Chapter 14: The Mark

The chains were in the wall before the girl ever arrived, and Angeau’s story had nothing to say about what she thought of them. Angeau took this to mean there had been nothing to ask.

Crispin had spent three nights being watched from a rock and one morning rehearsing a very short sentence. He did not know that Noëlle had finished hers days ago and meant to go first.

Four days after the last moonset, Noëlle finally took the bandage off my left hand.

She did it on the top step of the den, in the sun, with my hand turned up in her lap and her thumb working along the edge of the cut. The heel of it had closed into a stiff pink seam. She pressed it and watched my face, and I held still, and she said it would do with a thinner wrap. The strip of clean cloth she tied on was only there to keep the dirt out, and I would have kept that cut open another week for her thumb. My nails had grown back square. The red lines from the beech had faded to two pale streaks that I could find only if I went looking.

She had sat on the shelf all three nights, like she said. The second and third were easier, like I told her, and every time I still turned toward the rock to check, and every time she was there with her back against the stone, saying my name when my arms tightened on the tree. I never once had to ask her to.

I was wearing the spare jeans from the bottom of the nest, which were short in the leg, and my one shirt, which she had sewn shut down the back with the needle from her kit while I slept off the last morning.

“There,” said Noëlle, and she kept hold of my hand. “Now I’m going to say something, and I’m going to say it fast, so don’t talk until I’m done.”

My ears came up. “Okay.”

“I’m in love with you.” She said it to the bandage, in the voice she uses for hold still and this will sting. “I worked it out on the shelf the first night, around the time you went back to that tree. I had a speech ready and it’s mostly about your shoulders, so I’m skipping it. That’s all of it. You can breathe.”

I didn’t. I heard every word, and none of them would land anywhere. I looked at her hands around mine, at the herb stain on her thumb, and tried to find where the catch was in the sentence. “Say it... again.”

“I love you.”

“Again.”

“Crispin.” She was laughing, and her eyes were wet. “It isn’t going to wear off.”

My tail had already answered. It was hitting the step behind me hard enough to send each thump up my spine, and I couldn’t have stopped it with both hands, and for once I didn’t reach back to try. “It’s doing it again.”

“I noticed.”

“I love you.” I had been rehearsing that all morning, and it still came out cracked, so I said it a second time, straight at her face. “I love you. I thought the word in the bramble hollow and told it to go away, and it didn’t. I think it was there before the moss. Before the rain, even.”

She kissed me, quick and hard, with my bandaged hand squashed between us.

“Good,” she said against my chin. “That’s done. Now I’m going to ask for the other thing.” She sat back and tucked her hair behind her ear, and her knee stayed against mine. “I want the full old ways. The whole chase, start to finish, and the real mark. At the lair.”

My ears pinned before she had finished. “Noëlle. You know what I... in the moss, I wanted to...”

“Bite me. I know.”

“And in the clearing, I took a step.”

“I was there. I had an excellent view.” She said it light and fast, and then she stopped being fast. “I know what you want, Crispin. I’m asking anyway, because of it. You held on to a tree for three nights so you wouldn’t touch me. I’d like to find out what you do when I say yes.”

I looked at the pink line on my hand. My heartbeat was in my jaw. “Are you... sure? Nobody ever said the mark wears off. If you want a day... or a week...”

“I had three nights on that rock with nothing to do but think, and I chose it up there. So no, you can’t talk me out of it.”

My tail said yes on the step before I did. “Then... yes.”

“Tell me what Fenris did. Getting in.”

I told the step, and my ears folded. “He ran her down at the hollow tree and... took her to the lair. She didn’t walk in. She was taken the whole way.”

“Right.” She stood and brushed off her shorts. “So here’s my change. I don’t get taken. I run the whole way, from here to the curtain, on my own feet, and I go in by myself. I pick the route. Nobody gets dragged, and you stay right behind me. You’re faster, I know you are. I want you on my heels the entire time and I want you not to pass me.”

It was a ridiculous thing to ask a wolf. “I can... try.”

“Good.” She tied the cloak at her throat. “Count to twenty.”

She took the bank past the bramble canes at a dead run, and I counted to twenty and went after her, and I was on her heels before the first thorns. My hearing had gotten sharper since the moss. I could hear her breathing from a long way back, and the smell of her, resin and crushed fern, was on every branch her sleeve had touched. Under all of it was a steady pull in the middle of my chest that said ahead and a little left, whether I looked or not.

She knew the way. She took the long route I had walked her in on, from memory, and she took it better than I had. She ducked the lianas where I would have climbed over, found the gap in the thorns, her hood flying and the red cloak showing between the trunks.

I could have had her in ten strides. Every time her boot slid, my body wanted those ten strides, and every time I put my feet where hers had been and stayed back. It was harder than catching her would have been, and I enjoyed it so much that I made a sound I hadn’t planned.

The growl came up from my chest, low and even with no hinge in it, and a jay four trees over stopped shouting. Ahead of me Noëlle shrieked, delighted, and ran harder. “Okay?” I called.

