Chapter 2
Kael
The wolf in me has not spoken in seventeen years.
He has been there. He has shifted when I needed him to and run when I needed him to and held still when I needed him to, and he has done all of it the way a horse does it when the rider knows what he's doing — with obedience and without affection.
We have not been on speaking terms since the dirt road.
He went silent the moment I went silent and we made an agreement, the two of us, that neither one of us was going to talk about it, and we have kept that agreement for seventeen years and three months and eleven days.
Tonight he is talking.
He starts talking in the office when she sits down across from me.
He starts low — a hum, a pressure behind my ribs — and by the time she says his name is Callum he is on his feet inside me with his ears back, and by the time she says he's Ronan's he is making a sound I have not heard him make since I was a child.
It is not a growl. It is something older than that.
It is the sound a wolf makes when he recognizes blood.
Pack-blood. The blood of the brother who taught him to run.
He is up on the inside of my sternum and he is not asking me to do anything — he is telling me.
He says, very clearly, the first three words he has said to me in seventeen years:
Get the boy.
I get the boy.
I walk through the snow behind Willa and I do not feel my feet.
I feel my hands, which are doing what they are told.
I feel the back of my neck, which has gone hot under the collar of my coat.
I feel the wolf, who is taking up most of the room inside my chest and crowding the rest of me out toward the edges.
I do not feel my face. I cannot feel my face.
My face has not been on the front of my head since she said the boy's name and I do not know when it is coming back.
The cabin door is propped open. Della is in the kitchen with her sleeves rolled up.
Jo Halloran is by the table with two fingers on a pulse and her eyes on a watch.
They both look at me when I come in and they both move — Jo stepping back from the table, Della stepping in the other direction toward the kettle — and they make a space for me at the table the way you make a space at a deathbed.
I look at the boy.
I do not — I do not have the words. There aren't any.
There is no language for what it is to look at the face of your dead brother on the body of a boy who has not had a father in his life and find out you have been wrong, for seventeen years, about the shape of what you took.
I had thought I took one thing. I took two.
I took my brother and I took his son's father, and the son was a thing I did not know existed and could not have known existed and that does not matter because he is on this table now with my brother's mouth open against the wood and my brother's lashes against his cheek and my brother's hand splitting open along the knuckles because the wolf in him does not know how to come the rest of the way out and the only person who could have shown him is in the ground six miles east of here and I put him there.
The wolf in me sits down.
He stops talking. He stops growling. He just sits — heavily, fully — in the cavity of my chest, and he watches the boy on the table with an attention I have not given anything in seventeen years.
Easy, I think at him. Easy. We're here.
He does not answer. He does not need to. He has already made his position clear.
"Tell me what we're doing," I say.
Jo says it. She is direct. I have always liked Jo for being direct.
She tells me where his shift is stuck and where the bruising is and how long he has been in this state and what the wolf's resistance pattern looks like and what she wants me to do — palms flat against his sternum, my wolf pressed down into his wolf, a slow even pull that will let his body finish what it started.
She tells me he is going to scream. She tells me he might not recognize me at first. She tells me he might try to bite.
"He won't," I say. "He's pack."
"He doesn't know he's pack."
"He knows."
I take off my coat. I roll up my sleeves.
I look at Willa, who is standing against the far wall with her hands pressed flat against the cabin logs behind her back, and her eyes are dark and her mouth is set and she looks like a woman holding the edge of a cliff with her fingernails.
She nods at me. Once. That is all I am going to get.
It is enough.
I sit down on the edge of the table. I put one hand flat on the boy's chest, palm down, fingers spread.
I put the other against the side of his neck.
I let my wolf come to the surface — not all the way up, not enough to shift, just enough to be present in my skin — and the heat of him moves down my arm and into my palm and into the boy.
The boy gasps.
His eyes open. The gold in them is liquid and confused and not focused on anything.
