CHAPTER EIGHT

Now, more than ever, Ero realized he needed to find somewhere safe for Wren to stay.

And by somewhere safe he meant as far away from Ero as possible, when there was no way in all the heavens or hells that being around Ero was in any way safe for Wren. Ero had come down from that dark and twisted surge of bloodlust once.

But could he promise he’d do it again and again and again so long as Wren sacrificed his body to the beast, when the slightest stray papercut could bring that monster out again?

He glanced at Wren in the passenger’s seat of the Jeep. The omega had buried himself in Ero’s map books and a few other hardcover fiction books, sounding out words under his breath, the only sound filling the strained silence between them, easing it a bit with Wren’s preoccupation replacing the simmering, resentful hurt that made every small interaction so difficult. Just from listening it wasn’t hard to tell Wren was picking it up quickly, sounding out more and more difficult words only to suck in a soft breath of realization as he matched the words on the page with spoken vocabulary he already knew.

Good. Reading was a luxury these days, a skill not many had…and if he understood how to read, how to write, Wren would be able to find a job easily and look after himself.

And that was all Ero was worried about.

Not about letting the pretty omega go when Ero had just found him, and the wolf inside him howled that this one, this one was the one he was meant to mark and keep forever.

Wren had changed, days ago, into the clothing Ero had scavenged for him; he hadn’t been able to find anything cold-weather that would work for that slim frame without slowing him down if they needed to move, so he’d opted for layers instead…and rather regretted it now, when Wren made such a pretty bundle in the tight-fitting, heat-insulating compression shirt, short khaki shorts layered over a pair of sleek, leg-hugging black tights, scrunched black socks, pretty heeled boots. Were this the old world he might almost be fashionable, particularly with the oversized scarf draped around his shoulders and wrapped to form a mask and hood just like Ero’s. But it was those thighs that continued to tempt him, reminding him how they felt clasped around his waist as he sank deep into Wren’s body, as his knot swelled and locked, as he thrust hard enough to feel something inside the pretty omega shift and open for him to spill himself over and over again inside that waiting, receptive, entirely soft and luscious body.

What if Wren was already carrying his pups? There hadn’t been functioning condoms for centuries, though certain herbs could be drunk beforehand as a fairly effective contraceptive; they’d had neither, and had been tangled up and wild and…and…

No.

He was overthinking this. If Wren had conceived, Ero would have been able to smell it within hours.

He was just making up excuses not to let the omega go.

Wren glanced up from squinting at one of the maps—and caught Ero’s eye. The pretty omega flushed, but scowled, looking away sharply; it had been that way for the past two days, wounded pride and hurt feelings a stiff wall between them. But now, as he stared out over the road, he tensed, leaning forward as a faded, tilted green road sign came into view; Wren squinted at it, mouthing the letters, then perked, gasping, “I saw that on the map. It says Meridian!”

“It does.” Ero glanced down at the book open across Wren’s thighs. “That’s in Mississippi.”

Wren peered at the map, then ran a finger below the letters reading Mississippi. “And we were in…Alabama,” he sounded out slowly, then frowned. “But it’s all blue here.” He tapped the shaded-in bits covering most of the lower halves of both states. “How are there roads when it’s blue?”

“The roads are underwater now,” Ero answered. “And the cities they led to. It’s all one great inland sea with New Orleans floating in the middle of it, and from there it’s out into the Gulf of Mexico, the Central American archipelago…and then it’s nothing but the open Pacific all the way down to Antarctica and the Silk Islands.”

Wren’s brows knit into a puzzled little knot; he had this way of wrinkling right between his eyebrows and above his nose when he was thinking hard about something, that quick mind struggling to fill in the gaps in his knowledge with intuition. “I can’t picture that. I’ve never seen anything like that, and the map is just lines.”

“You’ll see,” Ero promised. “It’ll make more sense then.”

But that sign had been a warning, and as the road bucked and broke and speared up in concrete barriers up ahead, Ero eased the Jeep off to the side of the highway, steering around the rusted corpses of a few old derelicts until he found a clear space to park.