“Yes!” It came back in pieces. “Don’t you dare stop!”

A bramble cane caught her across the knee at the edge of the thorns and she went down in the leaves. I was three strides from her before I knew I had moved, every muscle I owned leaning in. I did not touch her. “Noëlle...?”

“Fine!” She was already up, hopping once on the good leg, with a leaf stuck to her cheek. “Keep going! Be scary!”

So I was. I growled again, closer, and she ran the last stretch laughing too hard to breathe.

The wall of gray rock came up out of the brush with its curtain of vines hanging straight down. She did not slow. She took the vines in both hands, shouldered through, and the vines dropped shut behind her with the same wet sound as the first time.

I stopped at the curtain, close enough to touch it. The first time, my feet had refused. This time I stopped because she had told me not to pass her, and nobody had said the rule was over. I stood with my chest heaving, both ears on the vines and my tail beating the moss, and listened to her breathe on the other side.

“Come in, Crispin,” she called. “I got here first.”

The damp cold was the same after the heat of the run, and so was the smell of old iron and wet stone. The bones lay where they had lain, and my tail, which had been having a wonderful time, came down behind me. The shelf along the wall still had no furs on it. The dripping was louder than I remembered, and it came from several places at once.

She had taken off the cloak and spread it on the floor in front of the back wall, in the one patch the green light reached. Her boots stood beside it. She was against the wall with one hand on the nearest chain, hair stuck to her face and dirt on her knee from the fall. I wanted her hand off that iron, the same as the first time, and I wanted a lot of other things I had no business wanting in that room.

“I won,” she said.

“You did.”

“I get my prize, then. Look at the cuff first. I checked.” She shut the right one on her wrist and pressed the catch with her thumb, and it fell open. “I held it up to my wrist last time. It’s big on me, and the catch opens with a push, even when it’s shut, and my fingers reach it, so I can get out on my own and you can get me out in a second. That’s the first thing.”

“What’s the second?”

“I’m not doing this in a top.” She pulled it over her head and dropped it on the cloak, and the shorts and the thong went after it. “I’m not taking clothes off with my hands over my head. I thought it through.”

I looked at the ceiling, and after a second I looked at her, because she wasn’t looking at the ceiling.

She stepped back against the wall and yelped. “It’s freezing! It’s so cold!” She was laughing. “Okay. Don’t look at me like that, I’m committed.” She held out her wrist with the cuff open in her hand. “Put me in the chains, Crispin.”

My tail hung straight down. “Tell me it’s... your choice.”

“It’s mine. I picked it. I picked this wall.”

I took the cuff in my good hand and closed it around her right wrist. The iron scraped shut on its rust. I did the left with my bandaged hand, and my fingers shook so badly that it took two tries. She tugged both arms once, to show me the chain had play in it, and a link ticked against the stone beside her elbow.

“Settling,” said Noëlle, perfectly serious, and grinned at me.

That was when the hunger woke.

In the moss it had been a hand closing around my jaw. This was all of Fenris at once, coming up through me, enormous and plain. I wanted her pinned to that wall. I wanted my mouth on every part of her and I wanted her not going anywhere. What I had been afraid of since the moss was how much I wanted her to want it. She did. She was bare, with her wrists up by her shoulders, flushed to her collarbones, and she was breathing hard, and none of it was fear.

That isn’t me. I said it in my head, the way I always had, like shutting a door. The door didn’t shut. The hunger stood in the room with me, and it had my hands.

I held it. I put my weight against it as I had against the beech, and set both palms flat on the wall on either side of her head so they would have somewhere to be. The stone was cold. My arms shook.

“Crispin. Are you here?”

“I’m here.” My voice came out low. “It’s... all of it, Noëlle. Not like the moss. It’s real.”

“I can see.” She looked at me with the face she wears for a new fern. “What does it want?”

“You.” I laughed, and it shook. “Here. Like this. Not to keep you. Just this.”

“Then it wants what I want.” Her wrists pulled once at the cuffs, and the chains ticked. “So where are your hands, big bad wolf?”

“On the wall.”

“On the wall. All of that, and it can’t even move your hands.” She was grinning at me. “Look at you.”

I looked at my hands flat on the stone, and then at her. The hunger was still enormous, and it wasn’t running me. My tail lifted off the floor before I had decided anything.

“...okay,” I said, mostly to myself. “...okay. That can be ours.”

She let out a long breath. “Yes. Ours. Now kiss me, I’m freezing.”

I kissed her, and the hunger came along and I let it. I kissed her harder than I ever had, and she made a sound into my mouth and arched off the stone. The chains rattled.

“Shirt,” she said against my lips. “I want to see my stitches.”

I got it off over my head, carefully, with my ears caught in the collar. She looked. “Jeans.”

“You’re... bossy.”

“You like it.”

My tail swept the dust behind me. I got out of my boots and the jeans, and she looked down at my cock and said, “Oh,” and then, because she can’t help it, “Hello.” I laughed so hard I had to put my forehead against the wall beside her head. “Okay?” I said, when I could.

