Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
Jen
Fen is sitting where Daron said he was.
I see him from twenty yards out — at the south edge of the campground, his back against a fir, his knees drawn up, his hands loose at his sides. Not crouched. Not pacing. Sitting.
His head comes up when I clear the tree line.
The eyes are not human.
They are black. The man behind the black is up.
All the way up. He has been up since Daron's truck pulled off the road and he has been steering his own body for the first time since I have known him, and what he steered it toward this morning was a fight he could survive and a fight he could win without coming near me.
He does not stand.
I stop ten feet out.
Dean is behind me. Thaw is behind me, twenty yards back. Daron is somewhere in the trees, the rifle on Fen, not because he expects to use it but because Daron is the fail-safe.
It is just me, and Fen, and ten feet of forest.
"I am okay," I say.
He nods.
The nod is the same nod Crull does.
"You protected me," I say.
He nods again.
"You did not come for me."
His jaw works. He has the word but he cannot make his mouth shape it yet, and what he does instead is shake his head — a small one, a no I did not.
"Okay," I say.
I sit down across from him.
Ten feet between us. I sit cross-legged in the dirt with my hands in my lap and I look at him and he looks at me, and the bond is full and warm and aimed, and I let myself have one minute of looking at the man who is on the other end of the not-yet-thread.
He is dirty. There is blood on his face that is not his.
His black hair is wet at the temple. He is the most beautiful broken thing I have ever seen and my body knows it.
I sit cross-legged ten feet away from him and let myself want him.
Then his head snaps to the side.
He has heard something. A second later I hear it — boots, coming up through the trees from the east, more boots than the wolves' boots — and the bond spikes with adrenaline, and Fen moves.
He is up off the ground in one motion. Faster than Harek. He is between me and the east trees in half a second.
But the something coming through the trees is not Syndicate.
The boots are too loud and too uncoordinated.
The bond to Dean is steady, not alarm. It is the two surrendered shooters being walked through the trees by Crull, who has come up from the truck after all because Crull does not stay below when his pack is in the woods.
Fen has registered boots and his body has filed it as threat coming for her, and the man is up and the want that he has been holding has just found a direction it can finally go in.
He is coming up. All the way. His body is in motion and his hands are claws and his teeth are wrong and his eyes are gone, no human structure left in them at all.
He is going to kill the two Syndicate prisoners.
Crull is coming up the slope with both of them at gunpoint. Crull is going to walk into a Fen who has just turned all the way over.
"Fen."
I do not know I have said it until it is already out.
It comes out flat.
Not pleading. Not panicked. Not the way I said his name through the mesh of the cargo box. The way I said it just now is the way I used to say down to a working dog in a yard when the working dog was about to put its teeth into something it would regret. Flat, low, total.
His body locks.
Not stops. Locks. Mid-motion, mid-shift, mid-stride toward the trees — every muscle in him goes still at once, the way a body goes still when a high-frequency signal hits it that the brain has not yet processed. The claws hold their position.
He turns his head, slow, all the way around, until his eyes are on me.
I don't back down.
I sit there with my hands in my lap and meet his eyes. The word came out of me without permission. The locking happened without permission. Neither of us moves.
The whole forest is silent.
Crull has stopped on the slope. The two prisoners are not moving. Dean is not moving. Daron is not moving. Thaw is twenty yards back and Thaw has not moved either.
I say it again, just to be sure.
"Down."
I do not say Fen. I do not give him the name. The name is what kept him sitting against the tree. The down is what is keeping him from going through the trees and into the prisoners.
His body responds before the man does.
He lowers. Not collapses. Lowers. His knees give one fraction of an inch, the way a body gives when a command lands in it from outside, and his shoulders drop a quarter inch.
He is not back to himself.
But he is not going through the trees.
"Crull," I say. Still flat. Not looking away from Fen.
A pause. Then Crull's voice — slower, lower, the way he speaks to his alpha. "Yes, Jen."
"Walk the prisoners around. Not past us. Not in his line of sight. Take them back to the truck."
"Ok."
"Tell Daron to come down. Daron is with me from now until we are off this mountain."
"Daron heard you."
"And Crull."
"Yes."
"Tell Thaw to stay where he is. Do not move toward me. Not yet."
He walks the prisoners back through the trees.
Fen does not look at them.
Fen does not look at anything but me.
