Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
RJ
I was better once.
People forget that. The ones who write non-verbal and chain protocol on their clipboards. The ones who stand outside the door and look through the window and see the thing in the room and write it down and leave. They see this. They don't see before.
Cal remembers. Cal was there.
The medical center was small. Right next to Frosthaven Academy.
Clean. Quiet. I had a window. I could see the mountain from my bed.
Mostly I hung out with Gray. I could see the tree line and the sky.
It was a room with a window and a bed and a door that they locked at night but opened in the morning.
Doc Neal ran tests. Gentle ones. He'd sit across from me with his glasses and his clipboard and he'd say a word and wait. Just wait. No pressure. No timeline. And something in my throat would try to answer. Most of the sounds came out wrong — but some words stuck.
Tree. Cold. Water. Hungry.
Small words. Real ones. Each one felt like digging something out of deep mud. Heavy. Worth it.
Once I got to go outside. Not into a yard. Into the actual woods. Trees. Ground. The smell of pine and wet earth and the particular cold that lives at altitude.
Gray was there.
We didn't talk. Gray and I don't talk. We survived together on the mountain — years of cold and hunger and the raw animal business of staying alive — but surviving together isn't the same as knowing each other.
The mountain was hierarchy and instinct and the constant negotiation of who eats first and who sleeps where and who backs down when the other one growls.
We weren't friends. We were pack, and pack on the mountain meant something harder and simpler than anything the humans mean when they say it.
At the medical center, we both struggled.
I was getting there. Slower. Messier. But getting there.
Then the little girl.
I don't know where the memory comes from.
That's the thing that broke me. Not the memory itself — the not knowing. It surfaced one night at the medical center. I was sleeping, or close to it, in the room with the window and the view of the mountain, and behind my eyes something opened.
A girl. Small. Young. Dark hair. Looking at me.
Not afraid. That was the part that didn't make sense.
She was looking at me and she wasn't afraid.
Everything is afraid of me. Animals. People.
The other wolves on the mountain gave me space because my body was wrong — too big, too volatile, too far from anything that fit a category.
But this girl looked at me and her face was —
I can't hold it. The image fractures every time I try to see more. Her face. Her eyes. Something about her hands. And then it's gone and I'm in the dark and my heart is hammering and the sound in my throat brings the staff running.
Did I hurt her?
The question lives in the space where the memory should be. If I could see the whole thing — the before and the after, the context, the room — maybe the question would have an answer. But all I have is the fragment. The girl. The eyes. The absence of fear.
And the feeling. The terrible, certain feeling that something happened after the part I can see. Something that the edge of the memory is protecting me from.
I don't want to remember.
I do.
I don't know.
After the first time the memory surfaced, I couldn't hold the words anymore. They slipped out of my mouth like water through fingers. The progress — the weeks of it, the slow careful building — crumbled in a week.
Cal didn't give up. He adjusted. Sat with me in silence when the words wouldn't come.
But I could see it in his face. The thing he wouldn't say. That whatever the memory was, it had cracked something that was trying to heal, and the crack was worse than the original wound because now there was scar tissue in the way.
They moved me to Feral Academy when itt was built. Supposed to help. Gray went to Gold House. I went to Red. Different buildings. Different categories. Gray: kept improving. Me: failure. The system sorted us the way it sorts everything — by what you can control, not by what you've lost.
Then she came.
I didn't see her first. I smelled her.
I was in the yard — the run, the small one, the chain-link box they put me in when the main yard is occupied.
Pacing. The pacing is automatic. My body does it when there's nothing else to do, when the walls are close and the chain is short and the space between the fences is the only distance available.
The wind changed. West to east. And on it — something.
Fresh pine. Not the stale pine of the cleaning products they use on the floors.
Real pine. The way it smells at altitude, in the cold, when the air is moving and the trees are breathing.
And underneath the pine, open sky. I don't know how a person smells like open sky but she does.
The particular clean vastness of air above the tree line, where the wind has nothing to carry but itself.
She smelled like the mountain. She smelled like home. She smelled like every good thing my body remembers and can't get back to.
She smelled like freedom.
And mine.
I didn't choose the word. The word chose me.
It arrived fully formed, not in my throat but in my chest, in the place where everything that matters lives, and it wasn't a thought or a decision.
It was recognition. The way your body knows water when you're thirsty.
The way your lungs know air. A fact that preceded language by so long that language was just the latest, clumsiest way of saying what my blood already knew.
I stopped pacing. Turned. Found her — small, dark-haired, standing on the other side of the yard with the big man, Sven. Looking at the building. Looking at the fences. Looking everywhere but at me.
Then at me.
And the thing inside me — the feral thing, the thing that lost its words and its walking and its window — sat up. Lifted its head. Pointed itself at her like a compass finding north.
I want to be better.
That's the thing nobody writes on the clipboard. Not how I score on their charts. Not whether I hold human form long enough to pass inspection.
I want to be better.
I want to say her name without my jaw fighting me.
I want to walk beside her the way Stone walks — heel, toe, arms at my sides, human.
I want to sit in a room with her and hold a conversation and tell her — what?
That her scent rewired something in me? That the night she stood in the dark and I said Alex was the first time a word came easy since the memory took everything back?
I want to tell her about the girl. The fragment. Because maybe it matters. Maybe my body knew her before my mind did.
Maybe that's why the word was already there. Mine.
But I can't tell her. Because the words won't come in the right order. Because my body forgets how to be human when the pressure builds. Because I pace and snarl and grip chains and press my hand to walls to feel her through concrete and that's the ceiling of what I am right now.
I want to be better.
I just can't seem to.
The wall is cold under my palm. I press harder. Feel for her signal. It's there — faint, steady, the warmth of her moving through the building on the other side of everything they've put between us.
And next to her signal, the others. The boy who shifted in the yard.
And Gray — his frequency familiar the way a scar is familiar, something I've carried so long I almost forgot it was there.
Different now. Changed. Pulled toward her the same way I am, the same way the boy is.
Pack. Both of them. Hers, and therefore mine, and therefore pack.
Not mountain pack. Not survival. Something else. Something that has a shape I can almost see, a pattern I can almost understand.
I press my forehead to the wall. Close my eyes. Breathe.
She smells like freedom and my hand is on the wall and I want to be the man I was becoming at the medical center. The one who said words. The one who walked in the woods and stood up straight and looked at the mountain and felt something other than this.
I want to be that man for her.
I'm going to keep trying.
The wall is cold. My hand is warm. And somewhere on the other side of it, she's there.
That's enough. For now, that's enough.