“I’ll tell you when it’s not. Don’t stop.”

I put my mouth on her neck, below the place she had shown me, and worked down. Her breasts were cold from the air and her nipples were hard against my tongue, and she swore, cheerfully, and pushed her chest into my face. I went lower. When I got my hand between her legs she was soaked already, from the run or from me, and I didn’t ask which.

I went down on my knees on the cloak and put my mouth on her pussy, and I had never done it before, so I did what she told me. “There. Yes, there, don’t move.” My ears brushed the inside of her thighs and she squealed with laughter, and then she said, “Do that again,” so I tilted my head and did it on purpose. Her legs started to shake. She said my name over and over, and then she came, with her head back against the wall and both arms pulling at the chains until they snapped taut and tapped against the rock.

I stood up. My own legs were not entirely mine. She was grinning with her mouth open, hair all over her face. “Okay?” I said.

“Okay is not the word. Pick me up.”

I lifted her. Her legs went around my waist and the chains had enough slack that her wrists stayed by her shoulders, and her back was against the stone. I pushed into her slowly, and she was hot and wet and took all of my cock, and we both groaned at the same time. I stayed there, shaking, and I would like to say that was for her sake. If I had moved, it would have been over. “Too much?”

“If you stop I’m going to bite you.”

“That’s... my job,” I said, and she broke down laughing, and I felt it around my cock.

I moved slowly at first, and she told me to go faster and I did. The hunger shoved at me to go harder, and I gave it half and kept the rest in my hands where I could hold it. Her heels dug in. I kissed her collarbone and her jaw, and the growl came out of me without my asking. “What’s the prize?” I said into her hair.

“This.” She gasped as I thrust. “Harder. Yes. Like that. Don’t you dare slow down.” I didn’t. She was loud, and the lair gave it back, and I was louder than I had ever been in my life.

“Now,” she said, breathless, her head tipped back. “Crispin. Now. Where I showed you.”

I stopped moving. “Are you... sure?”

“Plenty to bite and nothing big to hit.” She turned her face away and bared the spot, the muscle between her neck and her shoulder. “I’m sure. I chose it on the shelf. Bite me.”

I took the muscle in my teeth, carefully at first and then with enough pressure to mean it. She hissed, and I started to let go, and she said, “Not yet,” so I bit down harder, until the skin gave and I tasted salt and a little iron. She cried out. The sound hit the rock and came back. I liked biting her, and I won’t lie to you about that.

The hunger left my jaw all at once. Everything it had wanted, it had, and it let go, and that left me shaking in my own skin with her tight around me. She came again, hard, clamping down on me, her whole body straining at the chains, and I held her up and finished inside her with my teeth still in her shoulder.

I let go carefully. A ring of small dents marked her, with a line of blood beading in them. She had gone still in my arms, and my ears pinned against my skull. I thought I had hurt her.

“Noëlle?”

“Shh. Listen.” Her eyes were wide open and on nothing. “There’s water. Behind me, in the rock, I can hear it drip, and there’s another one behind that, and one running underneath us going downhill toward the stream. There are roots in the roof. They’re pulling water up. I can hear them pull.” Her voice cracked. “Crispin, I can hear the whole hill.”

She was laughing, with tears running into the corners of her mouth. “It’s so loud. It’s so big. It’s so good.”

I shut my eyes. I knew exactly where she was, far past the rough sense I’d had in the moss. I had the beat of her heart, and which of her hands was lifted, down to the finger. “Your right hand’s open. You’re holding it up.”

“Yes,” she said. She had her eyes shut too. “Your left ear just went back.”

“Take these off,” she added, and rattled the cuffs.

I shifted her weight onto one arm, found the catch with my thumb, as she had shown me, and opened the left, and then the right, and this time my fingers didn’t shake. The chains swung back. Her arms came down around my neck at once and she held on to me hard.

I carried her the two steps to the cloak and went down on my knees with her, and then sat, with her across my lap on the red wool and her legs still around me. We stayed like that until we could breathe.

Her hand went to her shoulder. “I planned this,” she said. “I had a whole method for cleaning it one-handed. I worked it out on the walk back from here, the first time. I never told you.”

“Let me.”

She considered it. “Okay.” She pointed with her chin without looking. “Left, in the corner. The second drip is the clean one.”

It was, by the smell. I set her down on the cloak, went and cupped some water in my hand and brought it back, and she held her head to one side while I rinsed the bite. She swore at the cold of it. The marks were clean and not deep. “It’ll scab,” she said. “Leave it open to the air. I’ll look at it tomorrow.”

The hunger was still in me. I checked, as I had checked every day since the moss, and it was warm and smaller, and it wasn’t asking for anything I hadn’t already given. I let it stay.

Noëlle lay down on the cloak and pulled me with her, and put her head on my arm, and turned her face into my ribs. “Ours,” she said, pleased with it.

My tail was wrapped around her ankle. Neither of us moved it.