“For now, though,” he said, “we walk.”

“Why?” Wren asked, already closing up the book and putting it away in Ero’s pack.

“No other choice. The roads from here to Meridian are chewed to bits.” Ero stole another glance at Wren, at the way he kept reaching up to touch his hair inside his hood, at the way he unconsciously slid his thighs together as if trying to get used to the texture of the tights, the way they hissed in enticing whispers. “Hope you’re ready to climb.”

T

Wren had never wanted to hurt anyone in his life, except when he hadn’t been himself at the scent of human blood.

But he was very much ready to start throwing rocks at Ero to match the rocks in his head, when he was being such an asshole and treating Wren with either reserved, distant formality or all the indulgence of a parent with a particularly bright pup.

When it was a lie.

It was all a lie, when every time Ero looked at him Wren could smell his need, his longing, his ache, rousing Wren’s own until he could hardly stand it, and could hardly stand pretending he didn’t notice just to hold on to unspoken rules of lupine courtesy, when it wasn’t always polite to react on the things sensed, heard, smelled.

To hell with polite.

This was torture.

And it was cruel of Ero to wake Wren up to the possibilities of who he could be, and then deny him the very real, deeply painful possibility of them.

He wasn’t so naïve that he didn’t understand what this feeling was.

Everything that hadn’t been there, with Connaught.

Everything that said when Ero dumped him off in this strange place called the Silk Islands…he would rip a piece of Wren out that he would never get back.

He watched as Ero unhooked the solar cells he’d rigged to the engine of the—car, that was the word Ero had told him for it, the thing that had made Wren seasick and scared him a little with its growling and lurching until he’d gotten used to it.

“Ero?” he asked softly.

Ero’s shoulders tensed as he worked inside the front of the car, the way they always did now whenever Wren said his name. “Yes?”

“When we get to the Silk Islands…what will you do?”

“Rest,” Ero said with a touch of wry amusement. “I only go there to rest.”

“Why don’t you ever just stay?”

“It’s not really a place I fit into well.” Ero unclipped the last cell and straightened to fit it into his pack. “Besides…I’m not done walking the world.”

Wren frowned, wrapping his arms around himself. “Is that why you wander everywhere? Because you want to walk the whole world?”

“Maybe. I thought I’d map what was left, so I’d know for certain what was left of the world I knew, and what there is now.” Ero lingered on him with a grave look. “But maybe I’ve just been looking for a reason to slow down.”

Leaving Wren with that was cruel. Offering that subtle implication of something, some possibility, when he knew it would only be ripped away if he reached for it.

But Ero said nothing else, as they both shouldered their packs and set out on the road.

T

Wren had thought he was prepared to climb.

He found out very quickly, as they fought through chunks of landscape that had been heaved up as if the entire ground was a piece of broken wood, snapped into jagged upthrusting pieces…

That he very much was not.

Even with his strength, he was exhausted after hours of climbing broken stretches of road, shimmying up pillars to things Ero called overpasses, making tentative leaps across chasms that opened in the ground at their feet and led down to a dank darkness within the earth, as if it spat out the blackness that became the night sky above.

Slowly, though, as they made their way through the countryside—past burned-out clusters of structures that had once been towns, now collapsing frameworks covered in moss and dripping vines—the land began to even out, until he was no longer panting, sweating, sore, dreading the next climb. Slowly, too, he began to pick up on distant scents; he smelled wolf, human, leather, oil, metal, smoke, food…and something else, too, something carrying from far away.

That salty cool smell that clung to Ero, riding the evening air, wrapping around him as he walked down the latest stretch of smooth road, moving quietly at Ero’s side.

