Chapter 5 By the Fire
Grady
Hamish is already at the fire pit when I get back.
He holds two mugs. He doesn't offer one. He just sets the second one on the flat rock beside my chair. He knows exactly when I'll come through the tree line.
I considered that simple action. How over the last two hundred years, what it has given the Clan and its member packs. Our pack is a strong one. Hamish does this because he is my beta. He also does this because the Clan fosters the inter pack connections that make a clan strong.
When Buck Hansen Senior started the pack, people and wolves didn't know about each other. He fostered the cross-connections so that wolf shifters would come across as people first and not monsters to be hunted. To this day we still teach the young to be aware of those around them.
I drop into the chair. Pick up the mug. It's black coffee, which is what I drink when I'm not sleeping well, and I have not said a word to him about not sleeping well.
That's Hamish.
"She was on the trail," he says. Not a question.
"She was on the trail."
The fire snaps between us. The compound is quiet this time of night. Most of the clan pulls in for the evening, lights going yellow in the lodge windows, the low sound of conversation carrying across the yard in pieces.
Out here it's just the fire and the dark and the smell of pine still on both of us from the run.
"She saw you." Still not a question.
"She saw all of us."
Hamish turns his mug in his hands. "She didn't run."
"No."
"Most people run."
"She didn't." I think about the way she stood on that trail. Feet planted. Chin level. One hand on her friend's arm like she was the one doing the steadying. "She watched."
Hamish nods slowly, the way he does when he's adding something to a picture he's been building for a while. "What did it feel like, out there?"
I look at the fire.
"Stronger," I say. "Without the walls. Without the distance."
On the other side of a reference desk with two feet of professional distance between us, it was already enough to make my hands shake in a parking structure for six minutes.
Out on that trail, in the dark, in the wolf, it was something else.
It pulled forward like a current, with direction and intention.
It knew exactly where it was going and had been waiting for me to stop arguing.
I set my mug down on the flat rock.
"I need to say something out loud."
Hamish waits.
"I did not have this with Marris."
The fire crackles. A log shifts.
"I wondered about that," Hamish says quietly.
"I thought I did. I thought what I felt for her was—" I stop, then start again. "She was important to me. I don't want to rewrite that. But it wasn't this."
Because the wolf did not recognize Marris Walker.
The wolf waited all those years and recognized her sister.
"You couldn't have known," Hamish says.
"I should have known the difference." I know he's right. Still I feel almost glad that she left. That makes me feel terrible. Fated not fated.
"And another thing, do you think Veron knew it about it being the sister?" I snarl at that.
A few moments of silence pass.
"It doesn't make sense that he would go all that way and not actually read the name on the door."
"Thank you!" I slap both of my legs with my hands.
"Wait a minute. How could you possibly have known? You or the wolf." He leans forward, about to say something I don't want to hear and he's going to say it anyway.
"You'd never felt it before. You had feelings for Marris, real ones. You had no reference point for what the connection was supposed to feel like."
"The wolf should have told me."
"Maybe the wolf wasn't ready. Real feelings that you choose and build on mean more if you ask me."
"More than fate bonding?" I watch Hamish. He stands and paces around the fire pit.
"I'm saying that fate bonding isn't everything. Sometimes it isn't even the right thing."
He stands there for a moment.
"Hamish, are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm good. Thanks to you. Don't let my breaking the fated mate bond with Emily influence your decision."
"I'll take it under advisement." I try to sound official as a joke.
"Right." Hamish walks back to his chair and sits. He shrugs, one shoulder. "Maybe Lilly wasn't even born yet."
"Watch yourself!" I say and stare sternly his way. I kid but that lands somewhere low in my chest and stays there.
Lilly Walker is twenty-four years old.
"When I sat across from Denholm that time, I let him talk me out of Marris, Lilly was six." I say.
I pick up my mug just to have something to do with my hands. "The clan's position hasn't changed."
"Not one bit." Hamish emphasizes each word.
"Denholm still—"
"Denholm still believes what Denholm believes." Hamish cuts across that sentence without heat. "That's a separate problem."
"It's not a separate problem. It's the same problem it was then. I handled it the wrong way. Now, I'm sitting here at forty-two with a fated mate who is twenty-four years old. Not to mention that she is a human and the head archivist of the collection we donated. Denholm is going to—"
"Grady." I stop. Hamish looks at me with the patience of a man who has been my beta for eighteen years and has never once overstated a thing. "One problem at a time."
I breathe out. "Right."
"Thursday is the first problem."
"Thursday is a research appointment."
"See how it goes."
He gives me a look that says exactly what he thinks of that framing without using a single word. It's an efficient system. We've had eighteen years to develop it.
"She knows what she saw tonight," I say. "On the trail. She's not a person who misses things."
"No. She's not."
"She's been managing our collection for eight months. She's read everything in it."
"You think she knows what we are."
"I think she knows more than she's supposed to."
I fill Hamish in on some of the morning's details.
That she stood even and confident at that reference desk.
She explained the index series with the precision of someone who had not just filed those documents but understood them.
The way she looked at my eyes when they flashed and did not flinch.
She filed it. She moved on. She kept her voice level.
"She knew what to look for. She just doesn't have confirmation."
"And Thursday?"
The fire is burning lower. Across the yard the lodge windows are going dark one by one.
"Thursday I have to sit across a research table from her for two to three hours," I say, "and look at land records."
"Right."
"While the bonding does whatever it's going to do in an enclosed space with no way to—"
"Right."
I look at my beta. "You're not adding anything useful, are you."
"I already said the only useful thing." He picks up his mug. "One problem at a time."
He stands and stretches, no rushing, and tosses the last of his coffee into the grass beside the fire pit. He looks at me once more before he heads toward the lodge.
"For what it's worth," Hamish says, "she sounds like someone worth the problem."
He goes inside.
I sit at the fire until it burns down to coals. My thoughts race and bolt around in my mind.
With Marris I let myself feel the difference clearly for the first time. What I felt for her was real. Warm and specific and worth grieving. But it was a thing I chose, built from time and attention and two people who liked each other enough to try.
This is not that.
This is something the wolf carries in its bones. Something older than choice.
I thought losing Marris was the worst thing the clan's rules could take from me.
I did not know what I was waiting for.
The last coal goes dark.
Thursday, I tell myself.
And then I sit in the dark and I cannot tell anymore whether I am dreading it or counting the hours.
Both. The answer is both.