Redtail Rise I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears

Aventus wandered the night. It happened more often here than in Bearclaw Valley, a stark contrast to his daytime relief at being away from his father’s lands. He did not recognize it for what it was and attributed it to his father’s ghost haunting him.

He wandered so long that the sky began to lighten behind its grey pall. He was soaked through, but paid no mind to the rain sluicing against his face while he climbed. Arielle slept, or so he believed. She was in pain the day before, but Aventus was oblivious to the meaning. He hunted for her in the night as he always had since moving to the Rise, causing him to stray too far from her side to be of any use in her hour of need.

He knew even before he arrived that something was wrong. He knew it in the scarlet-tinted rivulets running along the stone, the metallic taint that curled into his nostrils, the sting of salt a subtle undercurrent. The beaver tumbled from his jaws, slapping against the wet ground and abandoned as Aventus pounded toward the den.

The smell of blood only grew as he barged into their home, so strong it choked him. Behind his eyes was burned the image of blood arcing from a torn jugular and spraying him in the face. The taste of that wolf’s flesh. The ecstasy he had felt then, and how it had gone bitter and frightful as he grew older and learned that with such power came only loss.

That fear gripped him now, climbing up his throat and strangling him, so that he stood there breathing hard and looking at Arielle and seeing only a corpse. Loss. That was the curse of the bear. That was the curse of Aventus the unfaithful. That was all he ever deserved and that was what he expected to receive.

It felt like an eternity that he stared at his wife’s lifeless body, and then he blinked, and she was not dead at all, but staring deadpan ahead with wet tracks on her face, and louder than thunder was the squalling of one child, and more haunting in their silence than the notion of his father’s vengeful ghost was the second.

His breath froze in his throat as he realized that all the bear had ever taken from him, he had been given in another form. Not by the bear — there would be no come to Jesus moment for Aventus where the beast was concerned — but by her, his radiant mate. When he lost his mother, she had come to him. The bear had stolen Astara, but Arielle had been there to pick him up. A mother gone, a partner gained. When he lost his father...

He could not peel his eyes from the two pups nor comprehend the rush of tears pricking at his eyelids, and when he finally found his voice to whisper, Arielle? it was hoarse with emotion.