He sees me. He does not see me. He sees the man over him and his lips pull back from his teeth in a thin, unconscious snarl and the wolf in him surges up against my hand from the inside and the wolf in me leans down to meet it, and for one second — one second — they look at each other through the boys' chest.
His wolf is young. Mine is old.
Mine says: I have you.
His wolf does not believe it. His wolf is afraid. It has been afraid all day. It has been trying to come the whole way out and the body it lives in does not know how to let it and the alpha it should have had has been gone for seventeen years and what it is staring up at instead is a stranger.
I lean closer. I put my mouth near his ear. The boy is making a low ragged sound in his throat and his hand is twitching against the table and his back is starting to arch.
"Callum," I say. "Look at me."
He looks. Barely.
"My name is Kael. I'm your father's brother. I'm your uncle."
The words are the strangest words I have ever said in my life.
I have said many things in this office and in this compound.
I have said things that ended men's careers and emptied other men's wallets and ruined three marriages that I know of.
I have never said the words I'm your uncle.
They taste like a language I have not spoken since childhood.
The boy's eyes focus. Just for a second. The gold flickers, brown comes up under it, and he looks at me and he sees a face he has never seen and recognizes nothing and recognizes everything, because his wolf — under my hand — has just felt mine, and the two wolves know what the two boys do not.
"You're stuck," I say. "You're halfway. I'm going to help you the rest of the way.
It's going to hurt. It's not going to hurt for long.
Then it's going to be over and you're going to be a wolf and I'm going to be a wolf and we're going to walk outside and we're going to run in the snow. Do you understand me?"
His mouth works. He does not say anything.
"Squeeze my hand if you understand."
His good hand — the unshifted one — closes around mine. Weakly. But it closes.
"Good boy," I say.
I do not know where the words come from. They are not in my vocabulary. They have not been in my vocabulary in years. They come out of my mouth on a current that bypasses my brain entirely and the boy hears them and something in his face — something at the very corners of his eyes — settles.
I push down.
I push my wolf down through my palm into his chest and I feel his wolf take it.
I feel the surge — the second-long resistance, the way the young wolf wants to fight a strange alpha just on principle — and then I feel the moment he remembers, in his blood, that I am his father's brother.
The wolf in him sags. The wolf in me steadies him.
I pull. Slowly. Evenly. I draw the rest of him up out of the body that has been holding him hostage all day, and the boy under my hand bows up off the table and screams once — only once, only briefly — and the bones in his face begin to rearrange and his ribs spread and his spine lengthens and his hand finally, finally finishes the work it has been failing to finish since nine o'clock this morning.
It takes less than a minute.
When it is done there is a wolf on my cabin table where a boy was.
He is grey-brown. He is lean. He is not full-grown — he is going to be much bigger in two years, you can see it in the paws — but he is finished, he is whole, he is no longer caught.
He is panting. His sides are heaving. His eyes are gold and clear and focused on me and his ears are flat with exhaustion and he is, unmistakably, my brother's son.
He has Ronan's markings.
I had — I had forgotten that detail. The slash of darker grey across the right shoulder.
The pale undermarking along the jaw. The white tip at the end of the tail that Ronan used to flick at flies in the summer.
I had buried that information seventeen years ago in the same hole I buried everything else and now it is in front of me, breathing, alive, and the wolf in me makes a sound I have not made and could not have made before tonight.
I take my hands off his chest.
"Hey," I say. "Hi."
He looks at me.
"You did great. You did really great. You want to come outside?"
His ears come up. Just a fraction. He understands. The wolf understands. The boy is somewhere underneath, asleep maybe, but the wolf is awake and the wolf is curious and the wolf is — this is the thing that nearly takes my knees out — the wolf is glad to see me.
I look up at Willa.
She has not moved. Her hands are still flat against the logs. Her face is wet. She is not making a sound.
"I'm going to take him out," I say. "We'll be back in twenty minutes."
She nods. She still does not speak.