Between Death and Desire

Water is the last thing I remember. Cold water, closing over my head, pulling me down while his face got smaller and smaller above the surface.

Then nothing.

Now there's stone under my back, hard and cold, and torchlight flickering somewhere above me, and my chest hurts like I've been breathing wrong for a very long time.

I open my eyes.

The ceiling is wrong. Low, gray, cracked in places. Not the ceiling I remember. Not the sky I remember, either...... The last sky I saw was full of water, silver bubbles rising past my face while my lungs screamed.

I sit up too fast. My head spins. My hands hit the floor to catch myself, and I stare at them.

They're not my hands.

The fingers are thinner. The nails are bitten down to nothing. There's a small white scar across one knuckle that I don't remember ever getting.

"Whose hands are these," I whisper.

Nobody answers. I'm alone in a narrow stone room that smells like straw and tallow candles. A cot sits against one wall, blankets thrown back like someone left in a hurry. My hurry, I guess.

I press my palm flat against my chest. My heart is going too fast. I can feel it ...... Feel it in a body that isn't mine, wearing skin that isn't mine, breathing air that shouldn't be filling these lungs at all.

"I died," I say out loud, just to hear it. "I remember dying."

The door bangs open before I can think about that any further.

A girl steps in, out of breath, dark hair falling out of its braid. She stops the second she sees me sitting up, and her whole face goes pale.

"Rue," she says. "You're awake."

I stare at her. The name doesn't fit in my ears right. It sits there wrong, like a shoe on the wrong foot.

"Who's Rue," I say, before I can stop myself.

Her eyebrows pull together. "You are. Rue - are you all right? You collapsed in the kitchens. Two days ago. We thought-" She stops. Swallows. "We thought you might not wake up at all."

Two days. I've been gone from my own life for five years, and now I've lost two more just lying on a cot in a room I don't recognize, wearing a body I don't recognize, answering to a name that isn't mine.

"I'm fine," I say, because it's easier than the truth, and because some old instinct in me ...... old from a different life .... knows better than to hand strangers the truth for free.

She comes closer, kneels by the cot, studies my face like she's trying to find something wrong with it. "You don't look fine. You look like you've seen a ghost."

I am the ghost, I think. You're just looking at me and don't know it.

"I had a bad dream," I say instead. "That's all."

"You were talking in your sleep." She says it carefully, like she's not sure she should. "You kept saying a name. Kael. Over and over."

My whole body goes still.

Hearing it out loud does something to me I wasn't ready for. It isn't just a name. It's water in my lungs. It's his hands, too far away to reach me. It's five years of being dead and thinking about nothing else.

"I don't know anyone named Kael," I say. My voice comes out flat. Practiced. I don't know where that skill came from in this new, unfamiliar throat, but I'm grateful for it.

The girl watches me a second longer than I like. Then she shrugs, like she's decided not to push. "Well. You should eat something. You've had nothing in two days." She stands, brushes off her knees. "I'm Mira, by the way. In case dying and coming back scrambled that too."

"Mira," I repeat, testing the name the way I tested my own new fingers. Filing it away. "Thank you, Mira."

"For what?"

"For finding me."

She gives me a small, strange smile, like she's not used to being thanked for anything. "Come on. If the kitchen mistress sees you up, she'll put you straight back to work, and you look like a strong wind could knock you over."

I follow her out into a hallway lined with low doors, and I understand, in pieces, what I've woken up into. Omega quarters. The lowest rank in the pack. People who scrub floors and carry water and disappear into the walls so completely that nobody ever really sees them.

Good, some cold part of me thinks. Let them not see me. Let them keep thinking I'm nobody, right up until the moment it matters.

We come out into a courtyard, and the size of the place stops me cold. Stone towers rising up into a gray sky. Wolves moving across the training grounds below, fast and disciplined, sparring in pairs.

This is Nightvale. I know it even though I've never stood in this exact spot before - I know the smell of it, the shape of the mountains behind the walls, the way the whole place seems to hum with old power.

"You've gone white again," Mira says.

"I'm just not used to being out of bed," I lie.

We're halfway across the courtyard when the air changes.

I don't know how else to explain it. One second it's just cold morning air, and the next, every hair on my arms is standing up, and something in my chest - something that isn't quite my heart, something lower and older - twists hard.

I look up.

He's standing on the far side of the training yard, watching a pair of warriors spar. Black hair falling across his forehead. Broad shoulders under a dark coat. He isn't looking at me. He isn't looking at anything but the fight in front of him.

And still, my whole body reacts like he's already touching me.

"Kael Draven," Mira says under her breath, following my stare. "Our Alpha. Try not to look so terrified, Rue, he'll think you did something wrong."

"I'm not terrified," I say, though my voice shakes on the word.

"Could've fooled me."

I can't stop looking at him. Five years of imagining this face - in nightmares, in the last conscious seconds I had underwater - and here it is, real, breathing, twenty feet away from me. Older than I remember.

Tired in a way he never let himself look before. There's a tightness around his eyes that wasn't there the last time I saw him, standing at the edge of the Silver Vein while I went under.

He watched me die, I think. He stood right there and watched.

Then, like he heard the thought, he turns his head.

His eyes find mine across the whole courtyard.

I forget how to breathe.

For one long second, nothing happens. He just looks at me - really looks, the way you look at something you can't quite place, something that's tugging at a memory you can't reach. His jaw tightens. His silver eyes darken, just slightly, and I feel it like a hand closing around my throat.

"Rue," Mira hisses, tugging my sleeve. "Stop staring at the Alpha. Are you trying to get us both in trouble?"

I tear my eyes away and let her pull me toward the kitchens, but I can feel his stare on my back the whole way, like a brand.

"Does he always look at people like that," I ask, once we're inside, once the heavy kitchen door shuts between us and the yard.

"Like what?"

"Like he's trying to remember something."

Mira laughs, but it sounds nervous. "He doesn't look at Omegas at all, usually. We're not exactly worth his attention." She hands me a rag and points at a stack of dishes.

"You must have made an impression collapsing in his kitchens."

I take the rag. My hands are shaking, and I press them flat against the counter until they stop.

He doesn't know, I tell myself. He can't know. Nobody knows.

But some small, treacherous part of me - the part that used to belong to a woman named Elara, the part that drowned five years ago and never quite finished dying - wants him to know. Wants him to cross that courtyard, take my face in his hands, and say my real name out loud, consequences be damned.

I push the thought down hard. Down where the anger lives. Down where I keep the memory of his silence while the water closed over my head.

He didn't save me once, I remind myself. Don't be foolish enough to hope he'll save you now.

I scrub the first dish so hard my knuckles turn white.

Behind me, through the small kitchen window, I can just make out his shape still standing at the edge of the training yard.

Still watching the door I disappeared through.

Still, somehow, looking for me.