4. Chapter 4
Maren came out of her cabin mid-morning with the tire iron in her hand.
She'd slept hard. Better than she'd slept in three years, which was either very telling or just what happens when a body had spent two days running adrenaline.
The dog hadn't been on her porch when she'd woken and she’d found herself slightly disappointed.
The clearing in the daylight was a different place than it was at night.
Bigger. The cabins set further apart than she'd thought.
Smoke from chimneys at three of them. People moving between them in a way that wasn't urgent.
The lodge at the far end with its big door propped half-open, sound coming out of it that was closer to a kitchen than a meeting.
There were two children in the clearing. A girl maybe five, a smaller one maybe three, in coats and boots, kneeling in the snow over something that mattered to a five-year-old.
Animals between them.
A wolf.
Not a dog. A wolf the size of an Irish wolfhound but with a face nothing like a dog's, lying belly-down with its head between its paws, watching the smaller child. Behind it, a second wolf, smaller, lighter coat, pacing easy in the snow with the older girl half on its back like it was a pony.
A pup, almost.
The pup, which couldn't have been more than four months old by the size of it but already big enough to bowl somebody over, came out from between the cabins at a tumble. Hit the smaller child broadside. They went down in a tangle of laughter, short small wolf-yips, snow flying up.
Nobody screamed.
Nobody came running.
The two adult wolves watched. The pup got up first, bowed in the front, tail high, shook the snow off, and tackled the toddler again.
Maren's hand on the tire iron went cold.
Not metaphor. Cold. Her body had decided ten degrees ahead of her brain that the floor of her chest dropped out and her grip was the first to know it.
She watched the older girl stand up, wipe snow off her face, give the bigger wolf a swat on the shoulder the way you'd swat a horse, climb back on. The wolf carried her three steps and shook her off into a snowdrift. The girl shrieked the laugh of the truly safe.
Those weren't dogs.
Jace stepped from the nearby woods. She turned with the tire iron up.
He stopped a few steps away, arms loose at his sides.
“Morning.”
She looked at him. Looked back at the children. Looked at him again.
“That's a wolf.”
“Yep.”
“Three wolves.”
“Uh-huh.”
She kept the tire iron up.
A man in his early to mid 20s walked towards Jace, then registered Maren and stopped where he was a respectful distance off. Tall the way Jace was tall but skinnier, like he wasn't quite done filling out. Same jaw, but his eyes weren’t as gold.
“My brother.” Jace's voice had quiet pride in it. “Cade.”
Cade dipped his head. Didn't come closer. Didn't try to shake her hand.
Tire iron still up, Maren looked at Jace.
“Is this a cult?”
Cade barked out a laugh.
“We don't chant,” Jace's face did something almost like a laugh, more in the eyes than the mouth. “We do sometimes sing at bonfires.”
A sound came out of Maren that wasn't quite a laugh. Closer to one than anything she'd made in three years.
She lowered the tire iron half an inch.
Cade grinned at his brother, didn't bother hiding whatever was behind it, and the nod he gave Jace had something pleased in it, something that had to do with her. Maren could feel that much and no more. She had no idea why a man would look that pleased about a stranger holding a tire iron.
Cade backed off, walked across the clearing toward the kids, making a wide path so the older girl could see him coming. The pup spotted him and tackled his boot.
The pack met for a meal at the lodge an hour later.
Maren sat at the long table where Jace had pointed her before two men with backpacks claimed his attention. She sat on the bench, her back against the wall on purpose, with the tire iron across her thighs. Her bowl had stew in it but she had yet to eat any.
Wolves at the table. People at the table. Some of the people had been wolves an hour ago, she was now ninety percent sure, and the thought was sitting in the side of her mind she didn't usually let things sit in.
She watched.
Names started attaching themselves. She recognized Theo, Rhys and Declan from the night of the attack.
The way Rhys was seated she saw a long scar that ran down his face and disappeared under his shirt.
Declan ate fast, said little, and made the others laugh once with three words she didn't quite catch.
Freya from the ops room ate with one hand while her other hand typed, her attention focused on her tablet.
Other names came at her by way of being said.
Brennan snuck a roll off Freya’s plate. She saw it then flashed him a smile.
Kira, who Maren only saw in profile because she was sitting one bench down with her back half-turned.
The young man who’d brought her the blanket the first night, and cookies later, was called Tyler.
He had bandages on his wrists she hadn’t noticed before.
He was being teased good-naturedly about something and laughing about it.
Children at the far end. All of them eating with the focused single-minded efficiency of small humans who had recently been outside. A wolf the color of pewter lay stretched under the bench by their feet with his chin on someone's boot.
Nobody made eye contact with Maren on purpose.
Nobody avoided it either.
It was the kind of room she'd never been in.
People who knew each other so well they could pass salt without looking, who'd kept doing whatever they'd been doing when she walked in because pretending was rude.
The closest thing she'd ever known was Jenny's diner at three on a Sunday afternoon, when the regulars filled the booths and nobody pretended to be polite to each other.
Elena came around with a pitcher. Filled Maren's water glass.
“Eat what you can, honey.”
She moved on.
A man in his 20s whose name Maren hadn’t heard leaned across the bench at her elbow and held out a basket of bread.
“Bread, Luna?”
