Chapter 14
Chapter fourteen
Jen
Forty minutes.
That is how long I last in the cabin. The bonds are humming — all four of them — and the part of me that is hooked into three men on a ridge two miles east is not the part that fits inside four walls.
I close the book Dean handed me. I walk out to the porch.
Dean does not turn his head. His eyes stay on the tree line. "You okay."
"I need to move."
"Stay where I can see you."
I put on Daron’s boots because I can lace them up tight enough to at least stay on my feet. I still feet a little clown-like stomping around the forest.
The four scorch-prints from Thaw are still there, dark against the rest of the ground. I walk past them. I do a slow loop around the edge of the clearing, staying inside the line where Dean's eys track me.
The air is sharper. The cold off the wind is not registering as temperature but as information.
I look down at my hands.
The nails are darker.
The tips have gone from human-pink at the quick to a deeper black color at the tips. The shape is wrong too. The edges have come to points I did not file. The free edge of each one ends in a curve that did not exist this morning when I washed my face in the cabin mirror.
I turn my hand over.
The palm is my palm. But the nails.
I look at the other hand.
Same.
Every one of them ends in something my body did without telling me.
I run my tongue across my teeth.
The canines are not right.
Not enormous. Not fangs. But the shape of them under my tongue is wrong — longer than my tongue knows, sharper at the point, the curve coming down a fraction lower than it should. I push the point of my tongue against the right canine and it gives back more than enamel should.
My breath is going faster.
I close my mouth.
I am about to call for Dean.
Then the wind shifts.
And I get him.
Hot metal under cedar smoke. Faint. Two miles east. I have never put words to what Thaw smells like because his scent has always been background. Now it is a line drawn through the air from the ridge to my face and the line says Thaw, moving fast, hot, breathing heavy.
I stop walking.
I turn my face into the wind.
I take another breath.
Stone. Wet rock. The mineral cold of a riverbed. Somewhere behind Thaw, lower on the slope.
Crull.
I take another breath.
Wet bark. Moss. The deep green smell of a forest floor where the light does not reach. The lowest to the ground, the closest to invisible, the hardest to find.
Harek.
I do not move.
The wind is carrying three of my men to me. I know they are two miles east. I know there are ridges and a creek between us. They are gone, off, away, running. And I have them in my nose like they are standing in front of me.
I take another breath.
I open my eyes.
"Dean."
I do not yell. My body needs Dean and his rifle and his calm face.
"Dean."
He is at my side in seconds.
The rifle is up. His eyes go to the tree line first — that is who he is, that is the job — then to my face, then down my body. Reading for injury before he reads for anything else.
"What?"
"I don’t know."
I hold up my hands.
Dean looks.
He does not flinch. He does not pull back. He takes my wrist in his hand and turns it once in the afternoon light and looks at the nails. His face does not change. He turns the other wrist. He looks at the other set.
"How long?"
"I do not know. Since I came outside. Maybe longer."
"You did not have these on the porch."
"I don’t think so."
He sets my hands down.
"Open your mouth."
I do.
He looks. He uses his thumb under my chin to tip my face up — careful, no pressure, just for the angle. He looks at my canines for a long moment. He moves my chin a quarter-inch to the left to get the light on the right side. He looks at the left side.
He closes my mouth with the same thumb. Gently.
He steps back.
He does not speak right away.
He has the rifle in his other hand and he is standing two feet from me in the clearing, putting information together — the slight narrowing at the eyes, the small flat compression of his mouth. Checking his own animal against what he saw.
"Dean."
"Yeah."
"Tell me."
He looks at me.
"That's not wolf."
The wind moves in the pines.
Far off, two miles east, three men whose scents are still in my nose run on a ridge.
Dean does not say what it is. He does not have a name for it. He looks at me with the same steel-gray eyes he has had on me since I woke up in this cabin and he tells me the one thing he can be sure of, which is the thing he is.
"That's not wolf."
I close my mouth.
I look at my hands.
I do not say anything for a long moment.
Then I look up at Dean.
"I want to go back inside."
He puts his hand at the small of my back to guide, and we walk back toward the porch. The four scorch-prints from Thaw are still in the dirt. I step over them. The boards under my feet are the boards the men dropped their clothes on. The four piles are still there.
Dean closes the door behind us and slides the bolt.
He sets the rifles on the table.
He does not call for the pack. He does not push the bond. He does not run for the folder.
He pours me a glass of water and he sits down at the table across from me and he waits with me until the men come home.