3. Jasper #3
Twenty feet across the grove. At the foot of the magnolia where Callum lay breathing. Pre-dawn light catching the silver at the temples the way afternoon light had once done. The same careful set to the hands.
His wolf had known the whole time.
Jasper’s vision blurred.
He blinked. Cleared. Did not look away.
His knees almost gave. He locked them before they could.
His head tilted.
A fraction. The smallest movement his neck would allow. He stared at the wolf, trying to remember.
The man’s jaw tightened by a fraction.
Neither of them spoke.
Neither of them was going to.
The man held the look longer than he would have if it hadn’t mattered. Then he turned and walked back into the deeper preserve.
Same way he’d come. No hurry. No explanation. A man who had somewhere else to be, who didn’t owe anyone an answer about it.
Jasper watched until there was nothing there to see.
His wolf strained against his ribs. It wanted to follow.
It wanted answers from the male that had carried him through a dark hour of his early life.
The frequency faded with distance. Jasper stood at the southern edge of the grove and lost it the way you only notice you’ve been holding someone’s hand once it’s pulled away.
He did not follow.
His brother was in the roots of the great magnolia, and his mother was on her knees beside him, and neither of them was moving from that grove tonight.
He crossed the clearing.
* * *
Callum was breathing.
Jasper kept coming back to that. He went down on his knees in the dirt beside the magnolia roots and pressed his hand to his brother’s chest, and the chest rose. It rose again, and again.
“Callum,” Jasper said.
There was no answer. There had been no answer expected. Callum’s eyes were closed and his face was wrecked, and the bruising on the left side was the kind that takes a fist with intent behind it. The intent had obviously been to do as much damage as a wolf’s body could to take.
Rowena’s hands kept moving.
Jasper put his other hand on the soil beside the great magnolia.
The ley lines came up through it. Slow. Patient. Powerful. The grove had a frequency of its own. Tonight the frequency was bring him home, bring him home, bring him home, and Callum was home and the grove knew it.
The warmth crept into Jasper’s palm and from his palm into his arm.
“Who was that?” Jasper asked.
Rowena’s hands kept moving. She did not look up. She did not stop her work for the question.
“Someone who keeps his promises.”
That was all.
He knew that it was all he was going to get tonight. Rowena had decided what she would and would not say in this grove before she had come down the stairs. There would be no further discussion.
He looked back at the preserve’s edge.
The wolf was gone.
But the voice in his head now rang clear in his memory.
Let’s get you home.
He had been hearing it most of his life, and tonight he had finally seen the face that went with it.
He pressed his palm flat to the magnolia root beside Callum’s shoulder.
Rowena’s hands kept moving, the light of the grove’s power glimmering from beneath her palms.
***
Eli came through the south edge of the grove at a run and stopped.
He read the scene the way he always read everything. Fast. Complete. Pulling out what mattered. His eyes went to Callum first. To Rowena, second. To the place along the preserve’s edge where the dark sat thick.
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one knuckle.
He did not speak for a long beat.
Then: “Who.”
“I don’t know his name,” Jasper said.
“A wolf.”
“Yes.”
Eli looked at the preserve. Then at Rowena. Her back was to both of them.
“Mom.”
She did not turn.
Jasper said it instead. “His wolf knew ours, Eli.”
Eli’s eyes came back to him.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t have words for it.”
“Try.”
Jasper tried.
He opened his mouth only to close it again a second later.
The thing he had to tell his brother lived under a long lifetime of dust and the words just weren't there..
Eli watched him try, watched him stop, watched him press the heel of one hand against the bark of the magnolia behind him because his legs would not hold him.
Eli pushed his glasses up again.
He was already on it. Jasper could see it. Eli would be in the journals of the archive before the day was out if only because it was one more piece that could possibly lead them to Serena.
Eli did not press.
“Later,” Eli said.
“Later,” Jasper said.
They both looked at Rowena.
She did not turn around.
“Find Serena,” she said.
Two words.
She turned back to Callum.
Jasper and Eli looked at each other across the grove.
There was nothing to say. There had been little enough to say since the bond had gone wrong, and there was less now.
Eli’s hand moved to the bark of the magnolia and rested there, the same magnolia Callum was lying under, and Jasper understood the gesture the way you understand any move your brother makes, common or odd, without needing to translate.
They walked back towards the house in silence that said more than words could ever convey.