17. Knox
KNOX
The thing I caught on the wind turns out to be nothing.
A buck, downwind, moving through the low brush past the south fence.
I had the rifle on it for a full minute before the shape of it resolved and I let the barrel drop.
Not Marlowe. Not Easton. Just an animal doing what animals do, oblivious to the fact that the people on this mountain have started counting the hours.
I should go back down and tell them. False alarm. Deer.
I don't go back down.
I stay up on the ridge of the roof with the rifle across my knees and the cold coming through my jacket and the whole black bowl of the night spread out around me, and I tell myself it's because somebody should keep watch with both packs this close, which is true, and which isn't why I'm up here, and I've never been any good at lying to myself even when I'd like to be.
I'm up here because I can't be down there.
The house is full of her. It's been full of her since the truck pulled in, her scent unwalled and rising and threading into everything, and now it's worse, because now it's braided through with Rhys too.
I smelled it the second Cass sent me up to knock and I caught it through the spare room door and I didn't knock, I let Cass do it, because if I'd stood at that door with the smell of the two of them coming through it I don't trust what the wolf would have done.
Cass. Then Gideon. Now Rhys.
Three of them. Three of four.
And me up here on a roof in the cold like a dog that's been put out, except nobody put me out.
I put myself out. I'm the one holding the line nobody asked me to hold, the last wall standing for no reason but that I built it and I don't know how to take it down without losing something I'm not sure I can afford to lose.
The wolf doesn't understand the wall. The wolf has a very simple position on the matter.
The wolf wants to drop down off this roof on four legs and go to her door and add my scent to the other three until the four of us are one thing the way a pack is supposed to be one thing, and the wolf does not see the problem, and the wolf has never once in my life been the part of me I let make decisions.
That's the whole discipline of me, in fur or skin: the wolf wants, and I decide, and tonight I decide to sit on a cold roof and keep both of us up here where we can't do anything stupid.
Because here's the part none of them know, the part I keep up here on the roof with me where it's quiet.
I'm the one who came back from feral with the least left over.
Cass walked into the wild and pulled me out of a cedar stump and spent a winter teaching me to be a man again, and it mostly took.
I can sleep in a bed. I can sit at a table.
I can hold a conversation and not show my teeth.
But there's a thing in me that never came all the way back, a thing that runs closer to the surface than it does in the others, and I have spent eleven years keeping it leashed by being careful, by keeping my edges, by never wanting anything so badly that the wanting got its hands on the leash.
I want her badly enough that the wanting has its hands on the leash.
That's the thing. That's the whole thing.
The other three can want her and stay men about it.
I'm not sure I can. I'm not sure that if I go down those stairs and let myself have her, the part of me that came back wrong doesn't come all the way up and stay up, and then I'm no good to anybody, least of all her, least of all on the day I might have to be the most dangerous thing on this mountain to keep her breathing.
So I stay on the roof. Where it's cold and honest and the wolf has nothing to do but watch the treeline.
I hear him before I see him. Cass doesn't sneak, never has, and the roof complains under his weight as he hauls himself up the ladder and over the edge and settles onto the ridge beside me like a man with nowhere better to be.
He's got two beers. He doesn't offer me one.
He just sets it down on the shingle between us, within reach, and leaves the choice where it belongs.
He doesn't ask what I saw. He knows if it mattered I'd have fired or come down.
We sit there a while. The rain's quit. There are even a few stars out, ragged holes in the cloud, and the cold settles over the two of us the way it used to settle over us on the supply runs before there was a cabin, before there was a pack, when it was just Cass and the long quiet and a man he'd decided to save.
"You smelled them on her," Cass says finally. Not a question.
"Yeah."
"And you came up here."
"Yeah."
He nods slowly, like I've confirmed a thing he already had down on paper. He picks up his beer and doesn't drink it, just holds it, looking out at the same dark I've been looking at.
"You done sulking yet," he says.
It startles a sound out of me that's almost a laugh. Trust Cass to take the whole tangled thing in me, the wall and the wolf and the eleven years of careful, and call it sulking.
"Not yet," I tell him.
"Take your time." He says it easy, no push in it, a man who spent six weeks leaving food at a stone marker for a feral thing that wouldn't come to him until it was ready.
He knows exactly what he's doing. He's done it before.
With me. "She's not going anywhere. Neither are we.
" He finally cracks the beer. "Roof's not going anywhere either. Cold as hell, though."
I pick up the beer he set down. I don't say anything.
We watch the treeline together, the way we used to, and for the first time since the truck pulled in the wolf settles down enough to let me sit in my own skin.