13. Chapter 13
The knock came at three thirty in the morning.
She hadn't slept. She'd made a second cup and let it go cold on the table next to the tin and was sitting with her hand flat on the wood beside it when the boot sound came up onto her porch. She knew the boot sound. She'd been learning it for a week.
She opened the door before he knocked twice.
Jace was in his coat. His hair was off his forehead. There was something in his face that hadn't been there when he'd gone up the medical-cabin steps ten hours ago.
“Rachel wants you to come down.”
She was already reaching for her boots.
“Tyler.”
He nodded.
She pulled her coat on. Pushed the tin toward the middle of the table so a sleeve wouldn't catch it. Took the tire iron out of her bag and left it on the table because a tire iron wasn't what this was going to need.
She followed him out.
The medical cabin at three thirty in the morning was a small square of orange lamplight in the dark compound.
Rachel was at a steel counter with her back to them, turning a vial between two fingers in the light to see what was left of it.
She was gray, close to sixty, and her hands were the quick kind that didn't waste a motion.
She set the vial down when they came in and wiped her palms on her jeans.
“Come and see him.”
Maren hadn't met her. Rachel didn't waste words on that either.
Tyler was on a cot along the inside wall.
Stripped to the waist. The wraps on his wrists had been taken off and the skin under them was the wrong color in the lamp.
Not red. Not clean pink healing. A blood-dark bruise color spreading up past the wrap-line into the forearm.
The burn across the back of his neck where a silver loop had sat for three hours was the same color and twice the width it had been at dawn on Day 7.
Heat came off him at a step away. His mouth was moving on a word and his eyes weren't opening.
Maren went still.
“Septic,” Rachel said. She didn't soften it. “It moved overnight. The burns have gone into the blood.”
Jace's jaw did its small thing.
“How long?”
“Hours. Maybe a day. Not more.”
“There's nothing.”
“There's one thing. Argentex. Human burn units use it for heavy-metal exposure and industrial contamination.
The Cedar Junction pharmacy keeps it on order for the mills.
For us, and for any pack within a thousand miles, it's the only thing that works on silver burns, and there are maybe four hundred doses in the country at any given moment.
That binds the silver before it reaches the marrow.
It won't heal the burns. It gives his wolf a chance to fight.
I've got enough here for a bee sting. It loses its teeth inside a year on a shelf, so even the packs that can get it don't dare lay any of it by.
You buy it when the clock's already running.”
Maren watched Tyler's mouth shape a word she couldn't hear.
“How do we get it,” she said.
Rachel turned her head and looked at her.
“That's not my job. But somebody had better.”
Jace had already stepped back from the cot. His hand went into his pocket for a phone and came out without it. Pack-link was the faster line.
“Work room. Now.” Jace said the words, in what she thought of as his Alpha voice. Maren didn't hear it, but she knew he had spoken in his mind too. She saw it in the small tightening at his eyes, the way his gaze went somewhere she couldn't follow for half a second.
“You don't have to come.”
“I have to come.”
He didn't argue. He turned to Rachel.
“Keep him here. Keep him alive until we're back.”
Rachel was already back at her counter.
“That's my job.”
The work room at four in the morning had every lamp on and every chair pulled.
Theo was at the head of the long table. Declan was on his phone.
Freya had a laptop open with a road map of Cedar Junction on the screen.
Rhys stood inside the door with his coat still on from the porch round.
Kira was in a chair along the wall, elbows on her knees.
Jace set both hands on the table and took the room in one pass.
“Rachel needs Argentex out of the Cedar Junction pharmacy inside six hours. Tyler is septic. There's no other line on this. Storage is in Cedar Junction. Maren's fingerprint is on that unit and nobody else's is. If we're going down there, we're going for both.”
He didn't phrase it as a question. Nobody in the room had the shape of a man about to argue.
Maren said it anyway, because she needed it on the record.
“I'm going.”
Jace's jaw did the small thing, and his gaze held the map on Freya's laptop for one more second and worked something out under his breath that nobody in the room tried to hear.
“You're going.”
“All right.”
She had been ready for the other answer. She had the line for the other answer. He had taken it off the table without making her say it, and it sat in her chest where the table couldn't see it.
Freya rotated the laptop a quarter turn toward the center of the table.
“One gate. We can’t fix that. Thornwood has been on it since the parley and they know an unclaimed alpha doesn’t choose to be away from his mate. Wherever Jace’s SUV goes, they will assume Maren is in it.”
