8. Nash
NASH
We make four hundred yards up the ridge before the helicopter finds the gap in the canopy and puts a spotlight down through it, and I know we're not going to outwalk this.
Caleb's still working the clearing behind us, I can hear him by the shape of the shouting, the men breaking left when he wants them left.
Wyatt's somewhere on the north flank moving them like cattle.
But there's a second team coming up the drainage on our right, disciplined and quiet, and they've got the high side of the ridge, and Erin is running on a bruised ribcage with her lungs tearing.
She stumbles on a root and I get her under the arm before she's down.
"I'm fine…"
"You're not." I put her behind a granite shoulder and crouch so she can hear me over the rotor wash. "Listen. They're going to push us onto the bald in about thirty seconds. There's no cover up there. Somebody has to break their line."
"Then we go back down the…"
"Erin." I take her face in both hands, mud and all, because I need her eyes and I'm never going to get another chance to do this well. Her breath saws. Behind me a light sweeps across the rock and moves on.
"You said you were done lying."
"I am. So here it is, and I'm sorry it's like this.
" My hands are shaking, which is new. "The wolf in that clearing is my deputy.
Caleb. That's not a wolf, that's a man who can be one, and everyone in this county who's ever pulled you out of a ditch or handed you a cup of coffee at my station is the same thing.
" I make myself say the last part plainly. "So am I."
She doesn't scream, or back up. She looks at me with those green eyes going wide and hard at once, the same face she had over the core sample, refusing to look away from an impossible object.
"Prove it," she says.
"I'm about to. Don't run when I do."
I stand and walk five steps out of cover, and I take my hands off the last twenty years, and I let go.
It doesn't hurt. That's the thing nobody outside believes. It hurts to hold it. Letting go is the relief of finally setting down something you've been carrying.
The world drops and widens. Color goes flat and everything else goes huge, twelve men on the slope by scent alone, the oil on their weapons, the dog handler's fear coming off him like smoke, and behind me, Erin.
Sweat and pine pitch and blood from her split wrist and her, the note under everything, the one that's been walking around in my chest since I met her weeks ago.
She gasps, shocked. Then I go down the ridge.
The first man doesn't get his rifle up. I take him at the hip and put him into the floor.
He collapses and stays limp, and I'm past his body before he's stopped rolling, because the point is never one man, it's the line.
Break the line and they stop being a unit and start being individuals in darkness with a werewolf they can't range.
The second one shoots and misses and shoots again and it opens my shoulder like a hot wire, I whimper but ignore it and push through it.
I lock him in my mouth, and fling him across, his gun dropping to the ground and his spine cracking as he hits a tree.
Caleb comes up on my flank. Wyatt closes from the north with three others behind him, and for about ninety seconds the slope belongs to us entirely.
They're professionals, a voice on the ridge is calling withdraw-and-consolidate in the same flat cadence I heard on the shoreline, and they go, hauling two of their own, leaving weapons, leaving the dogs, moving downhill in bounds while the helicopter drags its light across the treetops looking for something to shoot at and finding nothing but canopy.
Then it's rotor noise fading east and my own breathing and the copper smell of my shoulder.
I shift back and pull on the jeans out of the cache bag Caleb throws me, my hands still won't steady, and when I come around Erin is exactly where I left her.
She hasn't moved an inch. Her camera is on the ground beside her. She never picked it up.
"Erin."
"You have a bullet hole in you," she says.
"Through and through. It'll close by tomorrow."
"That's…" She takes one step, then another, and stops within arm's reach. Her chin is going. "Give me one fact I can put on the table with the others."
"Nash Hanson. Thirty-five. Born four miles from here in my mother's kitchen.
" My voice comes out wrecked. "Alpha of the Stillwater Pack since my father stepped down.
Sixty-one of us in this basin. My mother's a healer, my father hates fishing, Hazel Quinn keeps our history in nine notebooks and won't let anyone photograph them.
" I hold out my good hand, palm up, and leave it there.
"And I have been standing between you and that ground since the day you got here, and I'm sorry. "
She glances at my hand, but doesn't take it.
"Sixty-one," she repeats.
"Sixty-one."
"There is no population of sixty large-bodied endotherms in a basin this size that leaves no scat, no tracks, no…" She stops. Her mouth works. "There is, isn't there. There's a whole population and I've been walking through the middle of it taking notes."
"Yes."
A sound comes out of her, half a laugh and entirely not. She puts her hands over her face and stands shaking, and I want to touch her so badly my ribs ache, but I don't.
Caleb comes up the slope with his shirt in his hands and enough sense to keep his distance.
"Dogs are wandering, we'll collect them.
But they photographed her at that door, Nash.
Camera dome over the frame. They have her face, they have her plate off the fire road, and they know what county she sleeps in. "
Erin drops her hands. "The cabin."
"Is the first place they'll go," I say. "Tonight."
"Then I need my drives, my notebooks, the cores…"
"Wyatt's already there. He'll have all of it in forty-five minutes." I meet her eyes. "You can't go back. Not tonight, maybe not at all. There's one place within four hundred miles I can guarantee your safety, and it means I take you somewhere nobody outside our blood has ever been brought."
"Your compound."
"My home."
She looks past me at the timber, at Caleb, at the dogs milling in the clearing below with nobody to give them orders. Then she bends, picks up her camera, checks the lens cap, and slings it. Weeks of watching her, and I still didn't expect that.
"Understand something," she says. "I'm not coming because I believe you. I'm coming because I have a hypothesis and you're the only sample."
"That's more than I earned."
"It really is."
We walk out the long way, three miles under cover, Caleb ahead and Wyatt's people on both flanks.
The compound sits in a fold of ground on the west shore where the road ends and the map says nothing.
Lamps on porches. Woodsmoke. A dog barking at us, ordinary and stupid and alive.
My mother comes down the steps drying her hands on a towel, sees my shoulder, sees the woman beside me, and doesn't hesitate for a second.
"Come in," Grace says. "Both of you. Kettle's on."
Erin stops at the gate with her hand on the post. I watch her look at the lit windows, at the children's boots lined up on a porch, at sixty years of my family living quietly on the far side of a line no human being has ever crossed. Then she steps over it.