He couldn’t figure out what it was. But he was distracted from trying to figure out as the sounds of Meridian drifted across the distance, talking and clanging and footsteps and banging, people singing and laughing and shouting and fighting and making love, far many more people than he’d ever known; there had to be hundreds, all clustered in one place. His heart hammered nervously; he peeked at Ero, but Ero seemed unruffled as they took a turn of road that split off from the main one, yellow-lined gray stone leading them down toward a cluster of buildings walled behind high barriers of rusted, beaten sheet metal propped up with wooden framing.

From the top of the slope, Meridian looked like a kicked ant’s nest, swarming and teeming with activity; the noise grew deafening as they grew closer, and before they even approached the gate Wren found himself pressing closer to Ero, staring with wide eyes. Several men, both human and wolf, guarded the walls from atop them, with two flanked to either side of the gate; one of the gate guards was a dryad—no. No, the dryads were the curving trees with their soft faces, and this person wasn’t a tree. Woman, his memory supplied from Ero’s words, and he tried not to stare at the woman as he huddled behind Ero as the guards studied them warily.

“Name and purpose?” the woman barked in a voice softer and more fluid than any he had ever heard from a man.

Ero gave a cordial nod—but reached back to gently, reassuringly squeeze Wren’s shoulder without ever taking his eyes from the guards. “Ero Wake. My companion is Wren, no surname. We’re only passing through, seeking passage to New Orleans and then south for the winter.”

The other guard, a man in patchworked metal armor, curled his upper lip. “Boats out to New Orleans are delayed a few days. Only one more run going this season. You don’t have the coin to stay, best find somewhere else to camp.”

“We have the coin,” Ero said firmly.

Wren felt like everyone was staring at them, judging them by standards he couldn’t understand, and if they fell short these people would hurt them without asking questions. It made him want to hide behind Ero completely, but his pride wouldn’t let him, and he edged forward a bit to stand at Ero’s side, squaring his shoulders. Ero’s arm bumped his, but he otherwise remained motionless while the guards leaned together and conferred in whispers Ero couldn’t understand.

Deliberately, he realized. They were all human, and they were so used to living with wolves that they’d learned how to whisper in ways that slurred their speech so wolves couldn’t eavesdrop.

Finally they parted, and the male guard spoke again, jerking his thumb as the gate began to grind upward, metal squealing. “Stay on the canine side. You know the rules.”

“I’ve been here before, yes,” Ero said dryly, and tossed his head to Wren before stepping inside and through the gate. As he passed, the guard pressed a small pouch of something soft into his hand; Ero broke it open and scooped out a fingerful of some kind of salve, smearing it under his nose and along his upper lip, before passing the little soft egg of salve to Wren. “Just like I did,” he said, tapping his nose.

Wren sniffed the salve—then recoiled from the pungently minty odor. “What’s it for?”

“So if a human cuts themself,” Ero said. “We can’t smell it, and we won’t hurt them.”

Oh. Oh. Wren’s eyes widened, and he tentatively dipped a finger into the sticky salve, then dabbed it along his upper lip. It made him want to gag, but…

Gagging was better than hurting someone.

And there were so many people who could be hurt; more than he could handle, the press and crush overwhelming him, all these scents of bodies and people shouting from stalls to buy their food, buy their clothing, people arguing over pricing, others laughing and flirting and jostling and eating. Wren froze in his tracks, breathing shallowly, gaze darting everywhere at once and never settling on any one thing when if he tried to settle he would break.

Until Ero caught his hand, enveloping it in his warmth and giving him a solid grounding point. “Stay close to me,” Ero murmured. “And watch your things.”

Ero’s massive bulk forged through the crowd, forcing it to part for them, clearing a swath of space around them so Wren no longer felt like the breath was crushing out of him. There was still too much to look at, the entire town like some strange massive bazaar similar to the ones Connaught’s pack held in winter to stave off boredom and entertain snow-trapped wolves. Everywhere he looked, coin or barter traded hands…and his eyes widened as they passed a low-roofed longhouse with sliding paper screens for doors, the entire place smelling like the musk of rutting, and an omega leaned out with his hair unbound and sheeting to the ground for all to see, golden and shining and inviting anyone who could pay to come close to touch.

