3. Chapter 3
Chapter three
Jessica
Benny takes my elbow and escorts me into the corridor as if he's following Klaus's order.
"She's wanted downstairs," he tells the guards. "I'm taking her now."
Neither of them asks anything. One steps aside and I keep my eyes on the floor and concentrate on staying upright.
"She's bleeding through the dressing," Elise says. "I'm redoing it before you take her downstairs."
"Do it down there."
"I'll do it where the light is."
Neither guard questions her. Apparently the first aid box is explanation enough.
We go left at the stairs. The corridor narrows and the stone gets older, and the air moves against my face — the draught I noticed when they brought me in. I was right. There's another way out.
The passage runs behind the kitchens. They're still warm, still smelling of supper, and somebody in there is washing up and singing the same unfinished line over and over.
At the end, a guard waits beside the door.
"You're relieved," Benny says.
The man looks at him, and at me, and at the box in Elise's hands.
"Klaus wanted her in the storerooms."
"Klaus wants a lot of things tonight. Go up and get something to eat."
The guard hesitates, then nods and heads back toward the kitchens.
Benny puts the key in the lock.
"Once this is open, we don't stop until the trees," he says. "Elise first. I'm behind you. If you go down, I pick you up, and we keep going."
"Understood."
He turns the key.
The cold hits me like water. After hours in that overheated room, the air burns all the way into my lungs.
I'm outside. There's nothing over me but sky.
There's a strip of trodden ground and then the slope falls away into black. Somewhere beyond the track and the road, all three bonds pull hard enough that I can feel them between my shoulder blades.
"Go," Benny says.
The ground is worse than it looks, frozen in the ruts and soft everywhere else. My side pulls with every step down, and not far from the wall I put a foot in a dip and go onto one knee, and Benny has me up before I've finished swearing.
We're into the first of the trees when a torch comes on behind us.
"That's far enough."
Benny turns and steps across in front of me.
The man at the top of the slope has a light in one hand and a pistol in the other, and he's already pointing it, and he isn't pointing it at me.
"Back up the slope," he says. "The heir goes inside. You two walk in front of her."
"On whose order?" Benny says.
"Mine."
"You don't give orders in this valley."
"Tonight I do."
"I know your face," Benny says, and his voice changes. "You were at the staging ground."
One of the two Frances told me they'd secured. Apparently secured didn’t really mean anything.
Behind him, along the outer wall, a handbell starts up and somebody begins shouting for everyone to get out and get behind the stables. Lights come on in the buildings. Somebody has found the service door standing open.
"Stable shelter," Benny says. "That's where they put the children during an alarm."
Along the ground behind the buildings, a group hurries toward the stables — adults in coats thrown over nightclothes, moving children toward the shelter.
One of the children has one sock on.
The man swings the pistol toward the families crossing to the shelter. Tomas is among them, one hand wrapped around a woman's fingers, looking back over his shoulder at the torches.
"Walk back up the slope," the man says, "or I shoot one of them."
The trees are close. The slope drops away into black, and past the bottom of it there's a track and a road and every bond in me pulling hard enough to hurt.
"Elise. Get to them. Behind the stable wall."
"Jessica—"
"Now."
She goes. I come up the slope instead of down it.
"Stop," the man says, and swings the light onto me.
"You want the heir. I'm walking toward you." I keep my voice level. "Point that at the ground."
He doesn't. He tracks me and keeps half his attention on the children, because he's worked out exactly what's holding me here.
So I stop well short of him, and let out a long breath, and reach for it.
Not angry. Soren taught me what happens when I reach for the shift angry — I get all the power and none of the steering.
He taught me in the cold field behind the arena with his hand flat between my shoulder blades.
Find the heat. Know where everything is standing.
Know where you want to end up. Don't pull it. Just go.
The sedative is still in me somewhere, thinner every hour since the van, and it's the last of it that fights. The first surge comes up, hits something flat, slides off — and for one horrible second I think it isn't going to take.
Then it takes.
There's nothing graceful about it. My spine goes and my shoulders drive up and forward and keep going, and the torn place in my flank pulls hard enough to turn my vision white. My hands are gone. They're wrong, and then they're right.
The slope shrinks. The trees come down toward me.
Then the smells arrive and the world triples. Frost, pine, gun oil, sheep somewhere, woodsmoke, and the man's fear.
I'm enormous, furious, and still completely myself.
He fires just before I reach him.
The bullet tears through the top of my left shoulder, the same one that took the dart this morning. Pain detonates down my entire left side. It doesn't put me down. I keep going.
I could take his throat. I don't.
I hit him across the hips and the shoulder and put him into the ground, and stand over him with my head down while he finds out how much of this mountain I take up.
He gets a knee under himself and a hand toward the pistol.
Benny lands on his shoulders with all his weight.
The bonds don't get closer. They arrive.
Three wolves come up the slope out of the dark, and I know every one of them before I have any of them in focus — not by color, by the way they move.
The mahogany wolf stops at the edge of the trees and takes in every body, weapon, and doorway. Then Luke swings wide toward the people coming out of the building, putting himself between them and me.
The iron-gray wolf races past Luke and plants himself between the slope and the stable shelter, and nobody is walking through that.
The black one comes straight down the middle at a flat run and doesn't look at anything else.
Torres pulls up short of my bad side, gets his head under my jaw, and presses there — and fear, rage, and relief crash through the bond so hard my legs nearly give again.
