Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Jen
Thaw cannot sit down.
He has been at the kitchen window six times in the last hour. Walking past. Glancing. Walking past. I see patterning under his skin moving, his hand braced on the sill, his gold eyes tracking the place where the trees meet the clearing.
Crull is on the kitchen floor against the wall. His hands flex once against his thighs every time the wind moves a pine branch.
Harek is in the middle of the room, weight forward, the way a body waits when it is waiting to go. His purr under his ribs has gone low and continuous. The shimmer at his shoulders comes and goes.
The room is too small for them.
I do not need anyone to tell me this. I can feel it through the bonds — three threads pulling at the same restless tension, three bodies pressing on the inside of skin that has been in walls for too long.
Thaw turns from the window.
"Daron." He does not raise his voice. The forming thread carries it. "We need to run."
Daron is on the porch. He answers through the open door. "Sure, I haven’t see any movement. They haven’t found us.”
"You run with us. Dean stays on the porch."
"Ok."
"Jen." Thaw's gold eyes come to me. "We need to shift. Two hours. East of the creek, on the ridge. Dean will guard you the whole time. Tell me yes or tell me no."
I do not have to think about it.
The bond at my sternum is throbbing with how badly his body needs this. The three of them are about to come out of their skin and the only thing in this cabin that can give them the ground they need is the word from me.
"Go."
Thaw crosses the kitchen to me. He does not pick me up. He puts his palm flat against the side of my jaw and tips my face up and presses his forehead to mine and breathes once.
"Two hours. If you need me. You push the bond and I come. I will hear it. You will not have to call twice."
"I know."
Crull stands. He crosses the kitchen and stops in front of me and his huge palm covers my whole shoulder. He does not press. He just rests it there for a long moment, the weight of him steady through his hand, his amber eyes on mine. Rough, careful, the rebuilt voice: "Back in two."
He lifts his hand. He lets me go.
Harek comes to me last. He does not speak. He grabs me and kisses me. The rumble in his chest is at its lowest register and it is going straight into me. Then he goes.
I follow them as far as the porch.
Thaw goes first.
He stops at the edge of the porch boards.
He pulls his shirt over his head in one motion and drops it on the boards.
His pants go next. He does not look at me while he does it.
He is not putting on a show. He is stripping because the alternative is shredding clothes this cabin does not have replacements for, and the patterning under his skin is already moving in a way that says the shift is going to happen with or without his cooperation.
I look anyway.
I realize that I have slept with this man and I have never seen all of him. His back is scars layered over scars. His body is the body of a man who has been a weapon for somebody for twenty years.
He steps down off the porch into the clearing.
The dirt gives under his bare feet. He walks ten paces out, faces the tree line, and breathes once — the long deliberate scenting breath — and then he changes.
The patterning that has lived under his skin as faint texture comes up, full plates, gold-bronze and overlapping, sliding into place along his throat and his arms and his ribs and down both flanks.
His body lengthens. He drops onto his hands and his hands are not hands anymore — they are dragon-claws, four-pointed and black and sinking into the dirt of the clearing.
His shoulders thicken into something that does not belong on a human frame.
The gold of his eyes is all gold now, no white at the edges.
He is eight feet at the shoulder. Twelve feet nose to tail. A long muscled wolf-shape made of dragon-plate, and the air around him warps with the heat coming off his body. The dirt under his claws darkens, a thin line of smoke rising where the ground is starting to scorch.
He turns his head and looks at me.
The gold eyes are mine. The bond at my sternum is wide open and pouring and the thing in the clearing is Thaw, and the way he looks at me is the way he has looked at me since the corridor.
I breathe in sharp, he is gorgeous.
He blinks once — a slow blink, the inner lid coming across the gold and going back — and then he walks out into the center of the clearing and waits.
Crull is next.
He pulls his shirt off. He has to use both hands because the shirt does not move easily over his shoulders.
The slate-gray of his skin is mapped with scars I have only seen patches of through collars and sleeves — across his pectorals, down both arms, a long curved one over his ribs that looks like it should have killed him.
He folds the shirt twice and sets it on the porch railing.
He steps out of his pants. He does the same with them. Folded. Set down. Considerate.
I think about looking away. Because the man is six-foot-eight in human form and he is going to be larger in a minute and I am going to spend the rest of my life knowing that.
He steps down off the boards.
The dirt of the clearing settles under his weight. He walks past Thaw to a place his body can have, faces the tree line, and changes.
His skin darkens first — the gray going toward slate-black at the shoulders, at the back, at the line of his spine, the color spreading like ink in water.
His body expands. Not just taller — denser.
His shoulders thicken until they would not fit through a doorframe even ducking.
His chest deepens. The scars on him stand up in raised ridges, white against the slate-dark, the marks of every blade and bullet his body has eaten reading like topography.
His tusks come up.
Full tusks — old-bone, curving up past his lower lip and reaching toward his cheekbones.
He is eight feet tall.
