Page 108 of The Last Sanctuary
There was only the night. The night and Raven and the wolf.
The black wolf stood at the edge of the outcropping. He threw back his head, raising his muzzle toward the vast star-studded sky, and howled.
It was a haunting, mournful sound. A sorrowful song, clear and pure as a bow drawn across a violin.
It was a requiem. An elegy. A howl of grief for the lost mate who wasn’t coming back. Shadow howled his sorrow and pain and loss for Luna.
Raven turned off the flashlight. She stood still in the dark and listened. Her heart felt like it was cracking wide open. The pieces of herself splintering, shattering. The hard shell of her soul, broken wide open to reveal the raw, pulsing center of her heartache.
The grief and pain and loss of her own, which she’d buried deep since her father died. Since long before then. Since her mother had abandoned her. Since she’d first realized her father couldn’t love her like she needed to be loved.
Since she’d started to believe that perhaps that was what she deserved—to be alone. To be utterly lonely, forever.
The pain flowed through her. A dark river of sorrow drowning her from the inside. She grieved for Zachariah.She grieved for her father, whom she’d loved desperately, resentfully, bitterly. But still, she’d loved him.
She grieved for her mother. For the broken woman she’d rejected without understanding that brokenness came from a monstrous darkness deep inside her mother that couldn’t be fixed. She understood it now.
In that grief, in her understanding, lay something like forgiveness.
She grieved for the animals. How she hadn’t realized how much she’d needed them until they were gone. For Gizmo. For Shika, Titus, Echo, and sweet Suki. For regal Vlad, who didn’t deserve the disease or the death coming for him.
And for Luna, beautiful, loyal, honorable Luna. Who’d made a human part of her pack. Who’d sacrificed her own life to save Raven’s.
Her eyes burned. Tears glittered in her eyes.
For the first time in three years, she let them fall.
Standing there in the center of the dark, unknowable, empty universe, Raven wept.
Chapter Forty-Six
Along time later, minutes or hours, Raven shuffled back to the crevice. She crawled beneath the ledge and collapsed on the rocky ground, exhausted, weary to the core. Completely emptied out.
In the cold darkness, Shadow stood over her and nuzzled her neck. His breath was warm against her cheeks. The musky scent of his damp fur filled her nostrils.
She held out her hand and ran her fingers through the thick guard hairs of his ruff. With a sad snort, he flopped down beside her, his flank pressed against her side.
“It’s you and me, now,” she said.
He gave a mournful whine as if in response. The faintest hint of starlight limned everything in a pale glow. The wolf’s eyes glimmered in the darkness. Awake and alert, keeping watch over what remained of his pack.
“I can’t do this alone, okay? I need you. We need each other.”
Raven curled into Shadow. She nestled her cheek against his fur and breathed in the precious, comforting scent of wolf—of earth and grass and wind, of things wild and primal, of fierce love and pack and family.
Chapter Forty-Seven
In the morning, Raven awoke before dawn. Shadow was already up and outside somewhere. Her lower back spasmed as she crawled out from beneath the mossy ledge, brushing a few crawling bugs from her legs.
She was sore and achy all over, dirty and thirsty. She ran her tongue over her fuzzy teeth, longing for a hot shower. How she’d taken things like a soft mattress and running water and electricity for granted.
The rising sun transformed the sky above the trees in vivid shades of sherbet orange and cotton candy pink. Shivering against the chill, Raven drank from her water bottle and ate one of the granola bars.
Gingerly, she raised her shirt and took stock of the damage. A garish watercolor painting of blue, purple, and yellowish green bruised the right side of her ribcage from her bra line to her hip. She sucked in her breath. It hurt to look at it.
Lowering her shirt, she changed the bandage on her neck, then checked her rifle and zipped her pack. Once she was ready, she headed through the trees across the rocky ground toward the outcropping.
Last night, it had been too dark to see anything. Now, as rays of golden sunlight speared the cottony clouds, she stood at the tip of the outcropping and looked across the great expanse of forest, split by roads and trails with a few buildings clustered here and there.
