11. Ember
EMBER
The bottle rattles when I shake it, one dry rattle, the sound an empty thing makes when you're hoping it isn't. A single chip of nothing rolling against the plastic.
I tip it into my palm anyway, at five in the morning on the edge of the bed, and what comes out is a flake of the coating off a pill that's long gone, and that's all.
That's the whole of what I've got left between me and what's coming.
Nothing. I ran the last real dose dry days before the snare ever closed on my leg, and I've been running on fumes and willpower since.
Maeve's blockers were good, the best I ever found, the only ones that don't just bank the heat but bury the scent under it.
But good runs out the same as bad, and mine ran out days ago, and my body has spent every hour since climbing slow and patient and insistent toward the thing the pills were holding shut.
There's no slowing it now. There never was.
I've just been pretending the empty bottle in my hand was a fuller one.
After this, there's nothing between me and the worst of it except a locked door and six years of practice.
Gideon came back the night before last. Walked out of the trees the way he walked into them, said nothing about where he'd gone or what the Easton name had pulled out of him, and went straight to the stove like the conversation had never happened.
Nobody pushed. This is a house full of men with rooms they don't open, and they extend each other the courtesy of locked doors. I'm learning the architecture of it.
But he came back, and the morning I finally admit the bottle's been empty for days he's the one who says it, flat, over coffee: "You're out."
"Nearly."
"Nearly isn't a number I treat." He looks at me across the kitchen, clinical, and there's no heat in it, just the medic doing math. "Without them, how long until you're in it."
"Days. Maybe a week if I'm lucky and I never get lucky."
Cass doesn't look up from the map he's been marking. "Then we go today. Where."
And that's how I end up in the back of a truck at dawn, watching the mountains let go of us one switchback at a time, on my way to the one person who ever sold me a way to stay hidden.
The cab is too small.
I knew it would be. Knew it the way you know a thing you've decided not to think about until it's unavoidable, and now it's unavoidable, because Cass is driving with one hand loose on the wheel and Gideon's in the passenger seat and I'm folded into the narrow bench behind them, and there is nowhere in this truck that isn't full of the two of them.
Leather and snow, cold coal under it, all down my left side from the driver's seat.
Iron and clove, clean and sharp, from the seat ahead.
Two scents I've already learned in a too-warm bedroom, packed now into a sealed box rolling down a mountain, and whatever trace is left in my blood is losing, and my body knows exactly what it's sitting three feet from.
The heat doesn't come up like a wave. I keep expecting a wave.
It comes up like a tide, slow, finding the low places first. A warmth behind my knees.
A weight low in my belly that has nothing to do with the truck's motion.
A flush I can feel climbing my throat, and the worst of it, the part that makes me want to put my fist through the window: a softening.
Some animal part of me uncurling toward the two men in the front seat like a cat toward a fire, wanting nothing more complicated than to be closer to the warm.
I press my spine into the corner where the bench meets the door and I breathe through my mouth and I count mile markers.
Nobody talks for the first hour. That's its own mercy. If one of them made conversation I'd have to answer, and I don't trust what my voice would do.
It's Gideon who breaks it, and he does it without turning around, watching me instead in the side mirror, the way he's been watching me in the side mirror for forty minutes thinking I haven't clocked it.
"You can put the window down," he says. "It'll help. Moving air carries the scent off instead of letting it pool. For you and for us."
So he knows. Of course he knows. They both know.
Cass's jaw has been set like a man holding something heavy since the second I climbed in, the cords standing out on the back of his hand where it grips the wheel, and I understand suddenly that the silence of the first hour wasn't comfort.
It was discipline. Two alphas in a sealed truck with an omega tipping into heat, both of them holding a line by main force, and not one of them said a word about it because saying a word about it would make it real in the cab.
I put the window down. The cold comes in hard and clean and it does help, a little, dragging the worst of the pooled scent out into the slipstream.
"Better?" Gideon says.
"Define better."
His mouth does the dry almost-thing in the mirror. "Survivable to the pharmacy."
"Then better." I lean my temple against the cold glass and let the wind take some of the fever off my face. "Why isn't Knox doing this. Or Rhys. Why the two of you."
Cass answers, eyes on the road. "Knox is watching the south line.
After yesterday, nobody's leaving it unwatched again.
" A pause, and then the rest, plain: "And Rhys is too close to your father's world to walk into a town where people might be looking.
If anyone's circulated a description, Rhys's face is the one that gets remembered.
Mine doesn't. Gideon's doesn't. We're the two who can buy pills and not be a story. "
It's a good answer. Careful, complete, the kind of answer Cass gives. It tells me they thought about this, that the seating chart of this truck is another thing decided by four men weighing my safety like a load to be balanced.
I should hate it. I keep waiting to hate it.
Mostly I sit in the back of a warm truck with the wind on my face and the heat climbing in me and I feel, for the first time in longer than I can stand to count, like a thing somebody is trying to keep instead of a thing somebody is trying to catch, and I don't have any idea what to do with the difference.
The mountains flatten into foothills. The foothills give way to the long gray sprawl of the coast road, and then the first buildings of Forks, wet and low under a sky the color of dishwater.
"Maeve's is off the main drag," I say. "Behind the hardware store. There's an alley."
Cass takes us off the main road and into the back ways, slow, a man who doesn't like driving into anything he can't see the edges of. The alley behind the hardware store is empty, puddled, a dumpster and a stack of broken pallets and the back of a low brick building with a single steel door.
Maeve's door.
I've come to this door a dozen times in six years, always on foot, always after dark, always with cash and pelts in a pack and my hood up.
I know this door. I know it should be shut, because Maeve keeps it shut and bolted and has a particular paranoid pride about it, has told me more than once that an open door is an invitation and she doesn't issue invitations.
The door is open.
Not wide. A hand's width, dark inside, the way a door sits when it's been opened and not closed again. And there's no light on behind it, no radio, none of the small signs of a woman at work in her back room.
Cass sees it the same second I do. The truck stops. His hand goes inside his coat, slow, and comes to rest there, and the easy goes out of him all at once.
"That's not right," he says, low. He's already scanning the alley, the rooflines, the mouth of it where it lets back onto the street. "Maeve keep that door open, ever?"
"Never. Not once. She bolts it even when she's standing right behind it."
"Then somebody opened it." He puts the truck in park but doesn't cut the engine. His eyes find mine in the rearview, and there's nothing soft in them now, nothing of the man holding a careful line for the last two hours. Just the pack alpha, reading a wrong thing in a quiet alley.
"Stay in the truck," he says.