4. Knox
KNOX
I go out the back door before Cass finishes saying her name.
The rain takes me the second I clear the porch. Cold, steady, the kind that settles in for days this time of year. Good. The cold is honest. The house behind me is full of a smell that isn't, and I need to put walls of weather between me and it before I do something none of us can take back.
Marlowe. Rhys carried a fucking Marlowe into the house.
I walk the line.
It's three-quarters of a mile around the cleared ground, longer if I take the high side through the cedars, and tonight I take the long way because my legs need the distance more than the perimeter needs the check.
Nothing's out here. I'd know. I always know.
The wolf in me reads this ground the way other men read a page, and the page tonight says rain, deer two ridges off, a barn owl working the meadow, nothing with two legs that doesn't belong to us.
Nothing except what Rhys brought in.
I stop at the north fence and stand in the dark and let the rain run down my collar.
Her scent reached me on the porch. Under the blood and the scent of an omega who's been living rough, there was the other thing.
The thing the suppressants are supposed to bury and aren't burying anymore.
It went through me like a hook through the soft part of the jaw and I have been walking it off for twenty minutes and it has not let go.
I know that smell now. I'll know it in my sleep. That's the problem with scent. You don't get to un-know it.
The yellow's blazing in my eyes. I can feel it, the way the dark goes a little sharper, a little closer.
I don't fight it out here. No one to see.
Out here I let the wolf sit where it wants to sit, right at the front, looking through me, because pretending otherwise is how men like me get surprised.
So I let it the rest of the way. I shrug out of the wet shirt and hang it on the fence post and let go of the thing I hold all day in the house, and the change takes me between one breath and the next, fast and clean, the world dropping and widening as four legs come under me and the rain goes from a nuisance to a coat.
This is the only part of being a person I never had to relearn.
Cass had to teach me forks and doorknobs and the sound of my own name.
He never had to teach me this. The wolf was the last thing left when everything else burned off out here, and it's the first thing that comes back every time I let it.
I run the line on four legs. Faster this way, quieter, the ground telling me everything at once.
Rain. Deer two ridges off. The barn owl.
And up at the cabin, threaded through the woodsmoke, her, that hooked-in scent gone even sharper to the wolf's nose, so that I have to stop at the treeline and stand with my hackles up and breathe it and want things I don't have words for in this shape and am almost grateful, because in this shape I don't need the words.
I just feel it, clean and enormous and simple, and keep moving.
Cass found me feral. He's never told the others how far gone.
I was eating what I killed without cooking it.
I'd stopped sleeping in clothes. I went a year and a half without hearing my own voice and when Cass first spoke to me I didn't have the words to answer him, just stood at the edge of the trees with my teeth showing while a man I didn't know talked to me low and slow for weeks until something human came back up out of the dark and remembered how to want a roof.
Five years I lived in these mountains. Same as the ones around this cabin. Same rain. Same cold. Same nothing.
So I know exactly what's lying in that bed upstairs.
She didn't come out here to hide from her father.
Hiding is a thing you do for a season. She came out here to disappear, to go so far into the wild that the person she was couldn't follow.
I know because I did it. You trade your name for your life and you tell yourself it's a fair trade, and for a while it is, and then one winter you catch yourself gnawing a rabbit you didn't bother to skin and you understand the wild has started collecting the rest of the bill.
And she's been at it a long time. I can smell it on her, under the blood. Not months. Years. The wild gets into the scent eventually, the way woodsmoke gets into a coat, and hers is steeped in it. Long enough that it's most of what she is now.
Longer than should be survivable. Maybe longer than I lasted.
That lands somewhere I don't like. I push off the fence and keep walking.
Here's the part I won't say in the house, because in the house it comes out wrong: I want her gone.
Not dead. Gone. Back down whatever hole she crawled out of, far from here, before her scent finishes turning and this house full of alphas turns with it.
We built something here. Cass built it, out of four men who had no business surviving, and it works because we are careful and we are hidden and we do not bring the world's attention up our mountain.
A Marlowe daughter is the world's attention. She is a flare fired straight up over our roof.
I want her gone. Simple as that. Or it should be that fucking simple, and it isn't, and that's the trouble.
And under that, lower, where I keep the things I don't look at directly: I have wanted, through five years of my own out in country like this and all the years since in this pack, to not be the only one who knows what the wild does to a person.
To not be the only one at the table who came back from the edge with the edge still in him.
She came back from further than I did. She's still coming back. She's lying up there stitched into a bed not knowing she's surrounded, and some animal part of me that I thought Cass walked out of me a decade ago has decided it is not going to let anything finish what her snare started.
I don't trust that part of me. I never have. It's the part that doesn't sleep in clothes.
The rain eases to a mist. I've made the full circuit twice without meaning to.
Through the kitchen window the lamp burns low and gold, and I can see Gideon's shadow bent over the bed, working, patient, and Rhys's shape in the chair by the door where Rhys always sits, back to the wall, eyes on the exits.
Two men keeping watch over a problem I'd carry back down the mountain myself if Cass gave the word.
Cass won't give the word. I knew that before I walked out. Cass looked at her the way he looked at me at the cedar stump. Like a thing too far gone to save that he's going to try to save anyway. That's the flaw in him. The good one. The flaw that built this pack out of wreckage.
So she stays. For now she stays.
I go back in.
The kitchen's warm after the rain. I don't take my boots off.
I go up the stairs, and the smell gets stronger with every step, sweeter, the suppressant-wall thinning by the hour, and by the time I reach the doorway the wolf is so far up in me that the yellow's the only thing I can feel behind my eyes.
Gideon doesn't look up. "Knox."
"How long's she got down there."
"Not long." He ties off a stitch. "She's been fighting up toward the surface for the last few minutes. Body won't stay under. It wants to know where it is."
I look at her. Hollow-cheeked, her hair dried to tangle. Smaller than her scent makes her seem. They always are, the dangerous ones.
Her hand moves on the blanket. Just the fingers. A twitch, there and gone.
I've seen that exact motion before. On myself, surfacing from the worst of the fever Gideon pulled me through years ago. The body's first vote to come back, before the mind agrees to it.
"She's coming up," I say.
Gideon's already reaching for the gauze. "Then you'd better get the others."
I don't move for a second. I stand in the doorway with the rain dripping off me and the yellow full up in my eyes and I watch a feral thing decide to climb back toward the light, and I think: I know you. God help us both, I know exactly what you are.
Then I turn and go to get Cass.