8. Ember
EMBER
I go after him.
Not far. The back porch is still inside their line, still bolted to their cabin, and I'm not fool enough on this leg to test what's past it.
But the rule was don't leave the property, and a porch isn't leaving, and if these men mean to keep me they can learn this now: I'll walk right up to the edge of every leash they hand me and stand there breathing on it.
So I follow him as far as the boards go and not one step further.
It's still a stupid thing to do, chasing the one of the four who just made it clear he'd rather I didn't exist. Every instinct I've got says let him go, says a man who walks away is a man who's solved you, says don't follow the predator out of the lit room into the dark.
But I've spent six years letting my instincts make every call, and look where that got me.
Bleeding in my own goddamn snare. Stitched into a stranger's bed.
So I do the thing the instincts hate. I follow him.
The back porch is half-rotted board under a tin roof that's drumming with the last of the night's rain.
Knox is at the rail with his back to me, big and still, looking out at a treeline going gray with the dawn.
He doesn't turn when the door opens. He knew it was me before I touched the handle. They always know.
"Go back inside," he says. "You'll tear the leg."
"You don't get to walk out and lecture me about the leg."
"I'm not lecturing. I'm telling you the leg won't hold and the steps are wet." He still hasn't turned. "Both true. Do what you want with them."
I come to the rail anyway, a careful arm's length from him, and put my weight on it instead of the leg.
The cold air's good. It cuts through the last of the fever-fog and makes the world sharp again.
Out past the cleared ground the forest stands black and dripping, and somewhere in it is three miles of bad terrain between here and a cabin with a stove, and I find I can't quite remember why that cabin seemed like safety.
"You want to know who's hunting me," I say. "Fine. Tell me why."
"I told you why. I'm not putting my body between this pack and a thing I can't see."
"That's the reason you gave the room. I'm asking for the real one."
He's quiet a moment. The rain drums. When he speaks his voice has dropped into something flatter and more private, the voice of a man who's decided to say a true thing and resents that it's true.
"Because I know what you are," he says. "Not omega.
That's the least of it. I mean what you are.
" He turns his head, finally, and the yellow's gone out of his eyes in the gray light and left them just tired.
"You've been out there a long time. Alone.
Long enough that it's gotten into you. I can smell it on you under everything else, and I can smell it because I've got the same thing in me, and there's no washing it out.
I'd know it anywhere. I'd know it in the dark. "
The words land somewhere I don't have a guard up. I built guards for fists and for sweet talk and for the particular cruelty of men who want to own you. I never built one for I know what you are, said plain, by someone who means it as recognition instead of a threat.
"You don't know shit about me," I say, but it comes out without teeth.
"I know you came out here to disappear, not to hide.
Hiding's temporary. You came out here to stop being a person, because being a person was the thing that was killing you.
" He looks back at the trees. "I know that because it's what I did.
Five years. Same country, near enough. Same rain.
I stopped cooking what I killed. I stopped sleeping in clothes.
By the end I was barely changing back at all, staying on four legs for weeks because the wolf didn't have to remember anything, the wolf just was, and the man was the part that hurt.
I went a year and a half without using my own voice and when Cass first found me I'd half forgotten I had one.
So no. I don't know your name, and I don't know who you ran from.
But I know the shape of the hole you climbed into. I lived in one just like it."
I don't say anything. There's nothing in my arsenal for this. Every weapon I have assumes the other person is lying, and he isn't.
"Here's the math," he says, "since you came out here for it.
" And he gives it to me the way you'd read a map to someone, no heat in it, just the terrain.
"You go back out there now, on that leg, this time of year, you're dead inside a month.
Not because you're weak. Because the cold doesn't care how tough you are and the wound's going to slow you just enough.
That's one. Two. You stay here, and your scent finishes turning, and you bring whatever's hunting you up this mountain.
And this pack, these three men who pulled you out of a ditch, they'll stand in front of it for you.
They will. That's who Cass made them into.
They'll bleed for a stranger because he taught them to, and some of them might not get up. "
He turns to face me fully now. He's not a small man and the porch feels smaller for it, but there's nothing in his stance that's trying to crowd me. He's just looking at me, level, like he's set the whole thing on a table between us and wants me to see all of it.
"So those are the roads," he says. "You leave and the cold takes you.
You stay and stay silent and you might get one of us killed because we're guarding blind.
Or you stay and you tell us what we're up against, and we go in with our eyes open.
That's the only version where everybody walks.
And you won't take it. I watched you not take it in there. "
"You don't know what telling you costs."
"No. I don't." He says it simply, no argument in it.
"And I'm not going to stand here and pull it out of you.
I've had things pulled out of me. I know what that does to a person, and I won't do it to another one, not even when it'd make us safer.
" A muscle works in his jaw. "Which is the whole problem. "
"What problem."
He's silent long enough that I think he won't answer. The rain eases off the tin. The dawn's come up enough now that I can see the gray in his stubble, the old scar through one eyebrow, the way he's holding himself like a man bracing against his own next sentence.
"I came out here this morning to be done with you," he says.
"I meant it. I want you gone. You're a flare fired over a roof that took four broken men a decade to build, and the smart thing, the thing that keeps everyone I've got alive, is for you to be somewhere far from here by the time your heat hits.
" He looks at me, and there's something almost like anger in it, except it's not aimed at me.
It's aimed at himself. "And I stood out here in the rain trying to want that all the way through, and I can't get there.
Because the same thing in me that recognizes the hole you climbed out of doesn't want to watch you climb back into it.
It wants you to make it. I don't know when that started and I didn't ask for it and I like it less than you do. "
I open my mouth. Nothing comes.
"So here's where I am." He pushes off the rail, and for a second we're close, close enough that the smoke and earth of him goes through me whole, close enough that I catch the sharp ozone note buried under it, the one that only comes up when he's near me and makes the air taste like the second before lightning.
I have to set my feet to keep from swaying toward it.
He doesn't touch me. He just says it, low, final, like he's putting down something heavy.
"I want you gone. I'm also wanting to stop wanting that. I'll let you know which one wins."
He turns for the door.
He doesn't make it. Two steps, and he stops dead, the way an animal stops when the wind changes.
His head comes up. Everything about him goes from leaving to hunting in the space of a breath, the yellow surging back into his eyes, and he's not looking at me anymore.
He's looking past me, south, out over the cleared ground to where the treeline runs down into the draw.
"Knox."
He lifts one hand. Quiet. He pulls a slow breath through his nose, holds it, reads it, and whatever's in it drops the temperature of him ten degrees.
"Get inside," he says. Low. Not the voice from a moment ago. No want in it at all now, nothing but the flat calm of a man who's just found the thing he was afraid of. "Now. And don't argue with me, because there's a scent on that wind that isn't ours, and it's coming up the south draw."