5. Chapter 5
Day four was a clear cold afternoon with the sun low through the pines and the snow on the ground holding the orange of it like a held breath.
Jace came up to her cabin late morning and asked if she'd come look at something. He didn't say what.
He said it the way a man says a thing he's been thinking about saying for a few days and had finally talked himself into.
Maren took her coat. Took the tire iron. Walked out without a word.
He led her past the lodge, past the training yard where Kira and another man were going at it slow without weapons, past the third row of cabins, into the trees on the eastern edge of the compound.
The path was packed-down snow and old boot prints and one set of larger paw prints that Maren now knew not to file as dog.
After ten minutes the pines opened into a clearing.
Round. Smaller than the compound's. The sun came through unobstructed and turned the snow on the ground into something Maren didn't have a word for that wasn't holy and she wasn't using that one.
Jace stopped at the edge.
“What I wanted to show you,” he said, “is what I am when I'm not what you've been looking at?”
She kept her grip on the tire iron.
“Show me.”
He undressed.
Not for her. Not in any way that meant anything but the practical fact that clothes didn't survive what was about to happen.
He tugged the jacket off. Pulled the sweatshirt over his head.
Stepped out of his boots. Pulled the t-shirt off.
Pulled his belt loose, stepped out of the jeans.
Folded them on top of his boots one piece at a time, neat, because his mother or Elena or somebody had taught him to fold his clothes.
She'd known what a man's body looked like.
She'd known what a strong man's body looked like.
She hadn't until now known what a body looked like when its owner spent his whole life carrying the weight of a thing that wanted out.
The shoulders of him. Tendons running long across his arms. Two old scars across his ribs that she didn't recognize and wasn't going to ask about.
“This part isn't pretty,” he said. “Don't watch the change. Watch what's there after.”
She closed her eyes anyway, then. Not because she was afraid. Because he'd asked.
It was a thing he had done five thousand times since he was eight.
Not in front of her. Never once in front of her. Not in front of any human he hadn't been about to fight or about to rescue.
Standing in the clearing with the sun on his back. The woman who hadn't run from him, hadn't slept with him, hadn't let him touch her. Who walked here this morning anyway with the tire iron at her side. An experience he didn't have a name for.
His wolf had been at the front of him for four days. Closer to the surface than it had been since his father.
Wanting her. Wanting to know her. To put its head on her foot and just stay there.
Fast and brutal the way it always was. He hadn't gotten gentler with this. He had gotten faster.
When the change finished and he opened his wolf eyes, the woman who closed hers was a brown-coat blur in a cold field, breathing slow, with her face turned away.
He let her get there.
He let her open her own eyes when she was ready.
The man was gone.
Where he had been was a wolf the color of dark honey, of low light through whiskey, of the inside of a violin.
Bigger than the wolves she'd seen on the compound by half a head.
Standing where Jace had been standing, in the same patch of trampled snow, looking at her with eyes the color of nothing she'd been looking at for the past four days.
Gold.
Gold the way the inside of a coin was gold. Gold the way a flame was gold when you couldn't tell if it was the flame or the way you wanted to see it. They held themselves motionless on her, those eyes, and waited.
Maren had been clocking that color for four days. The shifting amber that almost wasn't amber. She had filed it. She had filed it next to everything else.
Now she was looking at the rest of it.
“I've been looking at amber for four days,” she said.
The wolf didn't move.
She took one step toward him. He didn't.
She took another. He held.
She got close enough that she could have touched his shoulder if she'd wanted to. She did want to. Wanted to know if he was warm. Wanted to know what his fur felt like in her fingers. To know if he would let her.
She rested her palm on his shoulder.
He turned his head one quarter and let his nose touch the back of her wrist for one breath and then took the touch back.
She felt the breath warm against her skin a second after he moved away.
She turned her head while the change ran the other way through him.
Instinct, the courtesy a person gave a man they had just watched become an animal.
She heard the soft sounds of him behind her.
Jeans. The clink of his belt. The shift of weight as he stepped into his boots.
When she looked back at him he was a man again, reaching for the t-shirt where he'd folded it.
As if he didn’t just turn from man to wolf and back again. Her chest tightened as her mind raced to process what her eyes had seen.