Wren pressed in close to Ero’s side, watching as a human sauntered close to the pretty blonde omega. “I thought humans and wolves couldn’t live together,” he whispered.

“Anything we’re told we can’t do…” Ero chuckled, squeezing his hand, and for a moment Wren let himself feel the warmth of it before reminding himself this was only temporary…and any moment now, Ero would turn cold again. “We find a way. It’s one of the few things humans and wolves still have in common, and it reminds us we used to be one and the same. But right now most of the humans are in bed. You’ll see more during the day; Meridian never sleeps, between the wolves and the humans who live by daylight.”

But as they threaded their way through close-packed streets, Wren spotted and scented fewer and fewer humans—until it was almost all wolves around them, the scents of marking and claiming heavier. Ero seemed to have some concrete destination in mind, and Wren found out what it was when they broke through several buildings and out onto a street that led down a slope lined with tall structures, and ended in a glittering expanse of blue water, reflecting back the moon in silvery skeins.

Wren stopped with his heart in his throat and his lips parted on a breath he forgot to take, as he stared. The water stretched on…forever. It was as big as the sky, bigger than his first glimpse of open fields and rolling distance; it reached out and out and out until it touched where the clouds moved across the night, and it was full of stars and shadows.

“What…what is that?” he breathed, and Ero drifted to a halt at his side.

“An inland sea,” Ero rumbled. “One that feeds into the larger ocean.”

“What’s the ocean?”

“Water without end, stretching all around the world.”

“It’s beautiful,” Wren whispered, his chest aching sweetly, and he breathed in deep, and let the cool crisp scent wrap around him. “It smells beautiful.” That was when it hit him; that scent was familiar, intertwined so perfectly with one he would never be free of, one that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He stole a shy, uncertain glance at Ero. “It…it smells like you. The first night you came to the keep I smelled this on you, and didn’t know what it was.”

“Did you?” Ero smiled, then, small and strange, just the slightest twitch of motion behind his scarf. “I suppose that’s not surprising. One way or another…I always come back to the sea.”

They stood together, watching the sea cut the moon into ribbons, for some time; even with the noise and movement around them, somehow this moment was quiet, perfect, right.

But Wren was still relieved when Ero led them inside one of the buildings lining the street, a square thing with many windows with a patched-up sign that just said Hotel. It was like the keep, he realized—one big place with many rooms for people to sleep in, only here those rooms had to be bought. It was quieter inside the small, close front room where a wolf waited to take their names, a relief from the chaos outside. Yet he felt useless, hanging back as Ero took care of everything, passing something that looked like folded colored paper over the counter in exchange for a key.

Then he was pulling away, tossing his head to Wren as he headed toward a door with a picture of stairs on it. “We’ll have to share a room,” Ero said grudgingly, and Wren tried not to let it sting that Ero was obviously so reluctant to be in any kind of space with him. “They’re booked fully. You can take the bed. I’ll take the floor.”

He followed Ero up a flight of stairs to the second floor, and a room with 313 on the door; when Ero unlocked it he revealed a small space with something like fuzzy fabric on the floors, a single large bed piled high with faded but still colorful quilts, the windows looking out over the sea, the bathroom visible through another open door. The room was simple, old, with no decorations, just the bare utilities…but it was nothing like anything Wren had ever seen.

Was the rest of the world like this, he wondered? When he’d been led to believe more of the world was like the pack’s keep than not…he felt cheated, almost. Lied to, and he resented Connaught for that enough that he wished he could see his former alpha one last time, just to ask him why.

And he didn’t want to leave here, not yet, not when there was so much to see and smell and taste and learn, and he wanted to absorb it all before he moved on to some unknown place he’d never seen.

But he couldn’t tell Ero that, when Ero was just in a hurry to get rid of him and move on with his life.

So Wren only bit his tongue, held his peace, and climbed onto the bed, kicking his boots off and curling up on his side and wishing for…for…

He didn’t know what, but it wasn’t this.