11. Chapter 11 #2
That's the thing about Torres that I keep coming back to, and I don't especially enjoy where it leads.
He has less standing than anyone in this equation — no House, no name, raised by whatever raised him — and he's the only one of us who simply walked forward.
No calculation. No staged retreat. He has nothing to lose and he behaves as though he has everything, which I'm beginning to suspect is the actual order of operations.
Draeven accepted it and thought that was the end of the work.
It wasn't. He's been quiet for a fortnight and short with people, which in Luke means he has run into a problem he cannot talk his way around, and I know precisely which problem, because she's standing two feet in front of me refusing to be positioned.
And Ander—
Ander is doing the thing where you refuse to name something and call it discipline.
It isn't. I've watched him do it since April and it's getting worse, not better. He thinks that if he never says the word, the word doesn't apply to him. That's not control. Control is knowing exactly what you're holding and choosing how long to hold it.
I have been denying this for months.
I've been telling myself that's not the same thing.
"Okay," Jessica says. "Again."
She stands facing the trees with her hand on her chest.
Nothing chasing her. Nobody hurt. No rope, no bank, no woman under a rock shelf. Just a field, and the cold, and a woman who has been told for a year and a half what she is by people who see her as a problem that needs solving.
I watch her shoulders drop. She breathes out.
And then she doesn't hesitate at all — there's no bracing, no windup, nothing I can see on her except a decision — and the air changes.
The shift takes her about four seconds, which is slow.
I don't care that it's slow.
Because I am standing feet from a direwolf.
I've seen her once before, at a distance across the training ground. It didn't prepare me for this.
The scale is the first thing and it isn't the important thing.
She's tall at the shoulder and heavy through the chest in a way no wolf I have ever fought is heavy — it isn't fat, it's structure, the frame of an animal built for something the rest of us have been scaled down from.
Long in the leg. Broad through the skull.
The coat is dark and denser than it looks.
Every account I've read of the direwolves is written by someone frightened. I understand the accounts better now.
And then she looks at me. And it's her.
Completely. Entirely. The head comes round and the eyes find me and it is Jessica Miller in there, unmistakably, with an expression I have seen on her human face approximately four hundred times, and it says: did you see that.
The history is impossible to miss.
So is she.
"You chose it," I say.
Her ears go forward.
And she is so pleased with herself that she forgets what she now weighs.
She comes at me the way a person comes at you — one step, shoulder-first, the sort of shove you'd give a friend — and it is like being hit by a door. I get my weight back and take two steps and she stops immediately, ears flicking, apologetic and entirely unrepentant at once.
I put my hand up against the side of her face.
I don't decide to. The animal is enormous and the fur under my palm is coarse over the bone and warm underneath, and she leans into it about an inch, and my heart clenches, hard.
And then Jessica Miller — direwolf, extinct, royal line, political catastrophe of the age — turns her head and licks me from jaw to temple.
Everything stops.
She freezes.
I freeze.
We stand there. Her eyes have gone enormous. Slowly, with what I can only describe as horror, her ears go flat back against her skull.
And the sound is out of me before I have any say in it at all.
I laugh.
Properly. Out loud, from the chest, in a field, with wolf saliva on the side of my face — and her ears go further back, which shouldn't be possible, and she takes an actual step away from me, and the enormous extinct predator standing in the middle of Luftis Academy looks mortified , and that makes it worse.
I don't stop for some time.
I can't remember the last time this happened. I mean that literally. I've been sitting here for a second trying to place it and I can't.
She shifts back in about a second and a half, which is significantly faster than she went in, and stands there scarlet to the ears.
"We never speak of that," she says.
"Of what?"
" Soren. "
"I have no idea what you're referring to."
"You have my—" she gestures at the side of my face "—you have it on you, you can't just—"
I wipe it off with my sleeve, without hurrying, holding her eyes.
"There were witnesses," I say.
Her head snaps around so fast she nearly loses her footing.
There are no witnesses. Voss went in twenty minutes ago. The field is empty in every direction and has been the entire time.
She works this out at approximately the speed I expected.
"I hate you," she says.
"No, you don't."
And it comes out flatter than I meant it to. Not a joke. Just the fact.
She doesn't say anything. Neither do I, because I've said enough, and today is not the day.
"Do it again tomorrow," I say instead.
"Tomorrow?"
"And the day after."
"I just did it—"
"Once. Once is an accident." I pick her coffee up off the equipment box and hand it to her. It's stone cold; I told her it would be. "You'll have it when you can do it four days running in weather you don't like."
"Four hundred times in a courtyard."
"If necessary."
She takes the coffee and pulls a face at it, and then she says, "You know, you could just say you're proud of me."
She says it lightly. She's not expecting an answer. She's already half turned away, gathering the notebook and the one glove.
I look at her.
"I am," I say.
She stops.
And whatever she was ready for, it wasn't that — I watch her jaw go slack, and for once in over a year Jessica Miller has nothing whatsoever to say.
"Right," she says eventually. "Okay."
"Four-thirty tomorrow."
"That's earlier."
"Yes."
Halfway across the field she turns round and walks backwards.
"Soren."
"Yes."
"Seriously. The licking thing dies here."
I look at her.
"What licking thing?"
She points at me with the hand holding the coffee.
"Good answer," she says, and goes.
I'm still watching the gate when Ander comes up the path from the residence.
He looks after her. Then at me.
He stops.
"What?" I say.
He doesn't answer. He's studying my face with the attention of a man who has known me since we were seven and has never once seen it doing this.
I realize I'm still smiling.
I stop.
It's too late; he's already seen it, and he's already worked out what it means, because whatever else Ander Ardent is, he has never been slow.
" Fuck, " he says.
"Yes," I say.