Chapter 4
Kael
I go to the grave at three in the morning.
I have not been there since the burial. I have not allowed myself.
I have driven past the turnoff to the access trail more times than I can count and I have never once taken the turn, and tonight I take it, and I park the truck at the dead end, and I walk the half-mile up through the bare oaks with a flashlight I do not turn on because I do not need it.
I can find this place in the dark. I dug it in the dark.
I covered it in the dark. The dark and I have an understanding about this particular patch of mountain.
The stones are still there.
That is the thing I had not let myself wonder about.
I had not let myself wonder whether they had been disturbed, whether animals had been at the soil, whether anyone had stumbled across the unmarked pile and gone looking with a shovel.
I had not let myself wonder because if I had let myself wonder I would have had to come check, and I could not come check, and so I refused the question for seventeen years.
The stones are exactly the way I left them.
There are leaves over them. There is moss on the largest one — the granite slab I dragged up here on my back, the one I picked because it weighed more than any animal could roll.
There is a small pine sapling at the foot of the mound, taking root in the disturbed earth, which is what disturbed earth does.
The mountain knits itself back together over what you put into it.
It has been knitting itself for seventeen years. The seam is almost invisible.
I sit down beside the stones.
I do not speak out loud. I am not a man who speaks out loud, especially not in places like this, especially not to people like him. I speak in my head.
Ronan, I think.
I have not been here since the day. I'm sorry. I should have come. I told myself I couldn't and I lied to myself for seventeen years and I am only just now figuring out that I was lying. I should have come.
The wolf in me is sitting beside me at the stones.
He has not moved from this position since the night I shifted with Callum.
He has lain down here in my chest and he has stayed, and I have walked around inside my own body for four days with my wolf grieving on a mountainside, and the strange thing is that it is — easier — than carrying him around tied up.
He grieves. I grieve through him. We are not separate things tonight.
She came back, I think.
She came back and she brought your son. I did not know about your son.
I would have — I don't know what I would have done if I had known.
I don't know if knowing would have made the seventeen years better or worse.
I think probably worse. I think I would have hated myself harder.
I think I would have hated her, too, for keeping him from me, and I would have had no right to and I would have done it anyway.
I think she knew that. I think she made the right call, leaving when she did.
Your son is good, Ronan.
He's good. He is so good. He looks like you.
He laughs like you. He tells stories the way you told stories — too long, with too many details, with the punchline in the wrong place.
He's going to be a beautiful wolf. He's already a beautiful wolf.
He leaned against me at the creek the other night and I — I don't know what I did to deserve that and I don't think I did anything to deserve that and I am not going to talk myself out of having had it.
She's good too. Willa. She's older. She's stronger than she was.
She has grey at her temples and her hands are the hands of a woman who works with engines now and she has the same line in her forehead she had at twenty-one, the one she got when she was thinking about something hard, and I keep looking at it because I am — I am a man who is not allowed to look at it and I am looking at it anyway.
I'm sorry.
I am sorry for that too. I should not be looking at it.
I know that. I know it the way I know my own name.
I'm telling you because I don't have anywhere else to tell it and you are the only person who has the right to be angry with me about it.
So be angry. I'm telling you. I'll keep telling you, every time it gets worse, because if I am going to do this — if I am going to keep being on a porch with her — I am going to do it in front of you.
You can stop me whenever you want, Ronan. I am asking you to. If this is wrong — if this is the wrong thing — give me a sign and I will stop. I will go on my knees in this mountain and I will stop.
I sit there.
The mountain does not give me a sign.
The wolf in me, beside the stones, does not give me a sign either. He just lies there with his head on his paws and his eyes open and looks at the place where my brother is, and after a while I realize that the absence of a sign is — maybe — a sign.
I sit until dawn.
I walk back to the truck.
I drive down off the mountain and I get to the compound just as Della is opening the kitchen at the clubhouse, and she takes one look at me and pours me a coffee and does not ask.
I drink the coffee. I go to my office. I sit at my desk.
I do not work. I sit. The wolf in me is still on the mountainside.
He is staying there for a while. I am not going to interfere with him.
The week passes.
A strange truce settles.
I see Willa at meals because Callum wants both of us at meals.
I see her on the porch in the evenings because Callum likes to sit out there after supper and walk through the day with both of us and we are both, separately, not willing to be the one who tells him no.
I do not touch her. She does not touch me.
We sit at opposite ends of the bench and we let Callum sit between us and we eat from the same plates and we drink from the same pot of coffee and we are — strangely — almost easy.
We have a son between us. We do not. He is not our son.
But he is the only thing we are both responsible for and we both know it, and the responsibility makes a kind of shelter between us that we sit under without naming.
I teach Callum to shift on command. We work on it every morning at the eastern clearing.
He gets faster every day. By the end of the first week he can shift in twelve seconds and back in eighteen and he is starting to get cocky about it, which is a thing I have to break gently because cocky wolves break their bones.
I teach him to track. He has Ronan's nose.
He picks up scent trails the older wolves miss.
I watch him follow a rabbit through three creek crossings on his second try and I have to walk away into the trees for a minute to put my face back in order because watching him track is — watching him track is watching his father at fifteen, and I had forgotten, I had forgotten that Ronan tracked like that, and the memory came up out of me sideways and almost took my legs.
I teach him pack hierarchy. He learns fast. He is respectful to Conrad, friendly to Priest, cautious around Toad, easy with the prospects. He calls me Kael and he calls Willa Mom and he has not asked me what I am to him beyond uncle and I am not going to push him on it.
He has not asked me about his father.
I am waiting.
I know he will. He is not asking yet because he is full — full of new things, full of pack, full of being seventeen and discovering he is a wolf — and the question is going to come later, when the air goes out of the new and there is space for the old.
I am ready for it. I am not ready for it. I do not know what I am.
On the eighth day I go to Priest.
Priest's cabin is on the south end of the compound, by itself, where he keeps it.
There is a small chapel attached to the back — not a church, not properly, but a room with a single table and two chairs and a candle and a window that looks out at the ridge.
He does not call himself a priest, properly.
He went to seminary thirty years ago and never finished and he has spent his life since then being the man this club confesses to, which is not the same thing as being ordained but is close enough for our purposes.
He is in the chapel when I come up. He has the door open. He is reading. He looks up at me and he closes the book without marking his place, which is his way of saying he knew I was coming, and he nods at the chair across from him.
I sit down.
I do not speak for a long time.
He waits.
I say, finally, "I killed my brother and I think I'm falling for his widow and I don't know what to do."
Priest does not move. He does not change his expression.
He looks at me across the small table with the candle between us and he lets the sentence sit on the table for what feels like a very long time.
He has heard worse things in this chapel.
I know he has. But not from me. I have not spoken about Ronan in this chapel, ever, not in seventeen years.
I have come to Priest about other things. I have not come to him about this.
He says, "How long?"
"How long what."
"How long has it been a falling."
"I don't know. A week. Five days. The night with the boy. I don't know."
"And before that."
"Before that I didn't let myself."
"That's not what I asked."
I look at him. He looks back. His eyes are pale and tired and patient. He has been waiting for me to come into this room for seventeen years and he is not going to let me get away with anything now that I am here.
"Before that," I say, slowly, "I think it was — I think it might have been there a long time. Quietly. Underneath. I don't know. I haven't been allowed to look at it."
"Allowed by whom."
"Allowed by — by me. By the situation. By the fact that she was my brother's wife and then my brother's widow and then she was gone for seventeen years and I had no right to look at any of it."
"And now."