Chapter 4 #2
She's staring at me with an expression that contains equal parts rage and clinical assessment, and the combination is so purely Signe that I nearly laugh.
The silvery mist takes me before the laugh arrives.
The transformation is instant. One breath I'm standing naked with the blizzard pouring through the window. The next breath I'm low to the ground, four-legged, my vision flattened and my scent-processing expanded to a range that makes the human nose feel like a blunt instrument.
My wolf doesn't carry pain the same way the man does. The shoulder is wrong, stiff, the claws having done damage that even this frame can't fully compensate for, but the stiffness is manageable in a way the human version isn't. Wolves don't negotiate with injury. They work around it.
I go through the window and hit the snow at a run.
The world opens. The blizzard that's been a wall of sound from inside the cottage is, from out here, a living thing with texture and direction.
My nose cuts through it the way Signe's scalpel cuts through tissue: reading the layers, sorting the information.
Snow has its own scent profile, clean and mineral, and laid on top of it are the scent-trails of everything that's moved through this storm in the last hour.
Two wolves. They approached from the northwest, circled the cottage once, tested the shutter, and retreated on the same bearing.
Their scent carries the particular mineral signature of Drakfell mountain territory: volcanic soil, glacier runoff, the cold stone of the passes I grew up running.
Balric's wolves. My uncle's reach extending through a blizzard to find the nephew who escaped.
I follow the trail far enough to confirm the direction and the pace. They're moving fast, not lingering, heading for the northwest passes. Scouts reporting back.
The trail is already filling with snow, which means they have enough of a lead that I won't catch them without leaving the cottage undefended. Leaving the cottage undefended with Signe inside isn't a risk my wolf is willing to take.
The return is harder. The shoulder is screaming in the wolf's language, which is less articulate than the human version but more honest, and by the time I reach the cottage window I'm running on willpower rather than strength.
The silvery mist takes me in the doorway.
One breath wolf, the next breath naked man, and the full weight of what my body just did lands on the reopened wounds with a clarity that drops me to one knee on the threshold.
Blood runs down my chest where the deltoid suture tore.
Fresh red on skin that's already mapped in old scars.
Signe is standing at the table with her suture kit in one hand and an expression I haven't seen from her before.
This isn't the clinical mask or the competent healer or the woman who laughed this morning for the first time in what sounded like years.
This is fury. Pure, undiluted, medical fury, and it's aimed at me with a precision that makes her scalpel look imprecise by comparison.
"If you shift again before that deltoid has sealed," she says, and her voice is so controlled it could cut glass, "I will personally ensure you can't stand long enough to try."
"Two scouts." I'm grinning through the pain because the alternative is screaming, and I've always preferred the grin. "They'll reach Balric in days if the weather holds. They know where we are."
The fury doesn't leave her face, but calculation moves behind it. She crosses to me, drops to her knees on the threshold, and presses a clean cloth against the bleeding deltoid with hands that are angry and steady and impossibly warm against my cold skin.
She doesn't say anything while she works. The silence is louder than the anger.
She re-stitches the wound. The pain is a familiar companion by now, and her hands on my chest are a better anchor than the cold and the blood and the image of Drakfell wolves circling this cottage while she worked on my wounds.
"The cottage isn't safe anymore," I tell her while she ties off the suture. "It's a known position. They'll report back, and Balric will send wolves who aren't just scouting."
"I know."
"We need to leave at first light. Regardless of the storm."
"I know that too." She secures the bandage with the same efficient competence she brings to everything, then reaches for the fur I dropped and drapes it across my shoulders.
The gesture is professional. The way her fingers brush the back of my neck is not, and the contact sends the animal behind my ribs into a register I have to actively suppress. The timing is catastrophically wrong.
She straightens and steps back, and the distance she puts between us is a clinical decision I can read as clearly as she reads wound drainage.
Too close, too long, too warm. She's aware of the same variable I'm tracking, and her version of managing it is the opposite of mine: where I want to close the gap, she widens it.
I let her have the distance. For now.
The shutter needs bracing. I wedge a piece of firewood against the frame from the inside, testing it with my good shoulder until it holds.
The door gets a simple alarm: a clay cup balanced on the bar latch, positioned so that any pressure from outside will send it crashing to the stone floor.
Primitive. Effective. The kind of field craft I learned running patrols in the Drakfell mountains since I was old enough to keep up with my father's stride.
My father's stride. The thought catches, and the rage that lives underneath my ribs flares hot enough to taste.
I push it down because the rage isn't useful right now.
The rage is for later, for the day I stand in front of Balric and make him answer for the three steps I couldn't close.
Tonight, the rage is a coal I keep banked behind the grief.