7. The Storm Inside
Chapter seven
The Storm Inside
Six months ago the loudest sound in his life was the refrigerator. Now a storm was tearing the mountain apart and a vampire had his hands on him and the loudest sound was his own voice saying yes to something that felt like the first honest word he’d spoken in thirty-four years.
The storm arrived on the fifth day like something that had been waiting for permission.
It came from the west, a wall of charcoal cloud that swallowed the mountain ridges one by one, erasing the horizon in increments until the sky over Black Pine was a single, bruised mass pressing down on the treetops with almost physical weight.
The barometric pressure dropped so fast Jace's ears popped, and the air turned electric, charged, humming, tasting of ozone and wet stone and the peculiar metallic tang that precedes lightning.
The pines began to sway in unison, their tops inscribing anxious circles against the darkening sky, and the wind that drove them carried a cold that was not autumn cold but something rawer, the cold of altitude and exposure, the cold that kills.
Canyon had known it was coming. He'd stood at the edge of the clearing that morning, head tilted, nostrils working, reading the air with the same focused attention he gave to tracking prey, and then he'd turned to the group with an expression that Jace had come to recognize as his crisis face, not panicked, never panicked, but sharpened, every unnecessary element of his humanity stripped away to reveal the predator's operational efficiency beneath.
"The storm will be severe," Canyon said, his voice cutting through the rising wind. "You stay indoors, you stay together, and you do not, under any circumstances, open a door or window until I tell you it's safe."
They'd consolidated into the lodge. Reed helped Canyon board the windows with pre-cut shutters that fitted into slots in the frames—a system, Jace noted, that had been built into the structure from the beginning, as if the lodge had been designed by someone who expected to defend it.
Milo organized supplies with the nervous efficiency of a man who channels panic into logistics.
And Jace hauled firewood from the covered stack beside the lodge until his arms ached and his shirt was soaked with sweat, the physical labor a relief from the tension that had been building in his body since the reveal.
Because the reveal had changed things. Not in the way Jace had expected, not with distance or fear or the slow, rational withdrawal of a man who'd been told the person he was sleeping with was a centuries-old blood-drinking predator.
Instead, the knowledge had intensified everything.
Every time Canyon moved through the room, Jace's awareness of him sharpened: the fluid economy of motion, the way his head turned at sounds no human could hear, the slight flare of nostrils when he passed close to Jace, reading his scent, cataloguing his chemistry, the intimate surveillance of a creature that experienced the world through senses Jace could barely imagine.
Knowing what Canyon was made wanting him not less dangerous but more honest. The pretense was gone.
The mask was off. And what Jace wanted, with a hunger that frightened him in its absoluteness, was the thing behind the mask.
The predator. The ancient. The creature that looked at him with silver eyes and saw something worth three hundred years of waiting.
***
The storm hit at four in the afternoon. One moment the wind was a gust; the next it was a force—a sustained, howling pressure that slammed into the lodge like a fist, rattling the shutters, driving rain against the boards in sheets that sounded like gravel.
Lightning cracked the sky directly overhead, the flash so bright it leaked through the seams of the shutters and strobed the interior in blue-white pulses, and the thunder that followed was not a sound but a physical event, a concussive wave that Jace felt in his teeth and his chest and the soles of his feet.
The power, such as it was, limited to the lodge's backup generator, died in the first twenty minutes.
The fire became their only light, and it fought the drafts that snaked through every crack, the flames ducking and surging with each gust, throwing shadows that leapt and twisted across the walls like something alive.
The animal skulls on the mantel grinned in the flickering light, and the one with the elongated canines, the one that was not wolf or bear or anything in Jace's taxonomy, seemed to watch with particular attention, as if the storm had awakened something in its hollow sockets.
Canyon had vanished into the back rooms of the lodge. Jace could hear him moving, or rather, he could hear the quality of silence that attended Canyon's movements, the way the air shifted when he passed, the almost-subliminal vibration of a body that displaced space differently than a human body.
Jace waited until Reed and Milo were absorbed in their game, then rose from his chair and followed the silence.
***
He found Canyon in a room he'd never entered—a storage space at the lodge's far end, windowless, lit by a single candle that guttered in the drafts.
The room was stacked with supplies: canned food, medical equipment, rope, the detritus of decades of wilderness operations.
Canyon stood at the far wall with his palms pressed flat against the logs, his head bowed, his shoulders tight with a tension that Jace could see vibrating through the muscles of his back.
"You should be with the others," Canyon said without turning.
"So should you," Jace said.
"I'm not good company right now." His voice was strained, not with the controlled authority Jace was used to, but with something rawer, something that sounded like a man holding a door shut against a force that was trying to come through.
"The storm affects me. The pressure changes, the electrical charge, it amplifies the hunger.
Everything is louder. Your heartbeat sounds like a drum.
Your blood smells like—" He broke off. His fingers curled against the wood, dragging furrows into the grain. "Go back, Jace. Please."
Jace closed the door behind him. The candle flame flickered in the disturbance and then steadied, throwing their shadows onto the walls in elongated, dancing shapes.
He crossed the room, and each step was a decision—a choice, deliberate and clear-eyed, the same choice he'd made in Cabin Eight when Canyon had offered him a door.
He placed his hand on Canyon's back, between the shoulder blades, and felt the tremor running through the muscle beneath—a fine, constant vibration, like a machine running at the edge of its tolerances.
"I'm not afraid," Jace said.
Canyon turned. His eyes were silver, pure, undiluted, the grey entirely gone, and the pupils had contracted to pinpoints despite the dim light, giving his gaze an intensity that felt like being caught in a beam.
His lips were parted slightly, and Jace could see the canines, elongated, sharp, extending past the lip line by a fraction of an inch, gleaming in the candlelight like polished ivory.
The hunger was visible in every line of his body, a physical force that distorted his control the way gravity distorts space, bending everything toward its center.
Jace kissed him.
The kiss was incendiary. Canyon's restraint shattered on contact, not violently, but completely, like a dam overtopped by a wave that was simply larger than anything the structure had been designed to hold.
His arms wrapped around Jace with a strength that was terrifying in its suggestion of what it could do and wasn't, lifting Jace off his feet and pressing him against the far wall with an impact that knocked the breath from his lungs and sent the canned goods on the nearest shelf rattling.
The wall was rough, raw log, unsanded, the bark still clinging in patches, and it scraped against Jace's back through his thermal as Canyon's mouth devoured his with a hunger that went beyond sexual into something more primal, more desperate, the hunger of a creature that had been denying itself for so long the denial itself had become a form of starvation.
Lightning struck close, close enough that the thunder was simultaneous with the flash, the concussive wave shaking the lodge to its foundation.
In the strobing light, Jace caught flashes of Canyon's face between kisses: silver eyes blazing, canines extended, the pale skin luminous with an inner light that pulsed in time with the lightning, as if the storm and the vampire were resonating on the same frequency.
Canyon's hands were everywhere, pulling at Jace's thermal, shoving it up, his fingers raking down bare skin that erupted in gooseflesh, the contrast between the cold air leaking through the wall and the scorching heat of Canyon's palms creating a sensory whiplash that made Jace's cock harden so fast it hurt.
Canyon's mouth left his and found his throat, the bruises, always the bruises, sucking them dark again, his tongue laving the pulse point with wet heat while his elongated canines dragged against the skin with a pressure that was a promise and a threat and a question all at once.
"Tell me to stop," Canyon rasped against his neck, his hips grinding against Jace's, the massive ridge of his erection pressing through layers of fabric with a heat that burned even through denim. "Tell me to stop before I—"
"I'm not telling you to stop," Jace said. "I'm telling you to hurry."