11. Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
Jessica
Ander and I arrive back at my suite with the good coffee tucked under his arm. Breakfast has been happening here since I got back, mostly to save me the walk to the dining hall while my shoulder heals.
Declan takes the bag off him at the counter like a man receiving a hostage.
"This is the good stuff."
"It's the good one."
Declan looks inside, then at Ander. "You can have eggs."
Which from Declan is a commendation.
Sophia has her community rotation folder open on the table, which means somebody has strong views about tablecloths again. Freya's is next to it, and Freya isn't even in that rotation. She's reading ahead for one she hasn't got yet.
Ander sits beside me without asking whether the seat is free, and his knee finds mine under the table, and Sophia watches the whole maneuver over the top of her mug with an expression I intend to discuss with her later.
"So," she says.
"Sophia."
"I'm allowed one question, correct?"
"You're allowed one."
She looks at Ander. "Are you coming to breakfast now? As a thing?"
"If I'm permitted."
"You brought coffee. You're basically family now." She goes back to her toast. "That's it, that's my one."
Renzo, who has been visibly dying since we walked in, finally puts down his fork.
“I have so many questions.”
“No,” I say.
“I didn't ask one.”
“I'm proud of you.”
Across the table Torres is grinning into his plate.
"Ander keeps doing the thing," he says to me.
"Doing what?"
"That." He points his knife at Ander, who has just gone briefly somewhere else, eyes unfocused, in the middle of reaching for the butter. "That. I had that for days we bonded."
"I am fine," Ander says.
"You're checking. It's fine to check. Everybody checks." Torres leans back, delighted. "The trick is checking without your face doing that."
"My face is not doing anything."
"Your face is doing a lot, Ardent."
Luke, without looking up from his phone: "It settles. Drink something."
"Thank you, Luke."
"Don't thank me, I'm enjoying it too."
Soren says nothing. He moves the toast rack within Ander's reach.
Under the table, Ander's hand finds my knee and stays there.
"Infirmary at nine," I tell him.
"The shoulder?"
"The shoulder, and everything attached to it. I'm hoping she clears me."
"And if she doesn't?"
"Then I can’t shift," I say, which is a sentence I have been practicing, "and we go for a walk on two legs and I'm horrible to everybody for a day."
Bergstrom works quickly and spends most of the examination making me move.
Arm out. Arm up, as far as it goes, which is further than last week and not as far as it ought to be.
Rotation. Resistance against her hand. She looks at the scar for a while and prods the edge of it and asks whether that hurts, and I say no, and she does it harder and I say yes, and she writes something down.
"Right," she says. "You can shift."
I pause. I had a whole argument loaded.
"That's it?"
"That's it. The tissue's closed and you've got function.
" She caps her pen. "Now the conditions, and these are not a negotiation.
You need somebody qualified to help if the shift goes wrong.
Professor Matthias counts for that, but he is not assessing you or clearing you.
Walk before you run. No fighting. No wrestling, no body-checks, nothing that slams weight into that shoulder. "
"Nothing fun."
"Running is fun and you may run, within reason, with breaks." She holds up a finger. "No jumping anything you could walk around, nothing that needs climbing, and if the ache gets stronger you stop, and you say so out loud in words. Not to yourself."
"And afterwards?"
"You come straight back here and I look at it before you do anything else, including eating. Use the field behind the arena and the ground above it. Not the ridge."
"Doctor Bergstrom—"
"And Miss Miller." She takes her glasses off. "This is a change in your condition, not a favor. Don't make me regret it."
They're waiting at the field gate behind the arena: Luke, Torres, Soren, Ander, and Jon with a canvas bag over his shoulder and two flasks in it.
"You're not coming out?"
"I'm coming out. I'm coming out on two legs." He shifts the strap. "One of us should be able to open a flask and read a watch. I'd rather be useful."
"That's a shocking attitude for a man with a wolf."
"My wolf and I have an understanding," Jon says.
I shake my head and then stand in the snow with my hand flat on my sternum, and find that I'm not moving.
The last time I shifted was violence and danger.
My heart is going like I've already run.
Soren comes around the wall but leaves plenty of space between us, hands loose at his sides.
"Do you want me to say it?"
"Yes."
"Don't overthink it," he says. "Just go."
So I find the heat, and I go.
I shift. There's no fight in it at all — no flat place where the drug used to sit, nothing to push through. My spine lengthens and my shoulders drive up and forward, my hands are feet and they're wrong and then they're right, and the whole thing happens fast.
Then the world opens.
Cut grass and cold. Wet stone. The kitchens across the grounds, doing something with onions again. Sheep on the far hill. Somebody's laundry.
And four bonds, all at once, going from clear to blazing.
I take a few careful steps, then a few more. The ache stays exactly where it is and doesn't get worse, and my legs — these ridiculous legs, this reach — feel great.
Jon crouches at the fence with his forearms on the rail and watches me walk, and then says, "No shortening. She's not favoring it," to nobody, in the satisfied voice of a man whose afternoon has been justified.
Then they come around the wall, and I get to watch it properly for once, with nothing on fire.
Luke first, and he doesn't hurry. Deep mahogany, near-black where the wall's shadow falls across him, long-legged and clean-lined, those green eyes startling in a dark face.