His knuckles crack like wood when he closes his hands into fists.
He looks at me.
The amber of his eyes is the same — deeper, darker, the pupils blown wide, but the amber holds. He lifts one massive hand and curls it into a slow fist over his heart. I feel my body respond, he is still mine.
Harek is last off the porch.
He steps out of his pants without ceremony.
The shimmer is under the whole surface of his skin.
I have only seen it at his shoulders and his collarbones.
It is everywhere now — along his ribs, across his stomach, down the line of his hips, the green-gold moving in slow patterns I cannot follow.
He is moss-green and gold light moving under moss-green and he is the most beautiful thing I have ever stood three feet away from.
He walks down off the boards.
He does not stop at a place. He keeps walking until he is at the edge of the clearing where the trees start, and there he changes.
He gets taller and thinner.
His proportions stretch — torso lengthening, arms lengthening, fingers going to a length that should not work and somehow does.
The shimmer comes up brighter, light coming out of him now, a slow bioluminescence under the surface of his skin.
His skin darkens — the deep moss-green going darker, into the color of wet bark — and the bones of him stand out as ridges along his jaw and his clavicle and the long lines of his arms.
His tusks lengthen — smaller than Crull's, sharper, more like blades — and two more come up beside the first two, twin curves of ivory along his upper jaw.
His eyes blow full luminous green. No black. No pupil. Just green light where his eyes were.
When he moves he does not walk, it looks like he flows.
He turns the luminous eyes on me. The third thread pulls tight in my chest. He moves around the perimeter of the clearing in one long fluid loop and ends up at Crull's flank.
Three monsters in the clearing.
Daron goes last.
He has been on the porch the whole time.
He has not slept. The rifle has been across his back all night.
He pulls the strap over his head now and holds the rifle out to one side.
Dean steps forward and takes it without a word.
The two of them stand there for a moment with the gun between them.
Then Dean goes back to the doorframe with two rifles instead of one, and Daron sits down on the porch boards to unlace his boots.
He starts with the right boot.
He has not looked at me yet.
I have not seen Daron without clothes.
He pulls the second boot off. He stands up. He undoes his belt. He steps out of his tactical pants and drops them next to the boots.
I look.
He is wolf-shifter lean. The muscles defined. The skin pale where his clothes have been. There is a scar at the side of his ribs that has the shape of a knife.
He reaches for the hem of his shirt and pulls it over his head.
That is when he catches me looking.
He grins. Quick. Then his ice-blue eye drops in a slow deliberate wink.
My face goes hot.
He keeps grinning.
He drops to all fours and the shift is a single fluid collapse — body folding in on itself and coming up as a different body in one motion.
What stands on the porch boards is dire-sized.
The shoulder of him is at my chest. His coat is dark blond — the color of his hair, deeper at the shoulders, lighter along the belly — and his ice-blue eyes are his.
The huge wolflooks at me.
I am still red.
He huffs once — a wolf-laugh, the sound coming out as breath through his teeth — and steps off the boards into the clearing.
Behind me on the porch, Dean has not moved. He is holding two rifles now. He is the only fully dressed man here.
Four monsters in the clearing.
My brain does not have a word for it. I have lived over thirty years and there is no shelf in my head for four creatures the size of cars standing on the dirt outside a cabin breathing.
Thaw is the largest thing I have ever seen and the clearing was not built to hold him.
Crull has gone past man-shape and into something that is not built to fit through a door.
Harek is moving in a way nothing should be able to move.
Daron is the smallest of the four and is still the size of a horse.
I am breathing fast.
They look at each other.
The four of them stand in the clearing in their full forms and they read each other — Thaw's gold eyes sweep the wolf, the orc's amber meets the fae's luminous green, Daron's ice-blue takes in the monsters his brother lived with for two years in cells he did not know about — and something settles among them. The bond at my sternum carries it.
Thaw turns his huge plated head toward me. He lowers it. The smoke curls off his back. He meets my eyes and the bond floods with one word, that is yes.
Then he turns.
He moves through the clearing toward the tree line in a low fast run, the plates rippling along his flanks.
Daron falls in at his flank. Crull goes in the second wave — his enormous body moving faster than something his size should move, the ground giving where he steps.
Harek flows last and silent and the shimmer under his skin pulses once at the edge of the trees and then he is gone.
The clearing is empty.
I stand on the porch.
Four piles of clothes.
I am breathing very fast.
It is not fear. It is the breath of a body that has just seen something true and is rearranging itself around having seen it.
Dean is one pace behind me at the doorframe. He has a rifle across his chest and his brother's rifle slung across his back. He is just there, guarding me.
We stand there for a long time.
Far off, three bonds and one thread in my chest, my pack runs free for the first time in years. My calves tighten in time with Thaw's stride. Daron's gait is smooth, but I feel him missing his twin. Behind me on the porch Dean's weight shifts on the boards in the same rhythm as his brother.
I do not have a name for what I am.
But whatever I am — it runs with monsters.