33. Ember
EMBER
He sees the knife and he smiles.
That's the thing I'll carry. Not fear, not even surprise.
My father looks at the blade in my hand, the cheap taped-up blade I've kept through six years of running, and he smiles, because in the last moment of his life I have proven him right about the one thing he most wanted to be right about. I am his. The proof is in my hand.
"There she is," he says softly. The same words Knox said in the woodshed, in a different mouth, meaning the opposite thing. "There's my girl."
And he moves.
He's fast even now, even at his age, faster than a man his size has any right to be, because he trained the same way he trained me, every day, no exceptions, and his hand goes inside his coat for the weapon he was never really without, the one he carried in close where a patted-down man keeps the thing that matters, and I see the whole of it unfold a half-second before it happens the way I always see things unfold now, because he built that into me too.
He taught me a stroke when I was eleven.
One stroke. He stood behind me in a cold room with his hand over my hand on the knife and he walked me through it a hundred times, a thousand, until it lived below thought, the angle and the economy and the place on the body where it ends a thing fastest. You won't have time to think, he said.
So we make it so you don't have to. He drilled it into me until it was reflex, until it was mine the way breathing is mine.
He never once considered that he was teaching me the exact motion I would use on him.
I don't decide to do it. That's the horror and the mercy both.
There's no decision, no moment where I choose to kill my father, because he made sure there wouldn't be, he sanded the choice out of me at eleven years old and left only the reflex.
His hand comes out of his coat with the gun and my hand is already moving, already finished moving, the stroke he gave me coming back to him exactly as he made it, and it lands precisely where he taught me it lands, and it is over that fast.
The gun goes off into the floor. His hand opens. The weapon falls.
And Malek Marlowe folds, slow, the certainty going out of him all at once, and I catch him.
I don't decide that either. My arms just come up and take his weight as his knees go, and I lower him down to the floor of my kitchen, and I end up on my knees with my father's head in my lap and his blood on my hands and the cedar of him fading into something else, something only blood smells like.
He looks up at me. The eyes that are my eyes.
And for one second, one single second, there's something in them I've never seen there in my whole life, something that might in another man have been about to become tenderness, or apology, or just the plain human animal fear of the dark coming, and I lean down close because some part of me, some small ruined eleven-year-old part, wants to hear it, wants the one thing he never gave me, wants it even now, even like this.
He doesn't give it. Of course he doesn't. There was never anything there to give.
His mouth moves. What comes out isn't I'm sorry and isn't I love you and isn't even my name.
"Good," he breathes. "Clean. I taught you?—"
And then he's gone, the light going out of my eyes in his face, and I'm kneeling on my kitchen floor holding the body of the man who made me and unmade me, and I am crying, I realize, I'm crying for a father I never had and never could have had, for the man he might have been in some other life where he wasn't hollowed out before I was born, grieving a thing that never existed, which is the only kind of grief he ever left room for.
The room is silent. The pack hasn't moved. They held, all the way through, they let me have it, and now they let me have this too, the terrible aftermath, kneeling in my father's blood mourning a love that was never on offer.
I don't know how long I kneel there. Long enough. Then I lay his head down gently on the floor, gently, the way you'd lay down something that mattered, and I get up.
I walk out. Past Cass, who reaches for me and lets his hand drop when I don't stop. Out the door, across the porch, down into the yard where Sutter's body lies in the dirt and the gray morning has started, finally, to spit the first thin snow of the year. I make it to the edge of the treeline.
And I am sick in the snow, on my knees again, my whole body trying to turn itself inside out, to get rid of him, the cedar and the blood and the eleven years and the six and the whole weight of being the best thing he ever made.
When it passes I stay there a moment on my hands and knees in the cold, empty, hollow, finally and completely free of him and grieving exactly that.
And then something else.
It comes up out of the same place the sickness came from, low, deep, under the grief, a pressure I have felt my whole life and have only ever felt as a locked door.
The wall. The thing my father built. Except this time when the wolf pushes against it, the wall isn't there.
Twenty-four years of bars, and somewhere in the last weeks the drugs bled out of me, and somewhere in the last ten minutes the hand that held the lock stopped holding anything ever again, and the door my father shut before I had words for it just opens, all at once, like it was never locked at all, like it has been waiting on the other side my whole life for exactly this.
The shift takes me on my hands and knees in the snow and it doesn't hurt the way I always imagined it would.
It feels like the first full breath after six years underwater.
The world drops and widens and goes loud with scent, blood and snow and cedar and pine and the iron of the man I just left on the kitchen floor, and there are four fast legs under me where my ruined leg used to be, and the wound that's slowed me since the ravine is just gone, knit shut in the change the way Gideon said it would, the way it never could before.
I stand in the snow on four legs for the first time in my life.
A wolf the color of wet stone and winter pine.
The thing he spent my whole childhood making sure I could never be, because a wolf can't be caged, a wolf can't be leased, a wolf can't be evaluated annually and traded between houses.
He kept it from me because it was the one part of me he could never own.
And now he's dead, and it's mine, and I throw my head back in the falling snow and I do the thing I have wanted to do since I was a child and never once could. I howl. Grief and fury and six years and twenty-four, all of it, up into the gray morning where he can't take it back.
That's when I hear it from inside the cabin. Knox's voice, sharp, no flatness left in it at all.
"Gideon. Gideon, stay with me. Cass—he's crashing. He's going into shock."