29. Ember
EMBER
The trip line sings at the gray edge of dawn, and the waiting is over.
I'm awake for it. I've been awake since the branch broke, lying in Cass's bed watching him watch the treeline, both of us pretending the other was asleep.
So when the wire trips, a thin high note carrying up from the south draw, I'm already moving, already reaching for the clothes I laid out the way my father taught me to lay them out, everything where my hands can find it in the dark.
"South draw," Cass says from the window. He's been a statue for two hours and now he's all motion. "First line. Just like she said."
Just like she said. My map. My father's mind, run backward, predicting his own men.
The house comes alive around me in the dark, four men moving to the places we marked on a sheet of paper at the kitchen table, no wasted sound, no light.
Knox is already gone, shirt and boots left where they fell, out a window and down onto four legs before he hits the ground, a dark shape pouring uphill toward the high ground faster than any man could climb it.
Rhys strips at the back door and goes wolf and vanishes toward the treeline, grey-brown and gone against the timber the second he's in it.
Gideon stays man, stays in the cabin with the medical kit and the second rifle, because someone holds the center and someone has to be ready to put us back together with hands.
And me. I stand in the dark with a rifle in my hands because a rifle is what I have, because the thing the rest of them are doing, the thing their bodies do without thinking, is the one door that's never opened for me.
Three wolves on this mountain tonight and a woman who was built so she could never be the fourth.
I feel the old wall where the wolf should be and I do what I have always done. I pick up the gun.
Cass takes my face in both hands for one second in the dark. He hasn't shifted yet. He'll go last, the way he does everything.
"You take the ridge," he says. "You're the best shot we've got and the ridge is the angle that matters.
You drop as many as you can before they reach the cabin.
" His thumbs move once across my cheekbones.
"And you do not let them take you alive.
Not because we won't come. Because I know what your father's people do, and I will not let you go back to that, and the surest way to keep you from it is you, with that rifle, where I can't reach you to do it myself. "
"I know what they do." I pick up the rifle, the one that's nearly the twin of the one he trained me on. "I'm the one who was taught to do it."
He kisses me once, hard. Then he steps back out of his clothes and the change takes him, fast and silent, the biggest of them, black going iron-grey across the shoulders, and the wolf holds my eyes for one beat with Cass's own pale stare before it turns and is gone into the gray.
And I go the other way, up, on two legs, the only ones I've got.
The ridge is where I said it would be, a spine of rock and scrub above the south draw with a clean line down into the approach.
I've climbed it a dozen times in the last two days, learning it, ranging it, picking the spots.
I get down behind the rock I chose, the one with the natural rest for the barrel and the fall-back behind it, and I settle the rifle and I make my body still the way six years of hunting taught me and the eleven years before that drilled into me, and I look down the draw through the thinning dark.
And here they come.
Six of them. Coming up the south draw in the gray, spread in the loose practiced formation of men who've done this before, moving from cover to cover, and even from here, even at this range, I know them.
Not their faces. Their walk. The particular economy of men trained in the same rooms I was trained in, by the same hands.
Marlowe alphas. My father's, or close enough.
Two out front, two center, and I track the formation and find the two on the high shoulders settling into shooting positions exactly where I told the pack they would, and the one going wide on the flank, the man sent wide, because my father always sends a man wide.
I was right about all of it. The knowing is a cold ugly thing in my chest. I was raised to be the mind that plans this, and I planned it against them, and they're walking into it exactly the way the blueprint said they would.
I find the lead man in the scope. Center mass. The wind's nothing, the range is one I've ranged, the rest under the barrel is solid. My father's voice in my head, flat, from a thousand cold mornings: breathe out, take the slack, don't pull, let it surprise you.
I think, for half a second, about the fact that I'm about to kill a man.
Then I think about Maeve in her chair with her throat opened by this exact technique, and the girl I was at eighteen, sold like timber, evaluated annually, and the four men spread across this mountain in the dark who sat outside a door all night and never turned the handle.
I breathe out. I take the slack.
The rifle bucks against my shoulder and the lead man drops, folds, goes down in the scrub and doesn't get up, and the sound of the shot rolls down the draw and the whole formation freezes for one beat, the beat of men realizing the high ground is already taken.
I'm already on the second. The bolt under my hand without my thinking about it, the brass spinning away, the next round seated, my father's drill running my body while some other part of me watches from a distance.
The second man breaks for cover and I lead him and fire and he drops too, spun around, down hard behind a rock where I can't tell if he's dead or just out of it.
Two.
The third's running now, all of them are moving, the formation blown, and I swing onto a man scrambling for the treeline and I fire and the round goes wide, kicks rock a foot from his head, and he makes the trees.
"Fuck."
I work the bolt.