal raced into my mind as if he’d been called to battle.

My head snapped back on my neck beneath the force of his arrival. I cried out, jarred.

Dace’s wolf growled, throwing himself between me and the animal inside me as if to shield me from it.

The thing raging inside me stopped moving, stopped breathing, and then ever so slowly, turned its attention toward Dace’s wolf.

Their eyes met.

Recognition slammed into me like a shot from a bow.

They knew one another. Remembered one another.

Dace’s wolf and my animal didn’t make a sound or do anything. Both, I think, were too shocked to move. Didn’t matter though. Memory ripped through me, everything my dreams tried telling me sweeping through me like a tsunami.

Images, feelings, and memories poured through me. A slideshow of still frames, brief moments, and sensation after sensation played behind my eyes. There was Dace’s wolf and my own running together, hunting together, mating. In every life they’d lived, they’d been side by side. And so had Dace and I.

Those images came, too. Bright, vivid. Burning like the sun. Me and him walking, talking, laughing, crying, making love, and raising children. Always together. Lifetime upon lifetime of us.

Love poured through me in waves, love for him and his wolf, and theirs for me and the wolf buried inside me. Millenniums’ worth of emotion, locked inside, growing, changing, stronger in each life. Complex, powerful, and beautiful. God, so beautiful.

I’d always loved Dace. Always.

The memories flickered faster and faster, the images becoming disturbing. Dace’s wolf roaring as the black twins hamstringed me. Mine screaming in defiance as the black twins attacked Dace. Packs of wolves falling beneath the might of those beasts. Me and Dace shifting to fight Sköll and Hati off. Both of us bleeding, both of us dying.

The sense of dread washing through me felt like acid eating me from the inside out. Kalei was wrong, so wrong. The wolf buried inside me had tried to show me this for the last two weeks, but I hadn’t understood soon enough. Hadn’t put the pieces together fast enough.

Sköll and Hati weren’t coming.

They were already here, and they were here for me and Dace.

Chapter Eighteen

T
he crack between my mind and Dace’s disappeared with so much force, my teeth rattled again. My chair flew backward across the room, pulling a cry from Dace’s lips. I hit the floor hard.

Dace dropped to his knees beside me, his beautiful emerald eyes full of fear. “Arionna?”

For a minute, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe. I could only lie there, staring up at him in stunned silence. I felt shredded, and not like at the rave either. This wasn’t physical, but emotional, visceral.

The love I felt for Dace and his wolf overwhelmed me. So did theirs for me. And I’d had lifetimes of that. Hundreds upon hundreds of lives by his side. I’d been right on the quad that day: I did know Dace. I’d known him for millennia.

“I’m okay,” I whispered, holding out my hand for him to help me up.

He took it carefully, as if uncertain whether he should, and then lifted me to my feet when nothing freaky happened. I swayed as blood rushed through me, and steadied myself against Dace. He pulled me into his chest and held me close, wrapping his frame around mine protectively. His heart hammered beneath my ear, and I knew he felt an eon’s worth of emotion, too; he’d seen everything I’d seen.

“We were mated,” I whispered, tears in my eyes. Love still coursed through my veins, thick ropes of intricate emotion pulsing in time to my heartbeat, in time to his heartbeat beneath my fingertips. Powerful and beautiful. An aria sung to the heavens and whispered across time, pure and perfect.

He nodded once. “We were.”

I closed my eyes, his awe coursing through me alongside mine. Knowing he felt the same thing running through him brought peace and terror at once. Peace because, for once, we were on exactly the same page. Terror because whoever we were, whatever we were … we were tied to Sköll and Hati as tightly as we were to one another.

We were supposed to stop them, and I was broken. Not who I needed to be. My wolf remained buried in there somewhere, unable to come forward completely. My legs trembled beneath me, and it felt as if the world trembled too.

“You don’t know that,” Dace whispered, tightening his arms around me. Fear flowed down our bond, his emotions too powerful for him to wall them up and hide them from me.

“Don’t I?” I asked. I felt Chelle’s and Gage’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t turn around and face them yet. If meeting Dace changed my entire world, what just went through me knocked it completely out of orbit.

For days, I’d wondered what I was. I’d tried desperately to believe Dace when he said I felt only a memory of who I’d been in some other life. In a way, he’d been right. What I felt in those deep-down places was a memory. But in all the ways that mattered, he’d been dead wrong, too.

I was supposed to be like him. The world
needed
me to be like him. And for some reason, I wasn’t.

That scared me more than anything else ever had.

“Sköll and Hati are here?” Chelle asked once Dace and I calmed down enough to tell them what happened.

Dace had his fingers laced securely with mine, and I held on to him as if he were a lifeline. I think he might have been the only thing keeping me grounded. The feel of his skin on mine, and the way he sat at my side as if to shield me with his body, held me together better than anything else. The powerful emotions were less all consuming, but I still felt shaken and stripped bare. How had I never realized what Dace meant to me? And what did that mean for us now?

I wished I knew the answers to both of those questions, but I didn’t.

“I thought they were a myth. There’s no way they can swallow the sun and the moon,” Chelle said.

“They don’t have to swallow the sun and the moon literally,” Dace told her. “When myths are passed down through the ages, what is real and what isn’t gets obscured or embellished. It’s a whole lot more impressive to say that two wolves are going to devour the sun and moon and cause the apocalypse than it is to say that two wolves are destined to kill two humans and cause the world to be reborn.”

“So they’re going to kill two humans?” Chelle asked him, clearly confused.

Dace shook his head, half rueful, half impatient. “In Norse mythology, Fenrir is a giant, a Titan. He grew so rapidly that the Norse gods feared him, so they tricked him. They told him they wanted to see if he could break every bond they placed him in. They forged the last bond,
Gleipner,
from nine intangible objects. When they brought it forth, Fenrir suspected the thin ribbon was magical, so he agreed to be tied only on the condition that at least one of the gods kept his or her hand between his jaws as a show of good faith. Tyr agreed to this and placed his hand in Fenrir’s mouth. When Fenrir realized he couldn’t get free, he bit off Tyr’s arm. The gods then attached the bond to
Gelgia
and drove it into a rock deep in the heart of the earth. Fenrir swore vengeance upon the gods if he ever got free.”