Page 31 of The Alpha's Mail Order Bride

“What?” he demanded. His wolf was frozen in his chest, silent, unresponsive. The message was as clear as day. The wolf had gotten them here; now it was the man’s turn to fix the terrible, terrible problem that had been uncovered.

“When she wakes, she’ll have forgotten,” Syrra said softly. “Forgotten the last four weeks—coming here, meeting us, everything. She’s going home, Darion. And she didn’t want to take any memories with her.”

“No,” he heard himself whisper. And despite Syrra’s murmured warning, he was walking past her, shoving the door open and stepping into the familiar room that was lit with unfamiliar light. Hundreds of candles, swamping the whole room with flicking light. He barely spared them a glance. His eyes were on the figure lying in the middle of the floor on her back, her dark curls arranged around her perfect face, a look of incredible peace on her sleeping visage. Beside her, a slender young woman was kneeling, a slip of a girl with white-blond hair and a grave expression on her pointed face.

“You have to stop this,” he said hoarsely. He’d been planning to shout; his first reaction, when Syrra had told him the lorekeepers were taking her memories, had been to scream at them. But he simply didn’t have it in him. “Don’t let her forget me.”

“I’m sorry, Darion,” Anessi said in her low, somber voice. “The ritual has been completed. She’ll sleep a few hours more, and wake in her own world again. This was her request; this was her desire. I serve,” she added faintly, her eyes dropping to her tattooed fingertips as she fidgeted with her long nails. “I only serve.”

“Then reverse it. Take it back.”

“It’s done, Darion.”

“No,” he said again, dropping to his knees beside her. He went to scoop her into his arms, then froze, shooting Anessi a frightened look. “Will I hurt her if—”

The lorekeeper shook her head. “She won’t wake, but she won’t be hurt. Mind her head,” she added—unnecessarily, Darion thought resentfully. He’d held his niece enough to have honed that instinct. Claire felt almost as light when he lifted her against his chest, cradling her head gently against him, feeling his body shiver with grief at the memory of the day they’d spent in bed together. The rituals of memory…it had been a long time since he’d heard about those. He’d looked into it once, as a young man, considering the prospect of forgetting he’d ever had a brother, but there had been no lorekeeper within traveling distance who was capable of performing the spell. He hadn’t known Anessi was one such lorekeeper.

Maybe she’d wipe his memory, too, he thought brokenly as he clutched Claire’s body helplessly against him. Her chest was rising and falling, and her cheeks were flushed with life—so why did it still feel as though she’d died? Everything they’d shared together, this whole dizzying, unbelievable, life-changing month…he simply couldn’t accept that he’d be the only one who remembered what had happened. It hurt too badly. But what hurt even more than the prospect of remembering it alone for the rest of his life was the idea of forgetting it, too. Of going back to the life he’d led before he’d known her.

He could hear himself speaking, whispering these things aloud into Claire’s ear. Too late, he thought wildly, feeling a sudden urge to laugh. Instead, tears were rolling down his cheeks, dripping from his chin and landing on Claire’s clothing. He already looked completely insane—why not really let himself get carried away? His words came easier and easier, and he found himself speaking quicker than he ever had, telling the unconscious woman everything he’d held back from her. The way he’d felt when they’d first met. The way he’d struggled to keep himself back from her, the way he’d yearned for her in secret. The sleep he’d lost, the anguish he’d tried to avoid…all of it spilled out of him, raw but oddly eloquent. He could imagine how attentively she’d have listened, her curiosity, the way she always asked such intelligent questions…too late, he thought miserably, too late. The only audience he had was an unconscious woman who might as well have been a stranger and a lorekeeper he’d barely exchanged a handful of sentences with since she’d moved here.

But Anessi’s eyes hadn’t left his face the whole time he’d been talking, and there was something about the intensity of that gaze that drew his attention, pulled his eyes at last from Claire’s sleeping face.

“This woman means a lot to you.” It wasn’t a question, but Darion nodded anyway, too tired to pretend at stoicism any longer. “What is she?”

