8. Embers
Chapter eight
Embers
Six months ago jealousy was abstract. Now it was chemical fire that said he touched what’s mine and mine was a word Jace had never used about another person and now couldn’t stop thinking in Canyon’s voice.
The sixth day brought a fragile normalcy that Jace didn't trust.
The storm had stripped the mountain down to its bones—fallen branches littering the trails, the ground a sponge of saturated earth, the air carrying the bright, scrubbed scent of a world violently cleaned.
Canyon led them out at dawn on a perimeter check.
Trees that had stood for decades lay toppled, their root systems torn from the earth in dark fans of soil and stone, exposing networks of roots intertwined with something else—something darker and more fibrous that pulsed with a faint bioluminescence when the light caught it.
"What is that?" Milo asked, pointing at the glowing threads with a fascination that had overtaken his fear sometime during the storm, the way a fever breaks and leaves behind a strange, clear-headed calm.
"The mountain's nervous system," Canyon said, and whether he was being literal or metaphorical, his tone didn't clarify. He moved on, and they followed, and Jace filed the glowing roots alongside the list of things about Black Pine that operated outside the boundaries of his previous reality.
By afternoon, the perimeter was secure, whatever that meant in Canyon's operational calculus, which involved stopping at specific trees, pressing his palms to the bark, and standing motionless for thirty seconds with his eyes closed, as if listening to conversations conducted in frequencies below the floor of human hearing.
At each tree, his expression shifted fractionally, sometimes tightening, sometimes easing, and Jace watched, trying to decode the grammar of Canyon's body.
At the last tree—a massive Douglas fir with bark so deeply furrowed it looked like a geological formation—Canyon's expression didn't shift. It locked. His eyes opened, silver-bright, and his head turned toward the northeast with the mechanical precision of a radar dish acquiring a signal.
"Something's changed," he said. Not to the group.
To himself, as if confirming a suspicion.
His nostrils flared—a long, deliberate inhalation that drew the air across whatever sensory apparatus allowed him to read the chemical biography of the mountain.
"The territorial markers on the north ridge are compromised. Something, someone, has crossed them."
"The wolves?" Reed asked.
"No." Canyon's voice was flat. "Something else. Something that isn't supposed to be here."
He said nothing more. But the pace back to the lodge was faster, and the silence he maintained was different from his usual economy of speech. This was the silence of a predator who had detected a rival.
That evening, Canyon ordered a campfire.
Not the survival-training campfires of the first days, utilitarian and positioned for warmth, but a proper fire in the clearing's central pit, large, bright, throwing a circle of orange light that pushed back the darkness in a radius that felt deliberate, territorial, as if the fire itself was a statement.
"Morale," Canyon said when Reed raised an eyebrow.
"The storm shook everyone. A fire helps.
" But his eyes scanned the tree line as he spoke, and Jace noticed that Canyon had positioned himself at the fire's edge facing the northeast, the direction he'd been staring when his expression had locked at the Douglas fir.
They ate around the fire. Elk stew again, but tonight Canyon had added something, herbs from the forest, wild and pungent, that gave the broth a richness that bordered on intoxicating.
Milo ate two bowls and seemed genuinely relaxed for the first time since arriving.
Reed produced a flask he'd apparently been hiding with a cunning that suggested decades of corporate function survival, and the whiskey, better than Theo's smuggled rotgut, made the rounds with the companionable ease of men who had survived something together and earned the right to drink about it.
The conversation started with the weather.
Moved to the terrain. Drifted, with the whiskey's assistance, toward the personal, backgrounds, regrets, the species of male failure that had driven each of them to pay four thousand dollars for the privilege of being cold, exhausted, and terrorized by a vampire in the Pacific Northwest.
Reed talked about his marriage, thirty years, mostly good, ended by the quiet realization that he and his wife had become roommates who shared a mortgage and a surname and nothing else.