I keep my eyes on his. I do not blink. I do not soften.
I have no idea what I am doing and every cell in my body knows what I am doing, and the two are not at war, they are agreeing, and I sit cross-legged in the dirt and I hold a feral male in lock with my voice and my eyes and my I am not afraid of you, and behind me, twenty yards back in the trees, my alpha is watching.
It takes Fen a long time to lower the rest of the way.
I count by my breathing. Slow, deep. The way Thaw taught me. The claws shorten. The teeth retract. When he is done, he is sitting against the tree again. Hands loose. Jaw working for words.
His eyes find mine.
The black is still in them. The red is still moving under it. But the center is back. He is back.
"Jen," he says.
"Hi," I say.
The corner of his mouth moves. It is not a smile. It is, however, closer than I have ever seen him to a smile.
I do not stand up. I do not approach. I sit cross-legged in the dirt across from him and I let my voice come back to normal, and I say:
"You did good, Fen. Thank you."
He nods.
He closes his eyes. He breathes.
Then, behind me, I feel Thaw move.
He has been holding twenty yards back for the entire time. I feel him come up now — slow, deliberate, the way an alpha walks into a room where something has shifted — and he stops just behind me, his hand finding the back of my neck, light.
He is stunned. Underneath the stunned is something deeper — the slow registering of a thing he has just witnessed.
He says, very quiet, against my hair:
"Jen."
"What?"
"What just happened?"
"I told him to stop."
"You told him down. Like a dog."
"He is not a dog."
"No. He is not. And he went down like one anyway. Like he was answering you. From a place under language. Jen."
"What?"
"You did not order him as his mate. You did not order him as his pack. You ordered him as something above him."
I close my eyes.
I have been sitting in the dirt telling myself the word was just the working voice. The voice you use when an animal is about to do something it cannot take back. A frame I know. A frame I have lived inside for years.
But Fen is not a working dog. Fen is a feral hybrid male in the middle of a partial shift, and a feral hybrid male in the middle of a partial shift does not stop because a human woman says down. He stops because something underneath the shift hears the word and defers to it.
Thaw's hand on my neck tightens once and then goes still.
Something in me just outranked the feral.
My pulse is loud in my ears. Thaw's hand is on my neck and Fen is sitting with his eyes closed and the bonds in my chest are all aware — every one of them, the sealed and the forming and the not-yet — and they are doing the same thing in my chest that they did in the bathroom the morning of the patch.
They are registering something. They are finding the new shape of the woman they have been bonded to.
I close my hand around my own wrist over Crull’s brand. The brand is hot.
Oh.
My voice worked. That is something I can do.
It is not fear. The analysis would call it recognition. What it is, in my body, is the small cold-bright feeling of a tool I did not know I had, and the what am I supposed to do with it now that comes after.
I sit with it for one breath. I sit with it for two.
I open my eyes.
I look at Fen.
He is looking back. The look in his eyes is not feral. It is the look of a man who has just been commanded by his mate's voice and has decided he is okay with that — more than okay with that, the way the bond is reading him to me, yours in the way the men have been saying yours since the cabin.
He saw it before I did.
His body did, anyway. His body went down because his body knew.
"What is this, Thaw?"
"I don't know yet."
"You don't know." I close my eyes again.
"I don't know what you are. I don't know why his body went down. The rest of it is something we are going to learn the way you learn anything — by it happening to you."
I get up off the ground.
I cross the ten feet slow, watching him, giving him time to tell me no.
He does not tell me no. He does not move.
I sit down beside him — not in front of him, beside him.
I do not touch him. I do not have to. The not-yet-thread is full and warm, and his body is at the other end of it, and we sit shoulder to shoulder with space between us because thst is what he can handle today.
It is enough.
It is the first time I have ever been within reach of him without one of us being in a cell or in a vehicle or under a dose.
He turns his head, slow. He looks at me.
"Down," he says. Quiet.
I am not sure whether he is asking what the word was. Or whether he is testing the word. Or whether he is thanking me for the word, for the thing it did, for the line it held.
I nod.
His shoulder leans, half a degree, until it is resting against mine.
It is the first time he has ever touched me on purpose while free.
Then Dean's voice comes through the trees.
"Thaw."
"What?"
"You need to see this."
Something in Dean's voice has changed.
Thaw is already on his feet.
"What did you find?"
"Not what. Who."