I push back with everything I have: recognition, relief, the certainty that I'm alive.
Behind them, two men on two legs.
Jon goes straight past us toward Luke and the men behind him.
Ander comes up the slope with a torch in one hand, looking for me.
The man under Benny stops struggling after that. Klaus arrives at a run with four of his own, armed for the alarm, takes one look at the pistol and the open service door and the children behind Soren, and puts the transport cuffs on the outsider rather than on anybody else.
"He's not one of ours," Benny says, breathing hard. "He was at the staging ground."
Klaus picks the pistol out of the frost with two fingers and turns it over.
"This isn't ours."
I hold the shape as long as I can, because the second I let go I'm a woman on a frozen slope with a hole in her shoulder.
Ander is already moving before I lose it.
Then my back end stops accepting instructions, the way it did in the wet grass, and I contract inward at speed — the trees seem to get taller, the ground coming up. My bones fold and it hurts, and the cold comes back all at once, and my shoulder burns.
My knees hit. Torres is still shifting. Ander reaches me before the ground does.
There's nothing neat about it. He goes down on one knee hard enough that I hear it, gets an arm behind my back and the other under me, and takes my weight against his chest.
"Jessica."
His hand is spread across my back, half on my collar and half on the bare skin where my shirt has torn away from my shoulder, and I'm close enough to feel his heart going.
"Ander. You came."
"Obviously I came. Where else would I be?"
Then he checks me, fast, and his hand comes away red.
"You are bleeding a great deal." His voice isn't steady. "Where else? Jessica. Tell me where else."
"Flank. This morning. It's reopened."
"Jon!"
Then Torres arrives on two legs and drops beside us. His gaze catches on Ander's arms around me, but only for a second.
"Baby. Hey. Look at me."
One of his hands comes up and closes around the side of my face, thumb at my cheekbone. The other closes around my left wrist.
Ander's palm is flat against the bare skin where my shirt has torn away from my shoulder.
Heat tears through both points of contact at once.
There's no warning. It's on, everywhere, and my back arches hard enough that I nearly come out of Ander's arms. My left wrist ignites — the three arcs flaring together, bright under the skin, hot enough that I try to pull away from my own arm.
And then a fourth line burns its way up beside the others, dark and sharp beneath my skin. It hurts for a moment, and I whimper.
Ander makes a sound too. It snaps his whole body straight and stops his breathing, and he puts his forehead down against the top of my head.
All three existing bonds jolt at once. Torres's hand jerks around my wrist. Behind me, Luke's snarl cuts off. Soren's head comes around.
Then it's done, and I'm shaking, and there are four arcs on my wrist.
Ander doesn't move. His hand is still flat on my back, and his breathing is rough and uneven.
"Oh," he says.
Then his grip firms, steadying me against his chest.
Torres looks at my wrist, then at Ander.
"Okay," he says quietly. He grips Ander's forearm once and lets go.
Elise shoves a thick pad of gauze into Jon's hand as he reaches me. He presses it against my shoulder hard enough that I swear at him.
"Keep talking," he says, without looking up. "Where's your physician, and what has she got? I want a vehicle at the bottom of this slope, not the top."
Klaus is already shouting it down the hill.
"How did you find me?" I get out.
"Ardent kept search files on these valleys after the war," Ander says. "There was one section in them that seemed like it might be a fit."
"He found the road," Torres says. "And we hustled.”
"And we came in the back," Luke says, arriving on two legs with his shirt half fastened. "Not the gate. I was getting you out no matter what."
He crouches beside me. His hands lift as if he means to touch me, then stop.
He presses his forehead to my temple and says nothing.
As soon as Klaus's men have the outsider cuffed, Soren crosses to me. He goes down on one knee, takes my right hand in both of his, and looks at my face.
"Your pulse is fast."
"I've had a night."
"Yes." He gets his coat over me. His hands aren't steady, which I will never mention to him as long as I live. "You're very cold."
"Soren. I used the thing you taught me and shifted right when I needed to."
His grip tightens around my hand. "Good."
Off to the side Benny is standing apart with his hands loose, waiting to be arrested by somebody, and Elise is telling Jon about the dressing before he can ask.
Frances comes down the slope in a damp coat, gray in the face, and stops when he sees me on the ground.
“He was one of the hired outsiders,” Klaus says before Frances can speak. “That weapon didn’t come from this valley.”
“He aimed it at the children,” Benny says. “She was almost into the trees, and she came back for them.”
Frances looks at the open service door, then at Benny and Elise, and finally at me.
“Benny and Elise are protected,” I tell him. “From everyone. Starting now.”
“Yes.”
"Everything else in the morning."
"Yes," he says.
Then Jon tells the lot of them to stop making me talk.
Someone brings a stretcher. They wrap me in coats and start carrying me down toward the track, because the physician is meeting us at the vehicles and Jon wants me off this mountain immediately.
Ander takes the front corner beside my head.
Torres walks alongside with his fingers laced through mine, letting go at the rough ground and finding my hand again on the other side of it.
I turn my left wrist over.
Four arcs.
"You spent months making sure this didn't happen," I say.
Ander looks down at me over the edge of the stretcher. "I did."
"And you came anyway."
He doesn't look at the mark. He looks at me.
"I came because I chose you. I’m done fighting this."