“So we send the bait first. Jace visible. Freya in the wig in the back to confirm the silhouette. The tail commits. Four minutes later the real Maren goes out the same gate and turns west on the fire road while Thornwood is forty miles north of where it needs to be.”
Theo leaned in.
“Alpha in the bait run. Most visible. Rhys drives. Freya in the back in the blond wig. From the ridge it reads Jace and his mate going north. Tail follows.”
“Bait's mine,” Jace said.
Freya closed her laptop halfway and reached for the brown paper bag at the end of the table without looking at it. She'd brought the wig before the meeting had started.
For a half breath the room was only the ticking of the wall clock and the small soft sound of Declan setting his phone face-down on the table.
Jace looked at the map on the screen and did the math he had already done in the corridor coming over.
His wolf was on its feet in his chest. The animal didn't want her in a vehicle thirty minutes south of him. It wanted her within a pack-link range he could close in under a breath. The man running the room had to override the wolf and the man running the room knew it.
Rachel had given it a clock. The clock was going to decide this, not the wolf.
He brought his eyes back up.
“Real run takes Maren. Declan drives. Kira goes too.
Brennan in the back with Maren. We give the bait four minutes to pull the tail clear.
Then you go out the same gate and turn west on the fire road.
Declan handles the pharmacy counter. Kira and Brennan handle anything that moves in the lot.
Maren doesn't leave the SUV until the Argentex is in it and the storage unit's in front of her.”
Declan nodded once and reached for his jacket off the chair back.
Brennan was at the back of the room with his coat already on. He nodded toward Jace and moved for the door.
Kira put her elbows off her knees. Held the space without speaking.
“Foot patrol on the fence line during the four-minute window. Anything tries to cut to the road on foot, we see it.”
“Good.”
Freya closed the laptop.
“Radios checked. Bait out at six ten. Real run at six fourteen. Dawn at six fourteen.”
Jace looked at the clock. Two hours.
His hands never left his side of the table. He saved his words until the room emptied. But his face did the thing it did when she was close, and the whole table saw it and the whole table looked somewhere else.
“Rest while you can.”
“I won't.”
“Holding you to that.”
At six ten Jace's SUV was at the gate with its engine running. Maren's SUV was idling fifty yards back at the equipment shed, lights off.
The compound had one gate that vehicles used. The main iron sat north-facing between the two stone posts Jace's great-great-grandfather had sunk into the frost line. Anything bigger than a foot patrol went through it. Anybody watching the compound from a ridge watched it.
Anybody on a ridge with a telephoto was watching it now.
Maren sat in the back seat of the second SUV with the tire iron across her lap. Brennan was beside her in the back, his coat on, his eyes on the gate fifty yards ahead. Kira was in the shotgun seat. Declan was at the wheel. The heat was on. Her breath was white anyway.
She watched the gate fifty yards ahead through the windshield. Pine on either side of it. Snow packed flat between the trunks. The sky above the pines was the blue-black of a sky waiting for the gray to come in.
Jace's SUV came down the clearing track and stopped alongside Maren's at the equipment shed.
Rhys was driving. Jace and Freya were in the back.
Freya had her hair pinned up under a blond wig, coat collar turned up the way Maren turned her coat collar up, profile in the passenger-side window at the angle somebody on a ridge with a telephoto would glance at once and file away.
Kira rolled Maren's window down without being asked.
Jace's window came down.
He passed his coat through the window.
The coat came into her lap still warm from his shoulders. The weight of it was the weight she'd been feeling on a bench a week ago when he'd said nobody hurts you. She took it without thinking, the way her hand had gone into his on the stairwell the night he'd killed a man for her.
He held her eyes for one second. Maybe two.
His SUV pulled forward to the gate. The gate opened. Headlights cut into pine. The SUV went through, turned north onto the access road, and was gone.
At six fourteen Declan put Maren's SUV in gear and rolled forward to the gate. The gate opened a second time. Headlights cut into pine. The SUV went through and turned west onto the fire road. Maren was ducked down just in case someone was watching.
The fire road was rutted. The SUV took the ruts at speed.
She pulled Jace's coat around her. The tire iron sat on her lap underneath it. The coat smelled like him. She wasn't going to think about that now. She was going to think about the pharmacy and the unit number and an eighteen-year-old boy on a cot whose burns went into his blood overnight.
Her hands went warm inside the sleeves.
The clearing disappeared behind them.
The sky above the pines went gray.
Two SUVs out the same gate at dawn, four minutes apart, and only one of them was the one Thornwood was following.