Chapter 4 #2
He marched toward her, and for a second, his tardiness was not forgiven, but forgotten.
He wore jeans, too, dark and worn in all the right places, and a white t-shirt that stretched just enough across his chest and shoulders to make her salivate a little.
His hair was slightly wind-tousled, like he’d run a hand through it on the drive.
His jaw was shadowed—not quite stubble, not quite clean.
His mouth—Enough. And hey, they matched. Cute.
Ridiculous thought. She shoved it away.
“I’m so sorry, I’m late again,” he said with a self-conscious smile.
Oh, yes. She was supposed to be irked by it. That had been the plan. “It’s only ten minutes,” she started. Reasonable. But couldn’t help the follow-up. “Does it happen often?”
He raised both arms a little and let them fall at his sides. “All the time. I could be on my way to hell, and someone would stop me to ask me something, to tell me something...” He shook his head. “I hate being late. My time is not more important than the time of whoever’s waiting for me.”
“Hey, that’s what I’m always saying!” she said, lighting up, genuinely delighted. Someone who understood that.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“I’ll cut you some slack because I assume being Alpha is very time-consuming.”
“You’re very magnanimous.”
“I can be.”
He smiled.
She stopped breathing for a bit. He was... stunning. Not just physically, though that was unfair enough, but in the way he smiled, like it reached all the way into him. It was disarming. Definitely too big a feeling for a Wednesday night.
“Shall we?” He opened the door and went in before her, then stopped when she was in too. “Again, I’m sorry. It’s instinct.”
She didn’t follow that one and frowned. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I should have kept the door open for you to get in first.”
She hadn’t missed the lack of chivalry, but she also wasn’t one to care about it. And he seemed very distressed about it–or, more frustrated with himself, which was not needed. “Okay?”
“The thing is, if you get in first, how can I protect you? I go in, make sure everything is safe, and then you get in. I’m always the first.”
That was so, so sweet, and a little hilarious. “We’re in a pub.”
“It’s instinct. I didn’t stop to think.”
No, he hadn’t. Protection was so much a part of him that it overwrote everything else. Manners, logic, social expectations. The wolf first, the man adjusting after. “Well, I appreciate it.”
“You do?”
“I’ve never been one overly preoccupied with gentleman stuff. I can open my own doors and put my jacket on without help. But knowing the reason why you did it...” she shrugged, struggling to find another word for hot. It always seemed to apply to him. “It’s nice.”
Not even close. Nice was what you said about curtains. Or soup. Not about a man who would walk into danger first without thinking because his wolf kept everyone under his protection safe. But she was not going to start the night by telling him all that, or that he was hot. Absolutely not.
She motioned her hand toward the tables. “Lead on.”
He gave her another thrill by smiling again, then picked a table in the far corner.
The pub was dim but not dark, all warm amber lights and old wood that had absorbed decades of spilled beer and stories and evolved around them.
A dartboard in the back, two older men nursing local drafts near the bar, low music humming under conversation.
The air smelled like fried onions, yeast, and something sweet baking in the kitchen.
Neither Aryon nor Elara was in tonight, not surprisingly. This close to Letha, they were hunkering down for the downpour of energy from nature and from people, riding it out somewhere quieter where they could brace for it.
The waiter, a young boy here for the season, came to take their order of drinks. Lemonade for her, local beer for him.
He leaned back, relaxed. “So, what did you find out about the plants?”
This, talking about work, she could do. All night long.
It wasn’t often someone showed interest in the analytical part of her job.
Everyone saw the shop, not what was behind it.
And okay, he was doing it because he felt responsible for the forest, but he could have come by the shop, asked for the headline, and spared them both the footnotes.
Could have settled for, “Do I need to worry?” instead of, “Tell me everything.” And it mattered to her.
It mattered more than she wanted to admit.
So she leaned in. “Nothing is wrong in the strict sense of the word. The plants are perfectly healthy.”
“But?”
