Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Jen
We make it twenty minutes down the road before Fen wakes up.
I know it before any of them do. The cold flat place under my sternum flickers — small, the way the needle on a gauge ticks once before the meter swings — and I sit up between Thaw's boots on the floor of the truck.
Some part of me has been listening to the cargo box behind us since we pulled away from the cabin, and that part is now telling the rest of me that the wait is over.
"He is coming up," I say to Thaw, whose hand has not let go of mine since we got in this truck.
His gold eyes go sharp. The bond at my sternum tightens. "How far up?"
"Not all the way. Surfacing."
He raps the mesh once with a knuckle. The rumble on the other side changes immediately — Crull, registering, deepening the low continuous note he has wrapped around his unconscious brother since we left the cabin. I have him.
The hollow is leaning toward the back of the cargo box like a face turned to a window.
It yanks. I make a sound through my teeth.
Thaw's hand is flat to my chest in the same beat. The bond floods. The yank settles to a pull I can breathe through, but only because he is pulling against it from his side.
"Slow," he says. Low. Right at my temple. "Slow, Jen. Breathe with me."
I breathe with him. The bond carries his rhythm down to mine — slow, deep, deliberate.
Behind the mesh, a sound.
Not the half-whine. Not the broken growl. A whine, high and thin and aimed, the sound of a body that has located its target and cannot reach it.
"Crull," Thaw says.
"Half-dose is wearing fast." Crull's rebuilt voice, rougher in the middle of the night than I have ever heard it. "Faster than the breach dose did."
"Time."
"Minutes. Not many."
In the front, Daron has both hands at ten and two, ice-blue eyes on a road that is mostly black with a fog of yellow where the headlights are not on.
Dean is in the passenger seat with the scent sensor in his lap.
The forming thread to Daron has been tight since we got in the truck.
He is doing the math up there. Routes, distances, dose timing, the alternate vehicle.
He is not going to interrupt his alpha to deliver it, but he has it ready.
Harek is in the seat beside me. He has not spoken since we got in the truck.
He puts his hand over mine. He does not say anything, but his thumb moves once across the back of my hand.
Somehow that helps.
Behind the mesh, the whine sharpens.
"Pack." Crull is talking to Fen now, not us. The rumble climbs. "Pack, brother. Pack."
The word does something. The whine breaks — not into a growl, into something softer, the sound of a body being told what it is and remembering. Crull is talking him. You are pack. You are with pack.
It works for about ten seconds. Then the smell of me must hit Fen again, or the pull must spike, or something I cannot see from this side, and the whine comes back twice as high.
I sit up further.
"Thaw."
He looks down at me. The gold eyes do the thing where the alpha softens for me, the thing he reserves for me.
"Jen. If we put him in another vehicle —"
"He's spent two years of his life in a cell because of what they wanted from his body. Two years. And the first thing his own pack does when we get him out is split him off."
"From the thing his body wants more than air," Thaw says. "Which is you."
I stop.
I'm very tired and very stubborn and I'd like to win this argument. I'm not going to win this argument. He's put his finger on the part of me that wanted to fight and turned it sideways, and now the part of me that wanted to fight is sitting there confused, going oh.
"That's the dirtiest pool I've ever seen you play," I say.
"Yes," he says.
"It's also right."
"I know it is. I wouldn't have said it otherwise."
"I hate that," I say.
"I know."
He brushes my hair off my temple with the side of his thumb. The gold eyes hold mine. The bond is wide open. Behind the mesh, Fen makes a sound. It is not the whine. It is not the growl. It is —
"Jen."
The cargo box stops. Crull's rumble halts. The whole vehicle is holding its breath. The word came through the mesh. Rough. Wrecked.
He has said my name.
I cannot breathe. The bond at my sternum is the only thing keeping me upright on the floor of this truck. Thaw cannot breathe either — through the bond I feel him register that his brother has just used a coherent word for the first time since before the cell. I press my palm flat to the hollow.
"Fen," I say. Through the mesh. Quiet enough that I am not sure he can hear it. Saying it anyway, because he said mine and somebody has to say his.
Behind the mesh, "Jen." Steadier.
Then a third — and the third one is the one that breaks me, because the third one is not just my name.
"Jen. Go."
I lower my head. Through the mesh, Crull's hand tightens once against his brother's back. He has used the first word he has had in months to deliver it.
I sit in a moving truck in a forest I cannot name and a man I have been almost-bonded to uses his recovered voice for the first time to send me away from him. It is the first thing he has ever said to me. And it is go. I let one tear fall. Just the one. I am not doing this.
Thaw feels it through the bond. He does not say anything. He just brushes my hair back again, and his hand stays.
"Okay," I say. My voice is thick. "Fen, I hear you."
Behind the mesh, a sound. A relief sound. The sound a man who has not been heard in months makes when he has finally been heard.
"Daron," Thaw says, low. "Second cache."
