18. Isla
ISLA
The fox shifter had shown up at her door just after she had gotten cleaned up and was putting tea on night before.
She'd been ready. Not that she'd admit that to anyone, but the kitchen was clean, the stove was loaded, she'd changed her shirt twice before settling on one that wasn't trying too hard.
When the knock came she'd taken a breath, smoothed her hair, and opened the door to find a short, the same man from which she had left the hill with, standing on her porch holding his hands behind his back like a schoolboy delivering bad news.
"Miss Green?"
"Yes."
"Rafe sent me. He can't make it tonight." The man had spoken quickly, already shifting his weight toward the path like he'd been instructed to keep it short. "He found Sloane. He's going to get answers. He said he'll be in touch."
"That's it?"
"That's the message."
She'd stood in the doorway for a moment, processing. The man had watched her with those inquisitive eyes, not unkindly, but clearly under orders not to linger.
"Thank you," she'd said.
"Yes, ma'am." And he was gone, disappearing back down the birch path with the quick, light step of someone built for speed rather than confrontation.
She'd closed the door. Unloaded the stove. Changed back into her regular shirt. Made tea she didn't drink and sat at the window seat watching the path until the light went out of the sky, which was a pathetic thing to do and she'd known it while she was doing it.
She wasn't disappointed. She understood. He had a ship to fix and a man to confront and those things mattered more than making small talk. She would have done the same. She respected the choice. She was fine.
She was not fine, and the lake had known it, the water going choppy under a clear sky for twenty minutes before she'd gotten her breathing under control and gone to bed.
The next morning she took her tea to the shoreline and sat with her feet in the cold shallows, letting the lake do what the lake did, pull the charge out of her hands, settle the static in her blood, give her something steady to lean against. By ten she felt closer to normal.
By eleven she'd decided to walk the river path to check the water level near the dock turn, where the spring runoff tended to undercut the bank.
She was crouched at the water's edge, measuring the erosion line against a marker stone she'd set three weeks ago, when she heard footsteps on the path behind her. Unhurried. The stride of someone who wanted to be noticed.
As she stood and turned around to face the uncomer, she noticed that the man was tall, lean, well-dressed for a river road in a coat that looked expensive and boots that had never seen real mud.
Dark hair swept back from sharp features, pale brown eyes that caught the late-morning light with an almost amber warmth.
He was handsome in a polished, deliberate way, like a room that had been staged for company. Mid-forties, maybe. Smiling.
"Miss Green," he said. "I was hoping I'd find you out here."
"Do I know you?"
"Not yet. But I know you." He stopped about eight feet from her, a calculated distance. Close enough to talk. Far enough to seem respectful. "My name is Malrick Sloane. I'm a merchant."
She kept her face still. "I've heard your name."
"From Captain Lupeus, I imagine. He's not my biggest fan." The smile didn't waver. "May I walk with you, or would you prefer I keep my distance?"
"I'd prefer you tell me why you're here."
"Direct. I appreciate that." He clasped his hands behind his back and looked at the river, the water moving fast over the rocks near the bank, swollen with spring runoff.
"I came to Hollow Oak on business. Trade routes, supplier contacts, the usual.
But when I arrived and learned there was a stormcaller living here, I admit my priorities shifted. "
"Shifted how?"
"I became curious." He turned those pale brown eyes on her.
Up close they were sharper than the warmth suggested.
"Stormcallers are rare, Miss Green. Vanishingly rare.
Most of the historical accounts I've read end the same way.
The power consumes the carrier, or the carrier consumes everything around her.
The fact that you're standing here, alive, practicing control on an orchard meadow in a hidden town in the mountains, suggests you've figured out something the others didn't."
"Obviously you’ve been following me. I don’t appreciate that.”
“Like I said.” He smiled and it gave Isla goosebumps. “Curious.”
“Well, I haven't figured out anything. I'm learning."
"Which is more than most managed." He took a step closer but still careful.
"I've spent fifteen years on the river. I've seen fae magic used in a dozen different ways by a dozen different people, most of them badly.
What you have isn't a liability, Isla. It's extraordinary.
And the way they've got you tucked away out here, practicing in a field, keeping your head down so the town doesn't get nervous. " He shook his head. "It's a waste."
"Nobody's got me tucked away. I chose this."
"Did you? Or did you run out of other options?"
She felt the charge prickle along her palms and pressed her hands flat against her thighs. The river picked up a choppy surface texture that hadn't been there a minute ago.
"You seem to know a lot about me," she said. "For a man I've never met."
"I research my interests. It's how I've stayed ahead in a business that rewards information over muscle." He paused and let the silence sit. "September 14th. Ardenmere. Two fishing vessels lost, crew of eleven. A storm that came from nowhere and a dock community that needed someone to blame."
