GRUDGE (Bone Hollow Sinners MC #15)

Prologue

Willa

The kettle is whistling when my son hits the floor.

I'm reaching for it — left hand wrapped in the dishrag I always use because the handle's been loose for three years and I never bothered to fix it — and behind me Callum is at the table eating the same breakfast he's eaten every morning since he could chew.

Two eggs, scrambled hard. Toast burnt at the edges.

A glass of orange juice he sips slow because he hates pulp and I forget to buy the smooth kind.

The radio is on. The weather woman is saying snow off the coast. The boat in the side yard is half-stripped down to its frame and I am thinking about the carburetor I need to order before Friday.

Then the chair scrapes.

Then there is a sound from my son's throat that does not come from anything I have ever raised.

I turn. He is on his feet. His eyes are wide and they are not the right color.

The whites are still white, but the irises have gone from the deep brown he inherited from his father to something liquid and gold, gold the way a fire is gold, gold the way I have not seen since I sat at a different kitchen table in a different state with a different man who told me what to do if it ever happened to our child.

Said it casually. Said it like saying mind the stove.

Said: if our boy ever goes gold, you get him to me.

You get him to the pack. You do not stop driving.

Ronan has been dead seventeen years.

I have not stopped, exactly. But I have not driven, either.

Callum's hand seizes. I watch the fingers spasm and then bend in a direction fingers do not bend, and his face is white and he is looking at me with a child's terror because he is seventeen and he does not know what is happening to him because I have spent his entire life making certain he would not have to know.

The kettle is still whistling. The weather woman is still talking.

My son's pinky finger is reshaping itself in front of me and the bone is making a sound like a wet branch under a boot.

"Mom," he says, and then he is on the floor.

I drop the dishrag. I drop everything.

The kettle screams behind me for another full minute before I think to move toward it and shut it off, and by then I am already on my knees on the linoleum with my hands on my son's shoulders and his head in my lap and his body bowing against my thighs in a series of long, slow convulsions that look almost peaceful from the outside and are not peaceful at all.

I have seen this once before. Only once.

A boy at the edge of the compound, fifteen, brought in by his uncle because his mother had no idea what he was.

Ronan put a hand on the boy's chest and said, easy, easy, and walked him through it, and the boy slid into his wolf form like a hand into a glove and stood up shaking in the grass and laughed.

That boy had an alpha.

That boy had a pack.

That boy had Ronan.

My son has me. A human. A boat mechanic in a fishing town. A woman who has spent seventeen years pretending she does not know what her child is, in the hope that the not-knowing would be enough to keep it from him.

"Callum," I say. "Callum, look at me. Look at me, baby. Breathe."

He looks. The gold in his eyes flickers — gold, brown, gold, brown — and his pupils are blown wide and his teeth are clenched so hard I can see the muscle jumping in his jaw.

He is sweating through his t-shirt. His chest is heaving.

The hand I am holding — his left, the one that hasn't gone wrong yet — squeezes mine so tight I feel the bones in my fingers click against each other.

"Mom," he says again, and his voice cracks down the middle the way it cracked when he was thirteen and his body was changing in less alarming ways, "Mom, my hand — my hand is —"

I look at his right hand.

His right hand is no longer a hand. Not entirely.

The fingers have started to lengthen and the nails have darkened and split, and at the base of his thumb there is a knuckle that should not be there, a second joint, and the skin across his knuckles is splitting open in clean red lines as something underneath rearranges itself and finds it cannot finish the work.

It is stuck. The wolf has come halfway up out of him and gotten lodged in the doorway of his body, and the doorway is too small, and now both of them — the boy and the wolf — are caught in the same panicking flesh.

I have seen incomplete shifts in old textbooks Ronan kept on a shelf I was not supposed to look at. They are described, in those books, as survivable in some cases.

Some cases.

"Okay," I say. "Okay. Okay, baby. Okay."

I am saying it to myself.

Callum screams. It is not a child's scream.

It is the scream of a creature that has not yet decided what it is, and the pitch of it slides down into something lower than his voice should go, and his back arches against the linoleum and his eyes roll up.

The convulsion lasts maybe six seconds. When it ends, he is unconscious.

His head sags sideways. His ruined hand falls open on the floor beside him, the half-formed claws pointing nowhere.

I sit there. I do not move. I count to ten because that is what I tell him to do when he is panicking, and counting is the only thing in my body that still works.

Then I get up.

I shut off the kettle. I shut off the radio.

I close the window over the sink because the wind has shifted and I do not want the neighbors to hear if he screams again.

I walk to the cupboard above the refrigerator and I take down the tin where I keep the things I have kept for seventeen years and pretended not to.

