Chapter Nine – Cole61
Chapter Nine – Cole
Her pulse had been there. Steady, even, and present.
I’d felt it in my fingertips and I sat with it, let it be real, but she hadn’t opened her eyes straight away, her body was still in the way that bodies were still when they were not choosing stillness but the way she lay with one arm loose and her head turned at an angle she would not have chosen, was what finally did it.
It pulled the floor out from under me. Not all at once.
In pieces, the way it always came: the orange color first. The windows of the pack house had been lit from the inside before I even got the truck stopped, and for a moment I had sat in the cab in the dark and told myself it was the lamps, that someone had left every lamp on, that it was nothing.
Then the smoke reached me through the closed window and I got out.
The front door was unlocked, which was the first wrong thing.
I called names. One and then another and then all of them, rapid and loud, and the silence that came back was not the silence of a house where no one was home.
It was the silence of a house that had run out of things to say.
The smoke sat in the rooms at about knee-height and the fire had been in the walls a long time already, and I moved through it with my shirt over my face, calling and not being answered, and I found them one by one in the places they had fallen.
Two fingers to the neck. Pressing, counting, finding nothing. Moving to the next one.
The roof beam let go somewhere above me, a sound like a chest giving way, low and deep and final, and the light through the staircase window went from orange to white for a moment, and I was at the last door at the end of the upstairs hall and I opened it and I found nothing inside it either.
Just the smoke and the heat and the particular silence of people who had stopped answering.
I walked out through the front door. I didn’t know how.
My legs found the porch steps and the yard and the truck and I sat in the cab again and I listened to the fire work through the rest of the building, and I was the only one sitting in any vehicle in that yard, and I understood, clearly and completely, what that meant.
I had pressed two fingers to six necks and found nothing in any of them, and I had walked out alone, and I had not stopped moving since.
She’d given me a scare. I thought I’d lost her before I had chance to have her.
Not that I’d ever take what wasn’t my own.
I was okay with waiting until she was ready, after all she’d been through enough this last year, the complication of a new scentmatched pack might not be something she’s all that ready for.
I exhaled long and hard. I had been carrying the fire for four years.
I knew its edges, knew the particular slant of light or smell or quality of silence that could wake it, knew how to step around it most of the time, knew that it would always be there in the way that certain things were always there, not loud, not gone.
I had learned to live alongside it the way you lived alongside a bad knee or a fence that would never sit quite plumb: you accounted for it, you didn’t pretend it wasn’t there, you got on with the rest of the work.
The first morning on this ranch, I had ridden in with Rhett and Wade behind me and found her clearly exhausted, looking for her cattle.
I knew there was something about her right there and then, and when I’d looked at her, I told myself that this was the omega for us.
She was our omega, the fierce little warrier we’d hoped for.
And now I’d nearly lost her, I knew one more thing… I’d fallen in love with her.