8. Chapter 8
Jace came to her cabin two hours after he came home from the parley.
He stood at the porch steps the way he'd stood at them yesterday morning. Hands in his pockets. Coat on. Cold on him from outside.
“Want to hear it?”
She did and didn't. She nodded.
He sat on the second-from-top step and put his back to a porch post and told her what Garrett had said in plain sentences without the version that protected her from any of it.
The word talk sat between them on the porch the way it sat on the air at the marker.
She didn't ask him to soften it.
He didn't.
When he was done, she said one thing.
“He didn't quit, Garrett. The client.”
“No.”
“He's just slow.”
“He's just slow.”
She put her chin down on her arms on the railing and watched the snow on the path between her cabin and the lodge for a stretch.
Then she sat up.
“Thanks for telling me.”
“You'd have asked.”
“Yes.”
He stood. Stopped at the bottom of the steps the way he did. She watched him cross the clearing back to the lodge until he was inside. Closed her door.
She didn't sleep.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed in her coat and boots at twenty minutes past two in the morning when the shouting started.
She heard it before she registered it. Some part of her had been listening since she'd lain down. The shouting wasn't close. It came from across the compound, from the direction of the training yard, in the half-muffled way sound carried across snow.
Not a fight. The pitch was wrong for a fight.
She set her hand on the tire iron on the table and went out.
The clearing was lit at one end where the lodge windows were yellow against the dark. Past the lodge, beyond the row of cabins, the training-yard floodlights had been turned on. Two pack wolves she didn't know by name moved across the snow at a pace that was urgent without being a run.
She followed them.
Stayed back.
The training yard at night was a different shape than the training yard in the afternoon.
Fence shadows ran long. Floodlights made a circle of hard white in the middle and left the edges in dark.
Six or seven wolves stood around the perimeter on the snow side of the fence, in human form.
Not crowding. Spaced. Watching the inside the way a pack watched when it was their business and not yours.
Maren stopped at the gap between two of them. Theo was one. Theo didn't turn his head but knew she was there.
“Stay there,” he said quietly.
She stayed.
She looked.
A young man was on the ground in the middle of the ring.
“Tyler,” Theo said beside her at the fence, low. “Lost his brother six months ago. He hasn't been right since.”
She nodded once. She hadn't met him.
Now he was on the snow in the middle of the floodlit ring on his hands and his knees with chains looped twice around his wrists and once across the back of his neck.
The chains were silver.
She had been told about silver only once, in passing, and she could see what once was enough for.
The chains weren't cuts. They were burns.
The skin under the metal was red-black in the way burned skin went red-black, and the smell carrying off him into the cold air was the smell of meat that wasn't supposed to be cooking.
He wasn't shifting. The chains were why.
He was breathing wrong. Too fast. Too high. The kind of breathing that ran ahead of a wolf coming up and ran ahead of the man trying to keep the wolf down. His eyes weren't right. Something behind them was clawing.
Jace was crouched in front of him.
Not standing. Not at his height. Crouched all the way down on his heels at the same level Tyler was at, knees out, hands loose between them where Tyler could see them.
Close enough that the chain burns were inside the range a wolf in panic could lash out. He was on the bite-side of the chains.
Maren made a small sound she didn't choose to make.
Theo, beside her at the fence, didn't look at her.
“He goes that close because Tyler trusts him,” Theo said quiet. “He goes that close because he won't ask anyone else to.”
She nodded once.
“How long's he been out here?”
“Since midnight.”
“Who put the chains on him?” she said, low.
“We did.” Theo didn't turn his head from the ring.
“Rachel and me and two of the others, before his wolf was all the way up, while he could still hold still and let us.
Silver's the only thing that holds a wolf this far gone.
Rope he'd snap. Steel he'd bend and cut himself worse on.
Silver he can't fight, so silver's what we use. It burns him while it does the job, and we do it anyway. The other side of it is he runs for the trees, and somebody has to put him down out there.”
He let that sit a beat. “This isn't the first night. Won't be the last until he decides to come back from his brother. We chain him as gentle as a thing like this gets chained, and one of us stays on the snow with him every minute. Nobody leaves him out here alone.”
“Tyler.”
Jace's voice carried across the snow in a way that didn't get loud.
“Look at me.”
The kid's head came up a fraction. The eyes that found Jace's weren't the eyes of a man entirely. They were a wolf's eyes trying to use a man's face.
“That's me,” Jace said. “You see me.”
A nod. Small. The nod of a wolf inside a man trying to do a man's signal.
“Breathe with me. In four. Hold four. Out four. Try.”
Jace did it. Slow. Tyler's chest tried. Got the in part wrong. Got it a little less wrong. Tried again.