Not on purpose. Her legs decided for her.
She watched him jam his foot into one boot. He noticed her sitting. Stopped. Came over and crouched beside her, two feet of space between them. Forearms on his knees.
“You okay?”
“Does it hurt?”
He took a breath.
“Not anymore. The first time hurts. I was eight. Lost two teeth.” His face went somewhere softer. “Cade's mom held me through it. She was a nice woman.”
“You don't have the same mom?”
He shook his head.
“Mine was killed when I was little.”
The clearing went quiet a second. The pines around them held the silence the way pines do, without rushing to fill it. Maren said nothing because there wasn't anything to say to it that she would have wanted somebody to say to her about her own father.
He let the silence sit.
She let him.
His face did something then she hadn't seen it do. Almost lit up. Like a man who was about to give somebody a gift he wasn't sure they'd want.
“I have a picture though.” A beat. He looked at the snow between them, embarrassed. “I'll show you sometime. If you want.”
“I want.”
He jammed his foot into the other boot.
“Elena knew her,” he said. “She said my mom used to braid peppers and sage into the rafters of the kitchen. The whole lodge smelled like it through the winter. Nobody's done it since. Elena keeps meaning to.” His voice went quieter. “I always wondered what it would smell like.”
Maren's chest did something in the part of it she'd been pretending wasn't there.
“How long ago?”
“Twenty-four years.”
She did the math. Eight when his mother died. Eight when his first shift hurt. Both in the same year. Cade born some time after. A lot of hard for a boy still losing baby teeth.
“How did she—”
“My dad wasn't a good man.”
He stopped working on the boot. Sat back on his heels. Looked at her directly for the first time since the shift had ended.
“I will never be like him.”
He said it the way a man says a thing he has said to himself in mirrors for thirty years. Not for her benefit. As a thing he'd needed her to hear because she'd asked.
Maren watched the words land in his own face. Saw what they cost him to give to a stranger in a clearing.
Jace wasn't a stranger.
She didn't know what he was, exactly. But he wasn't that.
Something in her own chest tipped a quarter-inch.
She nodded once.
He looked at her and saw that she'd believed him, and his shoulders dropped half an inch in a way she would think about later that night when she was lying in her cabin trying to remember exactly what his face had looked like in that second.
He finished tying the boot.
The clearing held the orange of the snow and the quiet of the pines.
Neither of them got up for a minute.
She stood up.
Brushed snow off her jeans.
“Come on,” she said. “Let's go see if Elena has some cake.”
She held out her hand.
He took it.
His hand around hers was warm in the way the wolf had been warm. Different. Same.
They walked back.
Somewhere between his first shift and his mother's kitchen, she stopped thinking of him as a wolf.
She started thinking of him as Jace.
Halfway back through the trees she said it without looking at him.
“My father was an accountant. His name was Elias Palmer. He was killed three years ago. The man he worked for has been looking for something since.”
She hadn't said his name out loud in three years. Not to a stranger. Not to herself. The name went out into the cold air and didn't come back.
Jace didn't stop walking. Didn't turn his head. Didn't tighten his grip.
“Okay,” he said.
“That's all I have right now.”
“It's enough. More than you think.”
They walked.
After a long minute Jace said, “Thank you for that.”
“Don't thank me for it yet.”
“I'll thank you for it now.”
She didn't argue.
His hand around hers stayed the same. Didn't stroke her thumb with his. Didn't squeeze. He held it the way a man holds a thing he has been told he is allowed to hold and intends not to do anything that gets the holding revoked.
The pines opened back onto the compound. Lodge porch lights were on already even though the sun wasn't all the way down. Two children were in the clearing again, running, with a wolf the size of a calf trotting after them at the patient pace of an adult wolf who had decided to humor the children.
Jace released her at the lodge door because it wasn't wide enough for two abreast and because he wasn't going to be the kind of man who held on after she'd let go first.
She didn't notice the let-go until later.
Elena was in the kitchen.
She moved in the kitchen the way a woman who had been in the same kitchen for thirty years moved in a kitchen, not so much working as inhabiting it.
Three pots going. One cake on a rack cooling under a clean towel.
Radio playing low. She didn't look up when Jace and Maren came in.
