Chapter 2 A Beast Bleeding

Snow howled behind her like wolves, but Lyra's gaze was fixed upon the impossible weight she now drew through the ice forest.

The wolf was enormous-bigger than a stag, with fur as black as the night sky, so dark that it seemed to swallow the moonlight. His thickly muscled, thickly furred body was streaked with blood and ice. She didn't know how she managed to pull him onto the old wooden sleigh hidden along her foraging route, but adrenaline was a strange and tenacious force.

"You'd better not die on me," she muttered under her breath, tugging hard on the leather strap looped over her shoulder.

Branches brushed against her arms as she shoved through the woods. She paused every few feet to check if he was still alive. He was. Barely. His ribs rose with labored, irregular rhythm, and with each exhalation came a small, rattling growl. His body was abnormally hot under the snow-crusted fur-hot with fever and buzzing with this odd, ancient magic that caused her palms to prickle when she touched him.

She had no idea what he was. Who he was. But she could feel it-this creature wasn't just a wolf. And somewhere within her, beyond reason, she knew that he was for her to find out.

Her cottage crouched on the edge of the trees, its stone chimney already sending smoke out into the storm as if expecting her homecoming. Her legs ached with fatigue by the time she stood outside the door, and she breathed in sparrow-like, stabbing gasps. But still she did not tire.

Grunting, she flung the door wide open and shoved the sled part of the way into the cabin.

The fire spat and crackled in welcome.

She'd never brought a wild creature into her refuge before, not one this big, this deadly-but the gleam in his silver eyes lingered still in her mind. That glimpse of something not-wolf gazing up at her. Something old. Something aching.

She settled down next to him on the rumpled rugs and felt for her satchel of herbs.

"I don't know what you are," she whispered, as she began to cut away the ice-crusted fur surrounding the wound on his shoulder, "but you bleed like any other beast."

The wound was deep-one made by a hunter's knife, or worse. Dark blood seeped around a ragged incision in the muscle, and she wrinkled her nose at the scent of it-metallic, with a trace of magic and smoke. It smelled. wrong.

She worked anyway.

She pummeled her herbs with practiced fingers, blending them into a thick salve that sputtered as it struck his skin. The wolf flinched but didn't move. His head rotated slightly toward her, and she hesitated, fingers tracing the smooth fur on his chin.

"You poor sweetie," she breathed. "What did happen to you?"

She stitched the wound shut with soft, earthy words on each stroke of the needle. Her magic glowed under her breath-a soothing heat learned from her mother, used for mending, never for hurting. When she finished, she bound the gash with a fresh bandage and gently draped one of her more substantial blankets over his body.

The wolf didn't shift. But as the storm raged at the windows, a new sound intruded into the room.

A hum.

It came from the mark beneath the blood-a soft glimmer in the fur just below the wound. Lyra leaned in, brow furrowing.

There was a symbol branded in the flesh. Faded and old, hidden beneath the fur, as if burned into his body centuries ago.

A crescent moon surrounded by a circle, thorns encircling it.

She'd ever noticed that sigil once, many years ago, in one of her mother's forbidden tomes. It was the prince who was curse's crest. Winter wolf. Missing heir to the Moon Court.

"No," she gasped, drawing back. "It cannot be.".

The legends were clear: every hundred years, the wolf prince came back, cursed to wander until he found the one able to break the spell-his true love. Most did not survive his touch. Others claimed they saw him in dreams or misty half-sight on the edge of the forest. But no one had ever found him.

Until now.

Her fingers trembled. She sat up and began to walk the room.

What was she supposed to do with that? Nurse him back to health and hope he didn't wake up and eat her?

She shook her head, trying to rid herself of the shiver crawling down her spine.

But even when she turned from him, she could sense his presence like a pulse in the room-slow, steady, and horribly old.

She knew she ought to be afraid.

But fear was never her first thought.

Wonder was.

Then warmth.

Then longing.

She wrapped herself in the corner chair with a blanket and looked at him in the firelight. The blizzard outside let up, its wind whining at the windows like a nursery rhyme.

And the beast-torn, bruised, and beautiful-lay still in her house.

Tomorrow would bring questions. Warnings. Danger, perhaps.

But this night... this night he was just a wounded animal she had saved. And maybe, in some strange way, he had saved her too.