"She got the house. I got the freedom. Fair trade, except freedom turns out to be a room with no furniture, plenty of space, nothing to sit on. "
Jace talked about his ex-wife. Not the details, those were too sharp still, too capable of cutting if handled carelessly, but the shape of the loss, the architecture of a life that had looked complete from the outside and was hollow from the inside.
"She didn't leave because she stopped loving me.
She left because the man she loved was a performance.
I was playing a version of myself that worked for everyone except me, and when the performance got too exhausting to maintain, there was nothing underneath. "
Canyon listened. He sat at the fire's edge, slightly apart, his dark mug steaming with its usual contents, and his face was lit by the flames in shifting planes of amber and shadow.
He didn't contribute. He didn't ask questions.
But his attention was total—Jace could feel it like a held note, a sustained frequency that followed each speaker with the focused precision of a creature that had spent three centuries listening to humans try to explain themselves to each other.
The whiskey reached critical mass somewhere in the second hour.
Reed's cheeks were flushed. Milo had loosened to a degree that would have been unthinkable a week ago, his posture almost relaxed, his smile emerging in cautious increments.
And Jace—Jace was warm, and slightly drunk, and acutely aware of Canyon's presence at the fire's edge like a heat source operating on a wavelength only he could feel.
***
It was Reed who steered the conversation into dangerous territory, with the casual precision of a man who understood that the best conversations happen when someone has the courage to push past polite.
"So," Reed said, swirling the flask. "Before Theo left, he and I had an unresolved debate. Length versus girth. I find myself in need of an expert second opinion."
Milo choked on his stew. Jace felt a laugh rise in his chest, genuine, startled, the first real laugh he'd produced in longer than he could remember.
"I'm serious," Reed continued, his expression arranged in the dignified solemnity of a man presenting a thesis defense.
"Theo's position was that length reigns supreme.
I maintain that girth is the defining characteristic.
And poor Milo here was too embarrassed to advocate for his own admirable proportions.
Now that we've survived wolves, vampires, and a storm that nearly took the roof off, I think we've earned the right to settle this with the gravity it deserves. "
"You're drunk," Milo said, but he was grinning.
"Respectfully impaired," Reed corrected. "There's a difference. Jace, expert witness. You've now had, shall we say, a broader frame of reference than when Theo was conducting his survey. What's the verdict? Length or girth?"
Jace's face burned. Not because the question embarrassed him, the man who'd sucked cock in a tent and begged a vampire to bite him while he came had surrendered any claim to embarrassment, but because the answer required him to acknowledge something aloud that he'd been processing privately: that his frame of reference had, indeed, broadened considerably, and that the data set now included a cock so far outside human parameters that it made the length-versus-girth debate feel quaint.
"Both arguments have merit," Jace said carefully.
"Diplomatic," Reed said approvingly. "But incomplete. The physical experience is not irrelevant. A thick cock hits the walls differently. A long cock reaches places that—"
"A thick cock stretches you open in a way that makes your eyes water," Jace interrupted, the whiskey apparently having disconnected the filter between his brain and his mouth.
"And a long one, a really long one, hits something deep that you didn't know was there, something that makes your whole body light up.
But what I've learned—" He stopped. Breathed.
The fire crackled. Canyon was watching him with an intensity that could have melted steel.
"What I've learned is that the best cock is the one attached to someone who reads your body like a book.
Who knows when to go slow and when to go hard.
Who makes you feel like every nerve ending you have was designed specifically for them. "
The clearing was very quiet. The fire popped. An ember floated upward.
"Well," Reed said into the silence, "I believe that settles it. The great debate ends not with a measurement, but with a metaphysics."
Milo was staring at Jace with an expression of dawning comprehension. "You're talking about—" His eyes flicked to Canyon and back. "Oh."
Canyon said nothing. But in the firelight, his eyes had gone silver, not the full, blazing luminescence of the storm, but a subtle, steady glow, the embers of something banked and burning hot beneath the surface.
He raised his mug and drank, and the gesture was so perfectly, deliberately casual that its artificiality was itself a form of communication: I heard every word.
And I will remember every word. And what I do with that memory will exceed anything your whiskey-fueled imagination can produce.
***