Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
Jen
I find it in the mirror.
The cabin has one — small, fogged, the silver flaking at the edges, the kind of mirror somebody hung above the bathroom sink forty years ago and forgot.
I am in here because after the folder I needed a door between me and the kitchen.
The pack let me have it. Crull is in the hallway with his palm flat against the wood on his side and the brand at my wrist warm with it.
I splash water on my face.
I look up.
It is the first time in weeks I have seen my own face in glass, and the woman in it is mine and also not — thinner at the cheekbones, brands at my throat and wrist where there used to be nothing.
I lower my eyes from my face to my chest. The sweatshirt collar is wide enough that when I pull it down I can see the place between my collarbones where the mark had been.
It was a red, warm spot. The size of a flattened palm.
Not a rash, not really — the skin was never broken, never flaking, never raised.
Just a clean unmistakable warmth under the surface.
It is the reason I went to the doctor in February.
It is the reason my blood went into a lab.
It is the reason a Syndicate reader picked the panel up off a national network and put my name on a list.
It is the start of all of it.
And it has moved.
The skin between my collarbones is smooth now. No warmth. No red.
But under the skin — in the same boundary, the same oval, the same size — there is a shape.
Dark. Not bruise-dark. Ink-dark. I can see it through the translucence of my own skin like a watermark held to a window.
I press my palm to the skin over it. It pulses against me. Once. A heartbeat that is not my heartbeat. A startled sound escapes me. The brand at my wrist throbs. Crull, on the other side of the door, has felt my pulse change. I do not give him a chance to ask. I unlock the door.
He is exactly where I knew he was. His amber eyes drop to my face and his weight shifts at the doorframe.
"Get all of them," I say.
They come fast.
Thaw first — gold eyes already braced, the bond at my sternum carrying his alarm before he reaches me.
Harek behind him. Dean and Daron in the hallway behind the others.
I step back into the bathroom and let them crowd in — Thaw and Harek at my shoulder, Crull filling the doorway, Dean and Daron in the hallway looking through.
I pull the collar of the sweatshirt down and I show them. The room goes silent.
Thaw's face goes blank.
"How long has it been like this?" he says. Careful.
"I don’t know. It was on the surface the last time I saw it. A spot. Warm. Red."
"It changed."
"Now it’s under my skin."
His thumb hovers over the skin and does not touch yet.
"Harek. Look."
Harek crouches. He is so tall the crouch brings his face level with my chest. He does not touch. Then he lifts two fingertips to my skin. Light. The third thread under my ribs goes warm and full. He breathes in. He closes his eyes.
When he opens them, he does not speak right away. He works for it.
"I don’t know."
I look at him.
"What does that mean?"
Thaw replies, "It means we have not seen this. Not on you. Not on anyone."
After the file, this is too much. My eyes fill.
"It is not a wound or a growth. Anything I can name."
"So nobody knows."
Thaw's voice goes quiet. "You have had it for weeks, Jen. It has not done anything but be there. Now it has moved. That is a change. We do not have a name for the change. We are going to keep an eye on it."
"Keep an eye on it."
"Yes."
"Until what."
"Until your body tells us what it is. Or until it does something we can read."
The pack is watching me. None of them is moving toward me.
I should be reassured. I am not.
What I feel — standing in a cabin bathroom with my sweatshirt pulled down off my shoulder and four men reading my body like an instrument panel and a dark shape under my own skin that pulses against my palm — is a slow black anger climbing up my spine that I did not know was waiting there.
"Cool." My voice is flat. "Cool. So we are going to wait and see."
"Yes."
The pack does not move.
"I went to the doctor because of that patch.
I would not have gone to the doctor if it was not there.
I do not go to the doctor. I have not had a panel in years.
I went because the rash was sudden and would not go away.
I was worried it was something. The clinic ran routine bloodwork.
The Syndicate's reader caught it. The panel they pulled is the panel sitting in Dean's folder right now with my name on it. "
I am breathing too fast.
"That patch is the reason I am here. Every single thing that has happened to me in the last few weeks happened because of a red spot on my chest that nobody could explain and nobody told me what it was and nobody — including me — knew enough to be afraid of it.
And now it has moved. And nobody knows what that means either. "
I take a step back.
It is involuntary. My body did it. I am suddenly standing with my back to the towel rack and the cabin bathroom feels very small.
"No."
The pack does not move.
