Chapter 4 #2
"I was fifteen," I say. "Pup, by club standards.
I'd been around the Sinners since I was eight — my father was one of the original brothers.
He died when I was twelve. Conrad took me in.
By the time I was fifteen I'd been hanging around the workshop watching the brother who handled fire then, a man named Hollis, until he started letting me help.
He died of a heart attack on a job in March of that year and I picked up his work because nobody else wanted it.
Conrad didn't argue. Fifteen was young, but I was good with chemistry and I wasn't scared of fire. "
I stop. I look at the wood stove.
"My first solo job came in June. A warehouse outside Asheville that belonged to a man who'd crossed the club on a deal.
Empty building, no civilians, easy money.
I'd built the device myself. I'd placed it myself.
I'd gotten the supplies through Hollis's old contacts.
I knew what I was doing the way a fifteen-year-old knows what he's doing, which is to say, I thought I knew everything and I knew about a third of what I needed to know. "
"What went wrong."
"Two things. The first was that the building wasn't empty.
There was a homeless man sleeping in the basement.
I should have checked the basement. Hollis would have checked the basement.
I didn't. He was using it because the lock on the rear cellar door was broken and nobody had fixed it.
He got out — barely. Smoke inhalation, second-degree burns. He lived."
I stop. The second thing is harder to say.
"The second was that I put a charge too close to a fuel barrel I didn't know was there.
The building had been a paint warehouse before.
Some of the old solvent stock was still in the back.
The first charge went off and ignited the solvent.
The whole back wall went up before I was clear.
I got pinned by a falling beam. I was burning.
I tried to crawl out. The right side of my body was on fire. I knew I was dying."
She's listening. Her mouth is set in the line that I've learned, in three days, means she's working hard not to say anything yet.
"My wolf came out without me asking. I didn't know that was possible at the time.
The first shift is supposed to happen at puberty and I'd already had mine, but the wolf came up anyway, a second one, an emergency shift.
He took me out from under the beam. The fire didn't hurt him as much.
Wolf form is more resilient — and there's something about me, my line maybe, my wolf in particular, that handles heat differently.
He carried me through the back door and out into the parking lot, and shifted me back when the fire stopped.
Most of my right side was burned. The medics they sent — Hollis had a private medic on retainer for jobs — said I should have died.
Healing took eight months. Some of it never healed.
The right side of my body is what fire didn't let go of. "
She's quiet for a long time.
She sets the coffee mug down on the desk.
She gets up off the bed.
She crosses the cabin. She stops in front of me. Two feet of space between us. Less. Eighteen inches. The temperature in the room changes the way it always does when I'm close to someone, because I run warm and they don't, and most people start adjusting away from me without meaning to.
She doesn't adjust away.
"Take off your shirt," she says.
I look at her.
"Isolde—"
"I want to see them."
"You don't want to see them."
"I want to see them."
I don't move. I don't know what to do with this. I haven't taken my shirt off in front of someone outside the club in eight years. The last time a woman saw the scars, she got through about thirty seconds before she had to look away. She apologized. I hated the apology more than the looking away.
"I'm a firefighter," she says. Quietly. "I've pulled burned men out of buildings. I've watched skin slough off bone on the way to triage. I'm not going to flinch. And if you don't trust me to do this, I'm going to stand here until you do."
I look at her hand. The scarred one. The pink-and-white rope of healed tissue.
I take off the cut. I hang it on the bedpost. I take off the T-shirt.
The scars are what they are. They start at the right side of my jaw, climb down my neck, wrap around my shoulder, cover most of my right pectoral, run down the right side of my ribs, dip below the waistband of my jeans.
The skin is ridged and slightly darker than the unburned half.
It's tight in places. It pulls when I move.
It runs hot to the touch. The hair on the right side of my body doesn't grow back the way the left side does.
She looks at me.
She doesn't flinch.
I'm aware that I'm holding my breath. I let it out. The temperature in the room ticks up another half-degree.
She steps closer. Twelve inches between us. She raises her left hand — the scarred one — slowly enough that I can stop her if I want to. I don't stop her. She lays her palm flat on the worst of it, the place at the right side of my ribs where the skin is thickest and the heat is heaviest.
Her hand is cool.
I inhale sharply. Not from pain — from the absence of the thing I'd been bracing for. The flinch. The pull-back. The look-away. None of it comes. She just stands there with her hand on my scars, her palm cool against my heat, her face turned up toward mine with an expression I can't read.
"Fire marks the people it doesn't kill," she says. Soft. "That's all this is. It's not a curse. It's a receipt. You paid for something and you're still here. So did I."
I don't know what to say.
I put my hand over hers.
I press it harder against my skin. My palm is warm and the back of her hand is cool and her scarred fingers are under mine, and I can feel her pulse through the back of her hand where the artery runs close to the surface. Her pulse is steady. Mine isn't.
We stand like that for what feels like a long time. Her hand on me. Mine on hers. The morning light through the cabin window. The wood stove ticking. The compound waking up somewhere outside.
She doesn't pull away.
I don't either.
Eventually — I don't know how long it is, a minute, two, three — her free hand comes up and she lays it on the left side of my chest, where the skin isn't burned, where the heat is the same as anyone else's.
Both her hands on me. Cool and steady. She isn't kissing me.
She isn't doing anything but standing there with her hands on my chest, her scarred palm on my scars and her unscarred palm on the rest of me, like she's mapping the two halves of me with her hands.
I put my forehead against hers.
The unburned side. I don't think. I just do it.
She doesn't pull away.
The wolf, under my skin, lets out a sound I can't translate.
Eventually she steps back. Slowly. Her hands come away last. The cool prints of them stay on my skin for a beat longer than they should, the way a cold drink leaves a ring on a wood table.
"Tomorrow," she says. Her voice is rougher than it was. "We work. We get him."
"Tomorrow."
She picks the T-shirt up off the floor and hands it to me. I pull it back on. The fabric drags against the scars and I'm aware of every inch of it.
I leave the cabin. I walk back up the hill to the workshop. My hands are shaking and I don't know why.
The wolf is awake and quiet and listening to something I can't hear yet.
I go inside. I shut the door. I lean against it.
For the first time in eight years, I've been touched without flinching, and the woman who touched me was the one I came to expect to be the hardest of all.
I don't know what I'm going to do with that.
I sit down at the workbench and I get back to work.