A wedding ring. A photograph. A folded piece of paper with seven digits written in Della's handwriting, the ink browning at the edges, the creases worn through. I pick up the phone.

I dial.

She answers on the second ring.

"Willa?"

She has been waiting. I can hear it. Not for the call, exactly — for me.

Della has been waiting for me for seventeen years.

She did not call. She did not write. She let me have my disappearance and she kept her phone on, and now she has answered my name like a woman who already knows what is on the other end of the line.

"Della," I say. My voice does not sound like mine. "I need to come home. Callum is shifting."

There is a beat of silence. Just one. I can hear her breathing on the other end of the line and I can almost see her — Della, who would be sixty-something now, who taught me to skin a rabbit the first month I was at the compound, who made me coffee the morning after Ronan was killed and did not say one word, just put the mug in my hands and sat with me while I shook.

Then she says: "Come. I'll make the arrangements."

I am crying. I do not know when I started.

"Della," I say. "Does Kael know?"

There is a longer silence.

"He doesn't know about any of it, dear," she says. "Not the boy. Not you. Nothing."

I close my eyes.

In the dark behind my eyelids, I see Kael Moran the last time I saw him.

He was standing on the porch of the clubhouse.

There was blood on his shirt and blood on his hands and blood smeared up the side of his neck where he had wiped his face.

His mouth was a flat line. His eyes were so empty they looked painted on.

I was driving past him with my whole life in the back of a station wagon, and he raised one hand — once, just once — and watched me go.

The man who killed my husband.

The man I am about to ask to save my son.

"I'm coming," I say. "I'm bringing him. Tonight."

"I'll have the cabin ready," Della says.

I hang up.

I look at my son on the floor.

I move.

I pack two duffels because I have always known, somewhere underneath the daily pretending, that I would only ever pack two duffels.

Mine is the green one. His is the navy one he picked out for football camp in eighth grade.

I put his medications in the side pocket — the ibuprofen, the inhaler he hasn't needed in two years, the wrist brace from when he fell off the dock the summer he turned fifteen.

I put the photograph of his father in the inside pocket of mine, wrapped in a t-shirt so the glass does not break.

I get him into the back seat. He weighs more than he used to.

He's six foot one now, broader through the shoulders than I expected him to get, and lifting him is like lifting a long warm log.

He moans when I move him. His half-formed hand drags against the upholstery and I tuck it across his stomach and arrange a blanket over him so he does not have to look at it if he wakes up.

I lock the front door. I do not look back at the house.

I have lived in it for sixteen years. I have repaired the porch three times and replaced the furnace twice and planted a kitchen garden out back that this year was going to have carrots.

None of that matters. The carrots will not come up.

The pipes will freeze in February. The boat will sit in the side yard with its guts open until the harbor master tows it and someone else makes it run.

It does not matter. It has not mattered for a long time and I have only just admitted it.

I get in the car. I start the engine. I check the rearview mirror and my son is curled in the back seat with his ruined hand under his chin and his face wet with the sweat of whatever is happening inside him, and his breathing is shallow and fast.

I pull out of the driveway.

The road south is the road I have not driven in seventeen years and I drive it now from muscle memory I did not know I still had.

Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, the slow grey grind down through Connecticut and into the Hudson Valley.

The sky stays low all day. The radio I turn off and do not turn back on.

I stop twice for gas and once at a rest stop where I half-carry Callum into the family bathroom and put a wet paper towel on his forehead and watch his eyes flicker gold and back and gold and back behind his lids.

He does not wake up fully. He moans my name.

He says, Mom, my hand, and I say, I know, baby, I know, we're going to fix it.

I do not know if we are going to fix it.

I cross into Pennsylvania at sunset and the mountains begin to rise on either side of the highway and I feel them under my sternum, the long blue spine of the Appalachians lifting up to meet me, and somewhere in the dark folds of them is the place I left and the man I left it with, and the grave I did not visit, and the cabin that has been empty for seventeen years with my husband's coffee cup still on the shelf because I was the last one who washed it and I did not have the heart to throw it away.

Somewhere in those mountains is the man with the broken nose and the iron-grey hair and the eyes that hold grudges the way other men hold religion.

The man who put my husband in the ground.

The man who, in less than twelve hours, is going to put his hands on my son and either save him or finish the work he started seventeen years ago, and I do not know which one and I am driving toward him anyway because I do not have another road left.

I drive. I drive. The headlights pick out the white lines and the white lines slide under the car and disappear behind me and Callum sleeps and moans and sleeps, and somewhere ahead of me Bone Hollow waits, and Kael Moran waits, and the long thing I have been holding off for seventeen years gets ready to land.

I pray.

I have not prayed in a long time.

I pray for the wrong man.

I pray for Kael.