Darion narrowed his eyes at the question. “She’s a human, as you well know,” he growled, feeling his temper rise up in his throat like an old friend. It would feel so good to yell at this woman, to vent some of his grief and anger with himself on an external target. But Anessi flicked his answer away with her fingers, still waiting. And suddenly, he knew what she meant.

“Right,” he said tiredly, feeling his anger fade at once. “Yes, I see. She’s my soulmate. Too late, I know.” Suddenly worried that Anessi was going to ask him to leave Claire be, he kissed her forehead, breathing in the sweet smell of her hair for what might be the last time. “Promise you’ll get her home safe,” he said softly.

A high, brittle laugh. Darion’s anger came rushing back at once, but Anessi spoke before he could snap at her. “That will be up to you, I think.”

Darion’s jaw tightened. “I’ve had precious little sleep for the past week running, lorekeeper. Speak plainly.”

“The spell didn’t work,” Anessi said immediately. “She’s fine. Take her home.”

“That’s a cruel joke.”

“I don’t joke.” Her silver eyes bored blankly through him, and with the shadows dancing on her face in the candlelight she was a strange, unearthly creature indeed. “My spell took no effect.”

“But you said it was done. You said it was too late.”

“New information came to light.”

“In the last five minutes?”

“Soulmate,” she murmured, and her silver eyes glowed with such a strange light as she uttered the word that Darion shrank back a little from her. “A soulmate, oh, a soulmate changes everything about magic, as you well know.” Grinding his teeth, Darion waited for her to elaborate. “Like the roots of trees,” she said dreamily, lifting her hand so that the sleeves of her robes fell away to reveal winding, intricate lines tattooed up and down not only her fingers, but her hands and wrists, too. “The bond, the magic, it ensnares and entangles. It holds,” she continued softly. “It holds so tightly that nothing can slip out. Memories, too. The spell I wove, it chases the memories out, but if the magic is there...” She pointed at the chalk runes on the floor with one long finger. “If the soulmate magic is there, then that’s where the memories hide, too. She’ll wake without forgetting.”

“You…” Darion could hardly breathe. “She wanted to forget how I hurt her. She wanted to go home.”

“So take her home.” Anessi was grinning, an uneasy expression. “So make her forget how you hurt her. My magic can take memories,” she said, scuffing the chalk with her fingers. “But no magic can unbind soulmates. Go,” she commanded suddenly, eyes twinkling. “I’ll tell everyone what a dreadful failure my poor little spell turned out to be.”

Darion fled the community center as fast as he could with Claire in his arms, cradled against his chest. He’d never carried such precious cargo before. What the lorekeeper had told him in there…he could hardly bring himself to hope that it was true. The pain of losing what he had with Claire was awful, true, but he knew about pain. Pain was an old friend, a strangely comfortable place to come to rest. Hope, on the other hand, was something he didn’t know how to handle. What if he let himself believe she might remember him, only to be met with the blank, confused stare of a stranger when she woke in his arms? Or worse, what if she never woke at all? What if that eccentric young woman had made a terrible mistake?

The door to the cottage was ajar when he reached it, but he hardly noticed. All his attention was on Claire, fast asleep in his arms. He hesitated for a moment at the bottom of the stairs. If she really did remember everything, she’d remember their last conversation when she woke. It might be better for her to be in her own bed. But then he remembered that she’d stripped off the bedsheets up there. The decision made, he carried her into his bedroom and laid her reverently down, her head cradled by his pillows, her body stretched out atop his quilt. Darion hovered for a moment, wondering whether he should sit at her bedside, or go and crash on the couch.

But it didn’t seem right to do anything other than lay down beside her. The warm, reassuring weight of her body against him, his arms wrapped tightly around her, Darion settled in to wait for morning to come. And though he’d expected a long, sleepless vigil, he was shocked to realize that the exhaustion of the last week was catching up on him at last. Through the maelstrom of stress and worry that had been eating him alive since he’d last left Claire’s side, Darion felt the blessed darkness of sleep rise up to claim him.

“Darion?”

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