Chapter 12 The Sisters Call
Lilly
I answer standing in the middle of the stacks with wolf clan biology notes spread across the floor around my feet.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey." Marris skips the warmup entirely. She always does, when she's calling with a purpose. "Has a man named Grady Harrison been coming to your archive?"
I go still.
The stacks are quiet around me. The half-power lights cast everything in amber. I keep my voice even.
"Yes. He has a research appointment on the Hansen Clan land collection. Why?"
"I got a call this afternoon from someone named Bex Harrow.
" Marris's voice has the careful pace she uses when she already knows more than she's saying and is deciding how much to hand over.
"She was confirming your employment at the university.
She seemed surprised when I identified myself as the older sister. "
I don't say anything.
"Lilly." Softer now. "What's going on?"
"I'm not entirely sure yet," I say. "Tell me what you know."
A pause. Then Marris says, "Okay."
She tells me about Grady.
"Lilly, we met a million years ago. Back when I was the liaison for the original archive donation. He was twenty-four and I was 18. He was so hot."
"He still is." I say under my breath.
"LILLY!"
"It's true."
"I know. He has that 'age like fine wine' feel about him. He'd just started the alpha track. I never met a man so at home in his own skin."
"You should see him now."
I hear a big sigh escape Marris over the phone.
"So what happened?"
"We'd been dating for eight months. I was getting the feeling that he wanted to take the next step."
"What did that look like?" I say this absently looking at the piles around me.
"That's a funny question."
I wait for her answer. She waits on me too.
"We were talking about getting married. What a dreamy time. Then one day Grady calls me and says we have to talk."
"That doesn't sound good."
"He tells me that Denholm brought some clan laws to his attention that made marrying a human impossible. No human mates, especially for Alphas. No bonding either. The council backed him up."
"Couldn't he marry you outside the pack? I'm sure it would have a cost." I'm a little vague on this area but I make a note on my office calendar to look into it.
"Denholm said it would cost Grady his path to the alpha seat, permanently."
"Then what happened?"
"Grady said we were done."
I hear a sniff or two.
"Then he asked another member to walk me out."
She says it without bitterness. Just as a fact. The way she says the most difficult things, directly, so they can't fester.
"He made a choice," she says. "I made a different one, which was to leave. I went to Portland. I built something good there. I have Randy and the boys, the bookstore. I have been happy for a long time, and I am not calling to reclaim anything. I want to be clear about that."
"I know," I say. "I hear you."
"I'm calling because a wolf who walked into my sister's archive looking for me and stayed is something you deserve to understand before it gets further."
I sit down.
The floor of the stacks is cold through my jeans. I sit anyway.
"He's been here three times," I say.
"I know." A pause. "Bex told me more than she probably meant to."
We stay on the line for a moment without talking. This is something we have always been able to do, Marris and I, sit in the quiet of a phone call together.
We are very different people. However, in this way, we have always fit together in the silence between words.
"Are you okay?" she asks.
"I will be."
"That's not the same as yes."
"I know," I say. "Give me a few hours."
She tells me she loves me and hangs up and I sit on the floor with my phone in my lap and the wolf biology notes around me and I let myself be angry. I feel the release of the anger.
He came here for my sister.
That is the beginning of the story, and he has not told me the beginning. He let me live in the middle. In the research, working side by side. That time in the vault, and when he asked may I — there is no understanding of what it really means without it.
I know the pull is real.
I know what is documented. I have the biology in front of me. I know my own body's response is not manufactured. A fate bond cannot be manufactured. Bex tells me that, and shows me the documentation supporting it.
Both of those things are true.
And so is this: he has not told me the truth.
I stand up. Gather my notes. Stack them into neat piles, because that is one thing I can still control.
Then I call his number.
He answers in one ring.
"Lilly."
"I spoke to Marris," I say.
The silence on his end is exactly as long as it needs to be.
One breath. Two. The sound of a man standing completely still.
"Okay," he says.
"You came here looking for her."
"Yes."
"And you stayed because your wolf recognized me."
A pause. "Yes."
"And you have been in my archive four times, Grady, and you have not told me either of those things."
Nothing. Just his breathing, even and measured.
"You have until nine tomorrow morning," I say. "Come to the archive and explain yourself. All of it, from the beginning, without managing my reaction." I pause.
"Or I will donate every Hansen Clan document in my collection to the county historical society and let them sort it out. They have a very enthusiastic volunteer corps and very limited understanding of paranormal clan materials."
I hang up before he can respond.
I stand in the quiet stacks for a moment. Then I go back to the reference desk, open the Harrison donor file, and pull the original intake form from 2006.
It is four pages long. Standard acquisition agreement, collection scope, access conditions.
At the bottom of the last page there is a note. It is in my sister's very neat handwriting, and slanted slightly left the way it always has been.
It is not part of the official form.
For whoever holds this collection next: treat him gently. He means well.
I look at those words for a long time.
Then I close the file and go home.