"No. You all stand here and you say we will keep an eye on it like that is the same as good news.
Like the keeping-an-eye is going to do anything.
The last time something on my body changed without me knowing what it was, I ended up in a cell.
So forgive me if we will watch it is not landing as the reassurance you want it to be. "
My eyes are hot. I have not cried since the night Thaw held me through it in the cell.
I am not crying now. What is climbing up the back of my throat is the next thing past crying, the thing that wants to break a piece of furniture, and there is a man down the hall who has been doing exactly that and now I understand him in a way I did not an hour ago.
"Jen," Thaw says.
"No. Don't. Do not — handle me. Do not Jen me. My body has been a thing other people read for weeks. Strapped to tables. Swabbed. Sampled. Bred."
My back is against the towel rack. Crull's amber eyes have gone careful. Harek is still in his crouch and has not stood up because standing up would crowd me and he is Harek, he is the steady one, he knows.
Thaw does not move closer either.
"What is the question," he says.
I look at him.
"Did I agree to this? Did anyone ask the part of me that lives in my own body whether she wanted to have something on her chest that would not go away. Or did the Syndicate get to make that decision for me too, the same way they got to make every other decision for me since they took me."
The silence in the bathroom is total.
Dean is in the hallway watching me. Daron is behind him with his hand on the strap of the rifle at his shoulder, not in threat, in the unconscious motion of a body that wants to do something and has nowhere to point itself.
Thaw lowers himself.
He does not approach. He drops slowly into a crouch against the opposite wall of the bathroom from Harek, so that we are three bodies at three points of a triangle on the floor, eye-level, none of us towering.
The alpha making himself small. The thread at my sternum opens, and what comes through it is not soothing.
What comes through is I heard you.
"You are right to be angry," he says. "You are right at every part of it. We should have asked first."
"Asked what."
"Asked you what you wanted us to do about it. Before we put hands on you to read it."
The anger does not drain. It does not soften. But something in my chest moves a degree.
"I do not know what I want you to do about it." My voice is shaking now. The composure has cracked the rest of the way. "But I know I did not consent to it being something I have to learn to live with on top of everything else."
"No," Thaw says. "You didn't."
He looks at the floor.
"And I do not have a fix for that. There is nothing I can do that makes this not have happened to your body.
I can promise we will figure out what it is alongside you.
I can promise no hand goes on it again unless you ask.
I can promise the men in this room will hear no from you on the smallest thing without a fight.
But I cannot give you back the part where you did not get to choose what was already in you. "
I close my eyes.
The brand at my wrist is hot. The brand at my throat is hot. The bond at my sternum is open and full. It is grief. He is grieving with me. The pack is grieving with me. They are not telling me to be calm. They are sitting on the floor of a bathroom letting me be furious in their bonded chest.
When I open my eyes, Crull has come down to a crouch in the doorway.
Dean is leaning against the hallway wall with the folder against his thigh.
Daron has gone down to one knee. Every male in the cabin is below my eye line now, the body language of an entire pack making itself smaller because I am angry and they are not going to make me wrong for it.
It is the most cared-for I have felt since I got out of the cell.
I hate that it works.
I hate that part of being furious in this room is also being held by them, and I do not know how to make those two things separate, and I sit down against the wall under the towel rack because my legs do not want to hold me anymore.
The pack stays at their points around me. Nobody approaches. Nobody manages. They wait.
I lean my head back against the wall and breathe.
The shape under my skin is quiet now. Whatever it is, it is not going to give me an answer in a bathroom. It is going to show me on its own schedule, and the only choice I have is whether I treat it as enemy or as mine.
I do not have to know yet.
And then — from the back bedroom at the far end of the hall, through the wall of the room where a man has been mostly quiet —
A growl.
Low. Long. Fen.
Under my skin, the shape pulses.
Hard. Once. Then again. Then a third time, faster than my heartbeat, faster than anything in me is doing on its own. It is reaching. The whole oval has gone warm under my palm and the warmth is aimed — back, and to the left, toward the bedroom door, toward him.
The growl breaks off. Fen has dragged himself back under control.
The shape is still pulsing. It does not stop when he stops. It keeps reaching for a long moment after the cabin has gone quiet, and then, slowly, it eases. The warmth banks. The pulse settles.
I look down. I do not lift my hand.
Thaw watches me read it.
"Jen," he says, careful.
I press my palm flat over the shape.
The shape reacts to him. I don’t know why.