“It's Maren,” she gritted her teeth to keep from screaming it.
She wasn't sure who she'd just said it to. The man. The room. Herself. Maybe even the low hum that had been under her ribs since the dog left her porch that morning. They kept calling her by the wrong name. She had her own and they needed to start calling it.
The young man blinked. The bread basket hung in his grip a half-second too long.
Down the bench, Declan didn't look up from his texting, but the corner of his mouth pulled up like he was holding a laugh back, at her or the man Maren couldn’t tell.
The young man set the basket down on the table muttered yes ma'am and kept his eyes on his stew the rest of the meal.
Nobody else at the table called her Luna.
Maren took the bread.
She ate the bread.
She kept the tire iron across her thighs.
Late afternoon Jace found her on a bench overlooking a large square at the far side of the clearing.
Two pack members were inside it, throwing each other into the snow with the patient efficiency of people who did this every week. Maren stopped to watch because the bench faced the yard and her legs stopped wanting to walk more.
Jace came up at an angle so she'd see him coming. Stopped a couple of paces off.
He looked at the tire iron she'd set on the bench beside her. Half a smile pulled at the side of his mouth.
“Still carrying it.”
“I see that.”
“Would it kill you?”
“No, but it would probably hurt like hell.”
He laughed once, low.
Took the seat at the other end of the bench. Far end. A foot of bench between them.
The two pack members in the yard kept going.
“Maren, nobody will hurt you. If somebody tries, I'll kill them.”
He said it the way a man says a thing he's already decided. No flourish. No vow-voice. Like he was telling her what was for dinner.
She looked at her hands.
She'd had a man swear to protect her once before, when she was seventeen. Her father had kept his word right up to the night somebody had murdered him. After that, the promise had been worth nothing because there was nobody alive to keep it.
This was a different man.
She didn't know what to do with how that landed.
She looked at the tire iron on the bench between them.
After some time she set it down on the ground.
Not far. By her boot. Where her fingers could reach.
But on the ground.
She looked back at the training yard. The two pack members stopped. One of them was helping the other up.
“You never stand between me and the path back,” she said.
“No. Once you'd picked it up, you were committed.”
“Most people do. They don't mean anything by it. They just end up in the gap, between me and the way out. You never do.”
“You look for exits,” he said. “I'm not going to become one more thing blocking them.”
She held that a moment. Something under her ribs moved a quarter-inch, and she let it.
Maren watched the two pack members leave the yard. They tilted their heads in that way that she had seen others frequently do, then walked toward the lodge.
“So what are you,” she said. “Around here. The mayor or something.”
“Alpha.”
“Which means what?”
He took a second to find a way to say it short.
“Pack head. The others follow my call. It's a job.”
“Sheriff job?”
“Kind of.”
“Hire-and-fire job?”
“More like the job picks you and you don't get to put it down.” A beat. “Until somebody better comes along, or you die.”
“And the head-tilt thing,” she said. “They do it to you. The two in the yard just did it to me.”
“You catch everything, don't you.” It didn't sound like a complaint. “It's respect. Cheaper than a salute. Nobody has to put down what they're carrying.”
“I don't work for you. Why do I get one?”
“No,” he said, and the grin came back, the one she'd seen at the diner, the one missing since the gate. “You sure don't.”
“That's a dodge.”
“It's the half I can give you out here.” He watched the empty yard a moment and the grin settled into something quieter. “The other half needs more time than we've had. When you want it, ask me about the word Tyler used. You'll get the whole thing. No charge on that either.”
She turned that over. The man kept handing her doors and never once pushed her through one.
She thought about that.
She filed the half-answer next to the dogs and the eye thing. But she'd asked this time. Asking had gotten her something. The files were getting thinner.
A while later Theo came across the clearing with a phone out and stopped at the edge of the bench. Spoke a name and a place to Jace that Maren didn't catch because Jace had stood up at the first sound of Theo's footsteps and was already half-turned to listen.
“I have to go take this.”
“Go.” She tipped her chin at the lodge. “The bench and the tire iron will keep me company.”
He took two steps away from the bench, toward the lodge.
Something pulled in her chest.
Not a flutter. Not a metaphor. A drag, low under her sternum, like somebody had hooked a finger around the inside of her ribs and was leaning gently on the line. Pulling after him.
She put a hand to her chest before she could stop it.
Her hand came back down to her lap fast.
She watched him go.
Twenty feet across the clearing. Forty. He reached the lodge door. Theo went in ahead of him. Jace put a hand on the door frame and turned his head a quarter, looked back across the clearing once. The pull went quiet. Humming almost, the way a wire did when you stopped pulling it.
Jace didn't smile. Didn't wave. Just looked.
Then he went inside.
The drag went quieter still. Not gone. Quieter.
Maren sat on the bench minutes after the door closed.
She looked at the tire iron on the ground by her boot.
Picked it up.
Didn't grip it the way she'd been gripping it. Held it loose, the way you held a tool you weren't using right now but might.
She walked back to her cabin with it pressed to her side.
The dog wasn't on her porch yet.
Inside, she set the tire iron next to the bed instead of on the pillow. Took her coat off for the first time in two days. Hung it on a hook somebody had screwed into the wall who knew human beings sometimes need to hang a coat.
She didn't know what had happened to her chest.