The air went out of her lungs.
"The records are public," he continued, his tone gentle, almost sympathetic.
"Harbor filings, fae-weather archives, incident reports.
I didn't have to dig deep. The trail was there for anyone willing to follow it.
" He watched her. "Your father was a stormcaller too. He died that night, whether he was to blame or not. And you've been moving ever since, town to town, coast to mountains, trying to outrun the thing that makes you extraordinary. I think you’ve been denying what you are truly capable of. What you’ve already done. "
"Stop."
"I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to tell you that I understand what you are better than anyone in this town does.
" He took another step. Six feet now. "The people here are kind.
I can see that. But kindness built on caution isn't acceptance.
They tolerate you because you've made yourself small enough not to scare them. What happens the first time you can't?"
"I said stop."
"And Rafe Lupeus." Malrick's voice shifted, still warm, but with an edge now. A scalpel wrapped in silk. "He told you about me, I'm sure. The bitter rival. The dishonest captain. Did he tell you the rest?"
"What rest?"
"Did he tell you about the Kellert account?
How he held that contract for four years by undercutting every other bid on the channel?
How he used personal relationships with port officials to lock competitors out of filing windows?
How the only reason I got that contract was because I finally found a way past the wall he'd built around it?
" Malrick's smile had gone thinner. "Rafe Lupeus is not a victim, Miss Green.
He's a territorial alpha who treats the river like his personal hunting ground.
When someone challenges him, he doesn't compete. He eliminates."
"That's your version."
"And his version is that I stole from him.
I'm sure it's very compelling over candlelight.
" The warmth was back, but she saw the machinery behind it now.
Every expression chosen. Every pause calculated.
"I'm not asking you to trust me over him.
I'm asking you to consider the possibility that the man who told you about the big bad wolf on the river is himself a wolf.
One who's been sitting in your kitchen evaluating what you can do for him. "
The charge in her palms was building. The river surface had gone rough, small whitecaps forming where the current hit the rocks, the wind picking up along the bank in gusts that pulled at her hair.
"What do you want, Sloane?"
"I want to offer you something no one else has.
Perspective." He held up both hands, palms out, the universal gesture of harmlessness that she didn't believe for a second.
"You have a gift that people have feared for centuries.
Most stormcallers died because they had no one who understood what they carried.
No one to help them see it clearly. I'm not offering to fix you or train you or tame you.
I'm offering to treat your power as what it is.
Remarkable. Valuable. Worth building something around instead of hiding from. "
"You want to use me."
"I want to work with you. The distinction matters."
"Not to me it doesn't."
She held his gaze. The river was loud now, the wind cutting across the water at an angle that sprayed mist along the bank.
The charge was in her forearms now, the sky answering the anger, the fear, the guilt his words had shaken loose.
She pressed it down with the discipline she’s been striving for.
"I'm going to walk away now," she said. "And you're going to let me. Because whatever you think you know about stormcallers, you do not want to find out what happens when one of us stops being polite."
Malrick studied her before stepping back. One step, then two, his hands still raised slightly, that smile still in place like it had been painted on.
"Think about what I said. That's all I ask." He turned and walked back up the river path with the stride he'd arrived with, unhurried, unthreatened, as if the conversation had gone exactly the way he'd planned.
She stood near the river's edge until she couldn't see him anymore. Then she sat down on the bank and put her head in her hands.
Her father. He'd talked about her father like it was a footnote.
Like September 14th was a data point in a research file, something to be leveraged over tea and polite smiles.
The guilt she'd been keeping in its box, the one she sealed with routine and practice and the careful fiction that she was getting better, cracked along its seams.
Two fishing vessels. Eleven crew. A girl in the tree line.
She pressed her palms into the mud and breathed until the wind settled and the river stopped throwing whitecaps against the rocks.
Malrick's words about Rafe sat differently now.
Not because she believed them. She wasn't naive enough to take a stranger's version of a man she'd slept with over the man himself.
But Malrick hadn't sounded like a liar. He'd sounded like someone telling a different truth, one where the same facts arranged themselves into a different shape.
She thought about Rafe at her kitchen table.
The candlelight. The calm. The way he'd said I don't have a name to give you yet, and the careful way he'd held back details while still giving her enough to feel included.
She thought about the counter. His hands.
The way he'd slept on her floor because whatever happened between them didn't give him the right to her bed.
A good man could still have an agenda. And a protective man could still be protecting his own interests.
She didn't know what Rafe was holding back. But after this morning, she was certain both men were holding something, and the fact that one of them made her pulse race and the other made her skin crawl didn't automatically make either of them honest.