“Good.”
The wolves at the fence were perfectly still, listening to the alpha at the center, lending him their silence.
Jace let Tyler breathe a long minute.
“Tell me where you are right now.”
From the fence Maren couldn't hear the answer. She could only see the shape of it work its way out of the kid's mouth.
“Tell me whose pack this is.”
The shape of a second answer. One word.
“Tell me what color the kitchen door at the lodge is.”
Tyler's eyes found something that wasn't the floodlights for the first time.
His mouth moved.
“It's green,” Jace said, echoing it back for him. “What time of day did you used to sit on the porch with your brother?”
Tyler made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else that carried across the snow.
“Sunset,” Jace said, echoing that one too. “That's right. Stay there. Stay with me. You're chained because you're dangerous when you panic. Not because you're an animal. Stay there. Keep breathing.”
Tyler's hands closed in the snow.
The wolf behind his eyes went one small step back.
She stood at the fence and watched a man she had been calling Jace for four days kneel in biting range at three in the morning to ask a panicking eighteen-year-old gray wolf.
She had been looking at a strong man.
She had been looking at the man who walked into a parley today and made an ex-client of Brock Bastian by saying her name in a sentence that no one had been able to argue with.
She hadn't been looking at the rest of him.
The rest of him was the piece in the middle of the ring with his hands on his knees, asking a kid about his dog.
The word that came up in her chest was a word she didn't usually let come up in her chest.
Tender.
She stood at the fence and said the word to nobody and didn't take it back.
It went on for some time.
Jace stayed at Tyler's level the whole time. Got him through the four-count. Got him through a longer count. Got him to where his chest was doing the work without Jace doing it for him.
Then Jace nodded once at the senior wolf to his left.
The senior wolf came in slow. Knelt. Touched the chains where they bit hard at Tyler's wrist. Said something at Tyler in a voice Maren couldn't hear from the fence. Tyler nodded.
The senior wolf unlocked the chain at the neck first. Lifted it off.
Dropped it on a folded cloth somebody had put on the snow because nobody touched silver bare-skinned.
Then the wrist chains, one at a time. Each one came off and went on the cloth.
Tyler shook his wrist once in the cold air, put it back in his lap.
When all the chains were off, Tyler stayed on the ground a second.
“Sorry, alpha.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
“He came back tonight. The thing he did. I couldn't—”
“I heard, Tyler. All of it.”
Jace put a hand on the back of Tyler's neck. Held it there a half-beat. Took it off.
The senior wolf and another older wolf got Tyler up off the snow. Walked him out the gate, past Maren and Theo at the fence, past the others, without anybody making it a thing. Tyler didn't look at her. She didn't look at him.
The pack at the fence stayed where they were until the three of them had cleared the path and gone off into the dark toward a cabin she couldn't see.
Then the pack at the fence broke up. Slow. The kind of breaking up that wasn't relief. It was the way wolves dispersed when the worst part of a long night was over and the watching was done.
The floodlights stayed on.
Jace stayed in the middle of the ring on his knees a second longer than he'd needed to. Then he stood up.
He didn't see her at the fence. He saw the cloth on the snow and the chains on it and the place where Tyler had been. He stood there a minute looking at it.
Then he came out the gate.
Maren was at the gate.
He stopped two steps from her.
The exhaustion on his face was the exhaustion of a man who walked into a parley at noon and into a panic at midnight and into the cold of a training yard at three in the morning to talk somebody else's eighteen-year-old back from going somewhere he wouldn't have come back from.
She wanted to lay her palm on his face.
She didn't.
She didn't know yet if that was a thing she could do.
He looked at the tire iron in her grip. Looked back at her face. Said nothing.
She said, “I'm not asking anything.”
“I just couldn't sleep.”
“I know. Bad nights don't knock first.”
He stayed there a second longer.
“I should clean up,” he said. Quiet.
“Go. I'll be all right from here.”
He started past her. Stopped. Looked at her one more time.
“Sleep if you can.”
“I'll try. You do the same.”
He went. She watched him go through the dark toward the lodge.
She walked back to her cabin at dawn.
The sun was a thin gray line over the eastern trees. The night hadn't quite let go but morning hadn't started yet. The compound was awake the way a pack was awake after a long night, in twos and threes, quiet, doing the small things that needed doing.
She let herself into her cabin.
Sat at the bed without taking off her coat.
She could still see him in the middle of the ring.
Tender.
Eyes shut.
Saw him crouched at Tyler's level asking about a kitchen door.
Saw him walking out of the gate looking at her and not knowing what to do with his face.
She wasn't tired anymore. She was something else.