Lifted the towel off the cake and got two plates down from a cabinet.
“Sit,” she said, to nobody in particular.
Jace sat at the kitchen table. Maren sat across from him. Elena cut two thick slabs of cake and pushed them across with two forks.
Maren ate one bite.
She ate a second.
She ate the rest of it.
Elena didn't say anything about it. Refilled Maren's water glass. Did the kind of things in the kitchen that didn't require her to look at anybody, and a quietness sat over the three of them. A quietness Maren hadn't experienced in three years. One that wasn't a quietness she'd had to enforce.
Jace ate his cake slowly.
Maren watched him eat and thought, He hasn't eaten cake at this table with anybody in the better part of a year. She didn't know how she knew it. The shape of him in the chair was the shape of a man surprised by an ordinary thing.
After a while Elena turned away from the stove holding a wooden spoon and looked at Maren for the first time since they'd come in. Not at her face exactly. At the side of it.
“He showed you the clearing,” Elena said.
Maren nodded.
Elena nodded back. Looked down at the spoon. Wiped it on a towel.
“He hasn't taken anybody out there to do that since I've known him,” Elena said. “And I've known him since he was eight.”
She turned back to her stove.
After a while Elena said to Jace, without turning around, “Theo's looking for you. He's on her porch.”
Jace put his fork down.
They walked back across the clearing in the last of the daylight. Maren had her hand on the tire iron without thinking about it. Jace’s fists were in his pockets, same way.
Theo stood at the foot of Maren's cabin steps.
His face wasn't the face he'd had at the lodge an hour ago. The shift was small. Maren caught it because she'd been watching the men in this place for four days and started to know them.
“Alpha,” Theo said.
“Theo.”
“Thornwood called half an hour ago. Their alpha Garrett Vanier requests a parley at the southern marker. Says he wants to talk about the woman you took from one of his wolves.”
Jace’s eyes narrowed. Garrett hadn’t called a parley in eight years. Whoever was paying him this time had paid enough to make him do it.
Maren's whole body went still.
“When?”
“He's offering tomorrow noon.”
Jace thought about it.
“Meeting with the core group of advisors at eight.”
Theo nodded. Lowered his chin once toward Maren, not at her face. His eyes went to her collarbone the way the young wolf's at the gate had. Then he turned and walked back toward the lodge.
Maren turned to Jace.
She had a stubborn line on her face she'd been ready to argue from before he opened his mouth.
“I'll be there too.”
He gave it a moment.
“You're in the room at eight. The advisor meeting. We'll talk the rest of it through there.”
She blinked.
She'd been ready for the fight. The fight wasn't coming. She didn't know what to do with the absence of the fight.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Eight, then.”
“Sleep well.”
She nodded.
Maren opened her cabin door. Stepped through. Stopped on the threshold and looked back.
Jace was still at the bottom of the porch with his fists in his pockets, watching her.
Neither of them said anything else.
She closed the door.
Inside, she stood with her back against the door.
Her fingers were still warm from where his hand had been around hers.
Jace.
The name had a shape now. The shape of a man who folded his clothes on top of his boots one piece at a time.
Who lost two teeth at eight. Whose mother had braided peppers and sage into the rafters of a kitchen and whose father had killed her.
Who had said I will never be like him the way other men said the names of their gods.
Who had put her in the room at eight without making her fight him for it, like a chair at the table was a thing she could simply have.
Maren didn't know what to do with the shape.
She walked across the cabin and looked at the suitcase by the door.
It had been by every door of every apartment for three years.
Tonight it was by a door she wasn't planning to go out of in the morning.
She had said her father's name out loud for the first time since she had buried him without a body.
Slid her hand into a man's hand and walked back from a clearing where he had taken his clothes off in front of her and become an animal she had touched on the shoulder.
She moved the suitcase from the door to the foot of the bed.
Not where you put a thing you might run with. Where you put a thing you weren't running with tonight.
She set the tire iron on the table. Not next to the bed. On the table.
She lay down on top of the blanket in her clothes, the way she had every night since she'd come.
Her eyes fell shut.
In the dark behind her eyelids, the gold of his wolf's eyes stayed where she was and waited.
She didn't dream.