3. Jasper #2
Rowena did not answer that for a long moment. When she did, she said it without inflection.
“He said it was in hand.”
“In hand by who?”
“He did not say.”
“You did not press him?”
“No.”
Eli looked at her.
Rowena looked at her son for the same length of time Eli had looked at her, and Jasper had to wonder if they saw their reflection in each other as clearly as the rest of the world did.
She picked up her coffee and crossed the floor and stood at the window beside Jasper, and the two of them looked at the dark.
“Both of them,” she said.
“Yes.”
Her jaw moved once. The cup did not. Jasper had watched his mother carry weight that would have folded other women in half, and the only place any of it ever showed was in her jaw when she was working to keep it still.
She did not ask him if he was all right. She knew the answer to that, and she would not insult either of them by pretending it was a useful question. She did not put her hand on his arm. She knew his wolf was at the surface, and a touch would undo him.
She stood beside him and looked at the dark. That was what she gave him.
She set her cup down on the counter behind them without taking her eyes off the yard.
“You stay in this house,” she said.
Jasper did not turn around. He could feel the weight of her certainty at his shoulder and could not make himself disagree with it out loud.
“Until?” he said.
“Until I tell you.”
She walked back across the kitchen.
He thought she was going back upstairs to the phone. He did not turn to watch her go.
***
The bond moved.
Jasper would swear it for the rest of his life.
He had been pressing at it the same way the whole night.
The same muffled frequency. The same cold wrapping.
Then, in the space of a single heartbeat, the bearing changed, the muffling relaxed just a bit, and his hand was off the window before his mind had finished the word.
“Something’s changed,” he said.
Eli was on his feet.
“He moved.” Jasper’s mind was already at the back door. “South. Toward the grove.”
“Mom said—”
“He moved south, Eli. Toward the grove.”
***
The cold of the night air hit Jasper in the chest like a hand.
He took it like a wolf takes water on the first day after a long heat.
His lungs had been holding their breath the whole night, and the cold opened them up at the back.
Spanish moss moved overhead. The smell of the preserve came up from the soil the moment he cleared the fence: green water, cypress rot, the wet old smell of a Louisiana night that had been holding its breath alongside him.
He didn’t shift. He didn’t trust his wolf with that much control right now. He was barely holding it together as it was.
His legs found the path by themselves. He had run this preserve in the dark since he was a boy.
He could have run it blind. The path to the grove was barely a path, an absence in the undergrowth, a direction the land had agreed to over many years of his family walking it, and his feet knew the ground without thinking.
The bond moved with him. Not faster. Not slower. The bearing held south.
Halfway in, his wolf began to note something at the edge of the preserve’s scent. A wolf-scent. Not familiar exactly. Not unfamiliar either. Just something tickling at the far edge of his nose that his wolf was lifting its head toward and that Jasper himself could not pull into focus.
The ley lines came up through the soil before the grove was visible. The particular warmth of them in the bones of his feet. He had been waiting for that warmth since he cleared the fence, and the moment it reached him, his lungs finally loosened enough for a real breath.
The grove meant home, and home was still the only thing in the world that felt safe.
He came through the south edge of the grove at a dead sprint and stopped.
Callum was in the cradle of the great magnolia’s roots.
His face was wrong on the left side. His left eye was closed and dark. His shirt was soaked through with dried blood, rust-colored and stiff. His wrists hung along his ribs where someone had laid them. His mouth was open. His head rested back against the bark, arranged with care.
Breathing.
Jasper’s wolf locked onto the breathing and would not let go.
His mother was on her knees beside Callum.
Her hair was loose. Her hands were already moving over him the way they had moved over Jasper a thousand times when he had been small and bleeding from doing something stupid.
Jasper had not heard her leave the house.
The scent he’d been chasing the last quarter mile of the run was right in front of him now. There was a man at the same magnolia, or a wolf rather.
Big dude. Bigger than Callum, and that wasn’t a thought Jasper was used to having about another wolf. Dark hair. Silver at the temples. Standing three feet from Rowena like he had every right to the air there.
His back was to Jasper.
Rowena’s hand had just been dropping away from the man’s jaw as Jasper entered the grove.
Jasper saw the end of the gesture before he had any context for the gesture itself. The way her fingers had been against the man’s face. The way they trailed once and let go. The way the man had not moved while she had touched him.
Then she was on her knees by Callum.
Jasper wasn’t sure what exactly he’d just witnessed.
His mother didn’t touch men. Not in his presence. Not ever. She had put her hand on this stranger’s face in a show of gratitude beyond anything Jasper had ever witnessed from her.
The man turned.
He hadn’t known Jasper was at the south edge of the grove. He knew now. The recognition landed in him without a head lift, without a posture change. Just a body adjusting one degree to take in a new piece of information. The kind of shift only an animal made.
Their eyes met.
Jasper’s wolf went somewhere it had rarely ever been.
It went still.
It went still, the way a wolf goes still when it hears a sound it knows from somewhere it can’t reach. A sound from before. From a long time ago. From an old memory that niggled at the edges of Jasper’s mind.
His wolf knew that man.
Jasper did not.
But his wolf was up against the inside of his skin, listening, head canted, the way a wolf listens to a wind too low for a man to hear.
Under the listening was a tug at the edges of him.
A memory with no face. Arms of a stranger.
The press of a chest against his cheek when he’d been maybe five years old; just a tyke.
He was small. Smaller than he could remember being.
His ankle was hurt, burning and bleeding.
Wire bit into it. There was something in the wire that scared him in a way he hadn’t understood at the time.
The woods were quiet, too quiet. Two men were coming through the ferns, and they were smiling. The smiling was the worst part.
Then the woods came apart.
A wolf came through. He couldn’t see all of it.
The size. The dark fur of it. Silver at the tips of its ears, catching the afternoon light.
The two men ran. The wolf didn’t chase. It turned and looked at him, and he looked back, and something went between them he didn’t have a word for then and didn’t have one for now.
A man knelt where the wolf had been. Hands worked the wire off his ankle. Careful. Impossibly careful. Picked him up. Carried him.
“Let’s get you home.”
Four words.
He’d been hearing those four words in his head most of his life. He’d stopped trying to find the voice they belonged to by the time he was twelve. The memory had gone where childhood things go. Back of a drawer. Dust on it. Faded enough to pass for something his mother had once told him.
Now the voice was in front of him.