"On it."
"How far."
"Eight miles past the highway turn. Twelve minutes if I do not push it. Eight if I push."
"Don’t push it."
The truck rolls. Thaw's hand on my chest. Harek's hand on mine. Crull's rumble through the mesh. Fen on the other side, quiet now, his words spent.
We drive in the dark and nobody speaks.
The second cache is at the bottom of a logging road.
Daron pulls off the track behind a stand of cedar and the low-beam headlight picks up — for one second, before he kills it — a tarp.
A vehicle under it. An old Forest Service work truck, crew cab, ugly green paint, the kind of vehicle that has been sitting on every back road in this state since 1994 and nobody looks at twice.
We move fast.
I get out of the truck on legs that are mostly working.
Thaw out behind me, his hand on my back as I drop to the gravel.
Harek out the other side, silent, already pulling our duffel from the cargo bed.
Dean rolls the cargo door up from outside, and Crull is exactly where I knew he would be — crouched against the mesh with one hand flat on his brother's back, the rumble low and continuous, his amber eyes coming up to find mine the second the door opens.
He nods at me. Once. He does not have to say what he is saying. I have him. Go.
Daron looks at me. He is not going to play. Not tonight. The dry banter of an hour ago is gone. The look in his ice-blue eyes is the look of a wolf who has just been assigned to ride six hours with two packmates, one of whom is feral.
"Take care of them, Daron."
"I am going to."
"All of you," I clarify.
His ice-blue eyes hold mine. "Even the one who is trying to send you away from him. Yes."
Dean rolls the cargo door down. The truck is closed.
I stand in the cedar stand with my hand on the cold metal of the door.
The hollow under my sternum is full in a way it has never been.
Full and warm and aimed, with a man on the other side of that steel who used his recovered voice to ask me to go.
I want to say something through the cargo door. I do not know what. I am not abandoning you. I am sorry. Thank you for saying my name. I do not say any of it. I put my palm flat to the metal of the cargo door for one second. The hollow under my sternum pulses against my own hand from the inside.
Fen feels it. I do not know how. But the hollow pulses back. I take my hand off the door.
We climb into the work truck. Crew cab, smell of motor oil and pine and somebody's old coffee, two duffels in the back. Dean takes the wheel. Thaw the passenger seat. Harek folds into the back with me, his shoulder against mine, his hand finding mine again the second we are settled.
Behind us, the first truck's engine pulls away. Northbound. Gravel for ten seconds, fifteen, and then the cedar absorbs the sound. Dean starts our truck and we pull out.
Dean does not push the truck. He keeps it at a steady speed that puts the trees past the windows in a slow drift, and for a while nobody says anything. The hollow under my sternum starts to pull about a mile in.
It is small at first — a faint reaching, the way a held breath gets uncomfortable before you decide to let it out. I do not say anything yet because I do not want it to be true.
Dean's eyes find mine in the rearview anyway. The forming thread has gone careful in a way that means he is reading my pulse off the bond and does not need me to narrate.
"It’s started."
"What is it doing?" Dean asks.
"Stretching. Not breaking. Aching."
Thaw turns to meet my eyes, "It will hurt and it will not break."
The truck climbs and the trees go from cedar to fir. Thaw has stayed turned half in the passenger seat to watch my face. Harek's hand in mine has not moved.
The pull thins as we drive, which is the strangest part. It does not get heavier the further we go. It gets finer — the ache holding at the same volume but at a thinner gauge. My chest registers the rate of change before my head does.
Sometime past the fir line, the thinning stops.
The pull holds itself at a level my body decides it can carry. The ache is real but it does not climb.
"It plateaued," I say.
Dean lets out the breath he has been holding for what must be five minutes. Thaw lets out his. Even Harek's hand around mine eases a fraction — the whole truck has been holding for a snap that did not come.
Dean says. Quiet. "Your body is holding on at a level you can survive."
"Without him."
"Until he is ready."
I close my eyes. "He said my name."
"I heard him. He used the first word he has had in months to keep you safe from him."
I lean my head against Harek's shoulder.
After a while Dean reaches across the cab and pulls a travel mug from the cup-holder and hands it back to me over the seat without looking at me, eyes on the road.
I take it. It is warm.
I take the lid off.
Coffee. Black. Two sugars.
The taste is the smell of every morning I had before the gravel road, and I sit in the back seat of an unfamiliar truck with the taste of coffee with two sugars on my tongue and I look up at the rearview to see whether Dean is going to acknowledge that he remembered.
He is looking at the road.
Thaw turns half in the passenger seat. I do not have to look at him — the bond carries his small smile. I do not look up. I just sip the coffee and let the forming thread to Dean go a degree warmer, and that is all that has to happen, and the wolf at the wheel is the kind of man who knows it.
I just keep hearing Fen’s rough voice, over and over. He said my name three times.
The third one sent me here.