CHAPTER 13
The ridge road was blacktop for exactly two miles before it curved east toward the Victorian. Luca walked it in the dark with his hands in his jacket pockets and his eyes on the asphalt ahead, measuring distance in the rhythm of his boots.
He’d stayed late at the carriage house. Denny Matthews’ shoulder had required more attention than expected, and Marcus had needed help with the splint.
They’d finished around eleven. Marcus had gone inside to clean up.
Luca had walked out instead of driving, taking the long route home along the ridge because the night was cold and clear and sometimes walking was better than sitting in a cab that smelled of someone else’s cigarettes.
The trees pressed close on both sides. Pine mostly, some oak.
Their branches met overhead in places, blocking what little starlight made it through the cloud cover, and the road became a tunnel of black between two walls of darker black.
The gravel shoulder crunched once under his boot when he stepped off to let a pickup pass, then went quiet when he moved back onto asphalt.
No other cars. The ridge road after midnight belonged to whoever was brave enough to claim it.
The turnoff appeared ahead. Gravel path, unmarked, the one that cut through the trees to the pack house. Luca had walked past it a hundred times. Tonight, four figures stepped out of the tree line ten yards beyond it and arranged themselves across the road.
Young. That was the first thing. Early twenties, maybe one older.
They stood with their shoulders squared and their weight forward, the posture of men who had positioned themselves somewhere between intention and commitment and were waiting for one to overtake the other.
Luca knew two of their faces. Not well. Names he’d heard around town, maybe seen at the hardware store or the diner.
The other two were strangers, or close enough that the distinction didn’t matter at this distance.
The one on the left held the stake.
Luca saw it without appearing to look. Split firewood.
Oak, from the grain. About eighteen inches long, sharpened at one end with something crude, a hatchet, maybe a hunting knife.
The point was uneven, beveled more on one side than the other, the work of someone who had been in a hurry or didn’t know how to sharpen wood properly.
The kind of thing stacked outside every house on the ridge road, split and dried and waiting for winter.
He kept his hands in his pockets. Didn’t take them out.
Didn’t raise them. The posture he’d used on Briggs outside Mario’s was the same one he used now: weight balanced, shoulders relaxed, face arranged in an expression that conveyed nothing worth reacting to.
Boring. Unremarkable. The kind of man who warranted no additional attention beyond what the situation had already allocated.
“Evening,” he said.
His voice came out warm. Direct. The same register he used for everything. Not performing concern. Not performing threat. Just acknowledging their presence as he might acknowledge the weather.
None of them answered. The one with the stake shifted his grip.
The wood rotated in his hand, the sharpened end tracking Luca’s center mass without quite committing to it.
Luca could read the hesitation in the boy’s shoulders.
Fear wearing anger’s clothing. The same combination he’d seen on Briggs, on a hundred young men across two centuries, the alloy of grief and terror that made otherwise reasonable people do things they would spend decades regretting.
He gave them forty seconds of silence. Let them stand in it.
Let the road hold the space between his stillness and their squared shoulders, and for those forty seconds, nothing moved.
Nobody moved. The stake stayed where it was.
The night air carried pine, cold and the faint mineral smell of the ridge itself.
Luca stood with his hands in his pockets, his weight on both feet and waited for whatever came next.
The stake came next.
The boy drove it forward with both hands.
The motion was committed. No hesitation, no telegraph, just a sudden lunge that covered the six feet between them faster than Luca had calibrated for.
The point hit his left shoulder four inches off center, below the collarbone, and the wood went in with a wet, percussive sound that belonged to no living thing.
Luca dropped to his right knee. The impact traveled through his shoulder into his spine and settled there as a bright, specific wrongness that his body recognized immediately as foreign material.
The stake stood out from his jacket at an angle, the sharpened end buried in muscle and whatever lay beneath it, and blood warmed the fabric around the entry point in a dark circle that spread faster than it should have.
He didn’t fall. That was the thing. His right knee hit asphalt.
His left hand came up and gripped the stake below the entry point, not pulling, just holding, and his right palm flattened against the road for balance.
The four wolves stood in their half-circle, frozen, watching the man they had just impaled remain upright on one knee with a piece of firewood sticking out of his shoulder and his dark eyes fixed on nothing in particular.
Then he stood up.
The movement was not graceful. It was functional.
His right leg pushed. His weight came forward.
His left hand stayed on the stake, neither pulling nor stabilizing, just maintaining contact with the thing that had entered his body, the contact itself treated as data rather than emergency.
He rose to his full height. Never tall, always upright.
And stood on the blacktop with the stake in his shoulder and blood on his jacket and his face arranged in the same expression he’d been wearing forty seconds ago.
The wolves scattered. Not in formation. Not with purpose.
They broke in four directions, men who had just watched something impossible happen and needed to put distance between themselves and the evidence.
Boots on gravel. Bodies crashing through underbrush.
The trees swallowed them in seconds, and the ridge road was empty again except for Luca, the stake and the blood soaking into the left side of his shirt.
He looked at the wood. Oak grain. Rough-cut. The sharpened end was inside him. The handle end protruded eight inches from his jacket, and his left hand was still wrapped around it below the entry point, his fingers pale against the dark stained wood.
He pulled.
The stake came out with a sound that was mostly wet and partly wooden.
The point dragged through tissue that had already begun to close around it, and the blood that followed was darker than it should have been and slower.
Luca held the stake in his right fist and pressed his left palm flat against the wound.
The pressure was automatic. His body had been doing this for two centuries.
The wound pulsed once under his hand, then settled into a steady ache that radiated outward from the point of entry and registered as pain his system could manage without cataloguing.
Wrong call. He knew it. Wood that went in should stay in until someone with better light and steadier hands could remove it properly.
Marcus would say so. Sebastian would say so.
Anyone with medical training spanning the last hundred years would say so.
Luca had pulled it anyway because standing on the ridge road with a piece of firewood in his shoulder was a statement he wasn’t interested in making, and sometimes the wrong call was the only one that left you walking under your own power.
He started walking. Left hand pressed flat over the wound.
Right fist gripping the stake. The Victorian was half a mile ahead.
The road curved east. The trees thinned.
The house would appear around the bend, its warped windows throwing weak light across the porch where Sebastian had been sitting for three nights running, and whatever waited inside those walls would have to accommodate one more piece of bad news before the night was done.
The blood seeped between his fingers. Not dramatic.
Persistent. The kind of leak that happened when something had been opened and hadn’t quite decided whether to close.
Luca adjusted his grip on the stake. The wood was warm from his hand.
The grain caught what little starlight reached the road, and the dark stain along its length registered as evidence of something that had already happened and could not be unhappened.
He walked the half mile with that evidence in his fist, his left shoulder burning and the Victorian’s lights growing brighter with each step.
Somewhere in the walking he thought of June’s hands.
Steady over a splinter, steady over anything.
And let the thought carry him another fifty yards before the wound reasserted its claim on his attention.
He didn’t run. Didn’t hurry. His pace was the same measured stride he’d been using since he left the carriage house, and the only thing that had changed was the weight in his right hand and the pressure of his left palm against his own body.
Neither of those things was sufficient reason to break rhythm on a road he had walked a thousand times in two centuries of nights exactly like this one.
The porch light was on when he reached the Victorian.
Yellow. Weak. Throwing just enough illumination to find the steps.
Luca climbed them one at a time. His left arm worked.
The shoulder complained but held. The door was unlocked.
He pushed it open with his right hand, the stake still gripped in his fist, and stepped inside to whatever came next.
June’s pager went off at half past midnight. Marcus’s number. No message.