Decker
Her breathing changes a little before midnight.
I’ve been waiting for it—the slide from dozing into the deep, even pull that means the wolf has taken the night shift.
She fought sleep for a while first, waiting in the low light like I might answer something.
I didn’t. Now I ease my arm out from under her head, and she murmurs and burrows into the warmth I leave behind.
I dress in the dark and let myself out. The boulder grinds home behind me, and the cold comes in clean after hours of shared heat.
The last time I left her locked in this cave, she pried her way out through my wall. She’s not that prisoner anymore. She’s not a prisoner at all, and we both know she’ll be there when I get back.
The bear has been shoving at me since sundown.
Not toward her, for once. Out. There’s work on this mountain I’ve left too long, and at the top of the list is a dead dragon lying in open grass less than an hour from where she sleeps.
Every moment it lies there, it marks the spot for anyone hunting a missing tracker.
I should have dealt with it the first night.
I had a bleeding woman in my arms instead.
Then Viktor. There hasn’t been a window until now.
The site is forty minutes at a walk. I make it in less.
The grass still shows signs of the fight. The scorch line where he breathed at me. The long gouge where he came down. The dark stain spread wide where he bled out.
The dragon is gone.
Not scavenged—gone. Scavengers strip a kill where it lies and leave the mess to prove it. What’s here is a wide, even drag path running off the stain to the flat below, and on the flat, tire tracks. Deep tread, doubled up, pressed in hard where a vehicle stood under a heavy load.
The Syndicate recovers its dead. Nothing left behind, nothing to find. If this was their crew, they know exactly where their dragon died, and every ridge within a day’s walk of this grass is inside their search ring now.
The den is inside it too.
I have the burner out before I’ve finished the thought, and I call the only number it holds.
Viktor picks up on the second ring. If I woke him, his voice doesn’t show it.
“The dragon’s gone,” I say.
“I know. My people lifted it out.”
I stand there with the phone at my ear and the empty grass in front of me.
“You knew where it died.”
“I knew where you were. The rest was logistics.” A pause, and I can hear him deciding to save me the work. “The phone, Decker.”
I look at the thing in my hand. A tracker in the burner. He slid a leash across his desk, and I picked it up and put it in my own pocket.
“You should have said.”
“You’d have left it in a drawer somewhere. Then I’d know a great deal about a drawer.” No apology anywhere in it. “You went dark on me once. I don’t plan to sit through it twice.”
“So you pulled the carcass to cover us.”
“I pulled the carcass because a dead Syndicate tracker rotting within reach of my territory is a problem for everyone. And because their search flights went up over the west ridge yesterday. High, wide loops—the pattern you fly when you’ve lost something and don’t know where to start.
If that body was still in the grass, the loops would be low and tight over your head by now.
” He lets that sit. “Instead, there’s nothing for them to find. ”
I can’t be angry about that. The same man who put a tracker in my pocket without asking just erased the one thing on this mountain that pointed straight at her.
That’s Viktor. He’ll watch you whether you like it or not, and he’ll guard you the same way.
“Anything from Vanya?”
“It’s been hours.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It isn’t a yes, either. Second day, as agreed.” Something rustles on his end. “Keep the phone on you. If I have to move you fast, I won’t have time to send a runner.”
The line goes dead.
I stand there with the burner in my fist. I could toss it and walk away, and Viktor goes blind. So does the search for her sister. The phone stays in my pocket, Viktor stays on the other end of it, and things keep moving forward.
I should go straight back.
I don’t.
All evening, lying behind her, part of me was already out here walking the ground. I strip, hide my clothes and the phone dry under a deadfall, and let the bear have what he’s been asking for.
The mountain arrives all at once. Scent over scent, each one telling me how long it’s been there. Deer moved through the creek bottom at dusk. A marten worked the rockslide an hour back. Nothing human. Nothing dragon.
The bear knows the job before I do. He checks the area.
Not the whole range. The approaches. The lower trail where the ground narrows and anything coming up has to pass.
The creek crossing. The gap in the rocks to the south where the slope lets a climber through.
We go to each one, and at each one the bear does the old work—grinds a shoulder into the trunks, rakes the bark as high as I can reach, presses our scent into the soil until it will hold through frost. Anything that reads sign will read it from fifty yards out: something big holds this ground.
I’ve had this mountain for years, and I’ve never once drawn a line around it. Never had to. A bear alone is his own boundary. I go where I want, and the wildlife sorts itself out around me.
This is different, and I know what I’m looking at. The bear rut. I’ve seen it in other males—the ones with a female denned close, working the ground around her like it’s something to defend. I used to think it looked like madness.
It feels saner than anything else I’ve done all week.
The line isn’t around the den. The den never needed one. It’s around her. Her, and no one else. And the bear will hold it against anything that comes up this slope, and he won’t ask me first.
By the time the work is done, the cold has gone through even my coat, and the sun is cresting the ridge.
I dress at the deadfall, pocket the phone, and head back.
The boulder is in place. Nothing has touched the slope.
Inside, she’s where I left her—curled on her side, one hand under her cheek, her hair spilled across the fur.
I stand there longer than I need to.
Her sister isn’t in a cell; she’s in a pipeline, and the deadline on her is tighter than the one I gave Grace. Her own blood has a price on it she doesn’t know exists. And I won’t tell her.
I strip and fit myself in behind her. She stirs, pushes into my heat, and settles with a small sound that lands under my sternum and stays.
Her neck is right there. The curve where it runs into her shoulder, bare above the blanket, close enough that my breath moves the fine hairs on her skin. The bear leans toward it, patient, certain.
No, I tell him.
He doesn’t argue.
He doesn’t take it back, either.