“But, chemical analysis shows the key active compounds, like, for example, medicinal alkaloids, and some of the properties that give them their magical resonance and their health potency, are at unusually low concentration. There are subtle stress marks I missed when we picked them up. Some leaves are fractionally thinner. The flowering is slightly delayed. And when I tested it, the nutrient accumulation in the roots was lower than usual.”
Their drinks were set on the table, but he ignored them and asked her, “What does it mean?”
“It means the plants are healthy, but... tired, and don’t produce the punch they normally would. They are not sick, mind you, but something in their environmental cycle is off.”
“Did you test the soil?”
“I did. Good nutrients, so it’s not starvation. Moisture levels are fine, the sunlight is adequate, and there’s no pest damage.”
He sipped now, his eyebrows drawn together as he thought it through. “Something is hurting them, but it’s not from within.”
“Not hurting them. Draining them.” She sipped too, and the tart flavor of the lemon made her twitch her nose. “You said the animals were weird.”
He nodded once, playing with the condensation on his glass but never taking his eyes off of her. “I track herd patterns every season. Migration, feeding routes, rut behavior. It’s predictable within a margin. They are moving wrong.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “Deer are nervous. They graze in short bursts, heads up more than down. They are covering more ground than they usually need, like they are searching for something that isn’t there.
” He shifted in his chair. “Birds are lifting off before anything spooks them. And because of that, coyotes and predators are ranging wider, crossing lines they usually respect. They are uneasy.”
His hands were curled around the glass, his head tilting as if he was narrating a memory. He was telling her things professionally, she knew, but... There was a tension in him that didn’t quite match the delivery of a polished ranger report.
Then it hit her.
He didn’t say, I saw signs of disturbance. He said they are moving wrong. He said that the deer were nervous, and the predators were uneasy.
Those words were not measurements. Those were feeling words.
Words he used because he lived in the forest long enough to be part of it.
The ranger took note, but it was the wolf seeing it.
And so, listening to the ranger might not be enough.
She leaned back, her heart suddenly racing faster. “What does the wolf feel?”
He blinked, caught off guard, and a chuckle—half disbelief and half amusement—escaped him. “Like, normal wolves, or me?”
“We can talk about standard wolves in a minute, if we need to. Right now, I need your wolf’s take.”
“Why would you care about that?”
She drummed her fingers on the table, ready to add more to her mental flood of information. “Because your instinct is information, just written in a different language, and I’m all for communication.”
He studied her in that intense way of his, clearly still not convinced.
“Look,” she said, exhaling, “just because it doesn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet doesn’t mean it should be ignored. We’re taking into account animal patterns, and you are an animal.”
He raised an eyebrow, and she wished she had thought of bringing a shovel to dig herself a hole.
“What I mean,” she rushed on, ignoring the heat on her cheeks.
“You’re magik. Part of you is animal instinct, only yours is.
.. amplified. Guided by the man, which makes it even more powerful.
And also, you can speak, where the deer cannot. So...”
Her hands fell to her lap. She knew she was blushing. She knew she sounded like she was half-teaching and half-babbling, but then, to her immense relief, he laughed. Softly, barely more than a chuckle, but it made her breathe easier.
He leaned back, eyes dark, scanning her face as if he could find his words there.
“The wolf feels like the forest is shifting,” he murmured.
“Some places are too light, like something is missing. Then you move, even just a mile, and it’s gone.
” Frustration flickered over his face, his jaw tightening, fingers drumming once against the glass before he stilled them.
“I feel it, but it slips if I try to grab it, leaving me with nothing but a hunch.”
She stopped, her brain putting together what he said and what they knew. “You know what we need?”
“Another drink?”
“No. I mean, yes, that. And also food because I’m starving.
But we need a grid. You say it’s not everywhere.
Not all my plants in the shop misfired. Those two things might be connected.
So, what if the worst plant depletion lines up with the weirdest animal movement and what you perceive instinctually? ”
“That would give us a map.”
“And a lot of answers are on maps. We need a plan. Obviously, I can’t cover the entire forest–“
“We can.”
She stared at him. He said it so simply, like covering miles and miles of living, breathing wilderness was the same as picking up milk. “How? It took us half a day to do the area we did.”
“The pack can cover it.”