He stops at the corner and takes the whole field in before he commits to a step — gate, treeline, the slope, me — and then comes at an angle he's evidently decided on, and arrives at exactly the spot where he can see all of it and me at the same time.
Torres doesn't stop at all.
Solid black, thick through the neck and chest, built like something you'd struggle to move with a vehicle.
Those amber eyes are on me before he's clear of the wall.
He comes straight across the ground and swings in against my good side — deliberately the good side, he's thought about it — and then circles me once, nose up, taking the whole of me in through the air, and what comes down the bond is so uncomplicated and so glad that my chest aches with it.
Soren doesn't come around the wall so much as appear at the end of it.
Iron-gray, darker along the spine, and enormous. He crosses the top of the field without any wasted movement and stands where the ground is highest, and then comes down to me and puts his head briefly alongside my neck, and steps back, and shakes himself out like a man taking his coat off.
And Ander.
Golden-tawny with darker honey down his back and sapphire-blue eyes. Even as a wolf, Ander looks polished. He moves with easy balance, completely at home in this body.
What he can't do is stand still.
He comes three steps into the field and stops, and the bond flicks toward me. Then he adjusts a little left. Flicks again. Then decides on somewhere else entirely, and the whole time it's there she is, still there, still there.
Torres, who misses nothing, goes over and shoves him with one shoulder.
Ander nearly sits down.
We walk first, because I've been told to, and because it turns out walking is hard when you haven't been allowed out of your own body for two weeks.
Up the long side of the field, along the top, down past the gate where Jon is leaning on the rail with a flask. Luke keeps pace on my left. Torres ranges out and comes back.
By the time we've come around again the ache has settled into background noise and my legs want more.
Torres puts his nose in my ear, and then he's gone.
He's well out across the field before he even looks back, and what comes down the bond isn't a word, obviously, but it might as well be. Well?
I run.
The ground flies beneath me. Nobody is chasing me. I'm not running toward a gate or away from a weapon. I'm running because I can.
My chest opens up. My lungs are expanding. The air is cold enough to burn, and the world arrives as smell — wet moss, frost, sheep on the far hill, and the four familiar scents of my mates running around me.
I’m good. No jumping, nothing that needs climbing, and I go around the broken ground above the field rather than over it, which is genuinely irritating.
Torres is delighted and going nowhere fast.
Luke finds the cleanest line and comes up on my right without appearing to try, does not look at me once, and is absolutely racing me.
Soren runs on my left, on the bad side, matching stride for stride — and then, halfway up the slope, he cuts in front of Torres at an angle Torres was not expecting, and Torres has to put extra steps in, and the iron-gray wolf goes past him without turning his head at all.
Torres's outrage comes down the bond.
And Ander holds himself in at first. I can feel him doing it — pace matched, position correct, everything exactly as it should be — and then something lets go and the golden wolf drops his head and goes, and suddenly he is faster than any of them.
At the top I pull up and walk, which is the rule, and they all come back to walking with me without anybody making a thing of it.
Then Luke runs close enough that our flanks brush, and pulls away, which for Luke is practically a proposition. Torres flings himself down in the snow and rolls, all four feet in the air. Soren stands over him and appears to consider it.
And when Ander comes back level with me I turn my head and drag my muzzle the whole length of his shoulder, deliberately, and push something warm and unmistakable down the new bond at the same time.
He breaks stride completely.
A golden wolf nearly going nose-first into the snow, and something coming back at me through that connection that is mostly outrage and a little do that again.
Torres turns in a great skidding arc to come and look at him, and I swear the black wolf is laughing.
Down at the gate, Jon has put the flask on the post and is standing with his forearms on the rail, watching all of it, and he's grinning at us.
Jon can't feel the bonds, but he came out here anyway, and he is having the time of his life.
We go around once more, easy. The ache sharpens on the last stretch, and I slow down and stop at the bottom of the slope. Torres is beside me immediately, nose at my shoulder, worried. Luke pulls up. Soren simply stands.
I'm fine. I'm just done.
We shift back and Jon passes around the flask. Warmth from the inside.
"Shoulder," he says, when I reach for a drink.
"Aching. It got stronger on the last lap, so I stopped. That's me telling you out loud, so Bergstrom won’t yell."
"Noted, and I'll tell her that she asks me, which she will." He pours something hot into a cup and puts it in my hand. "How was it?"
"I don't have words for it."
"You don't need any," Jon says. He's still smiling. "Stop for a minute before you walk back."
Torres flops in the snow at my feet with his hair in every direction. "I won."
"You didn't win. There wasn't a race."
"There was a race," Luke says.
"Thank you—"
"There was a race and I won it."
"You did not—"
"Soren cut you off," Ander says, coming around the wall, "and you took four extra steps and never recovered."
Torres sits up. "Soren, you cheated—"
"I found a gap and took it," Soren says.
"That's cheating!"
My jacket sleeve is caught behind me and I can't get my arm through it, so I hold it out.
"Jon."
He comes and gets it on, and his fingers brush the inside of my wrist.
"You'll be stiff tomorrow," he says.
"I know."
"Mm." He puts my cuff straight and doesn't move away immediately.
Ander stands on my other side, close, with his shoulder against mine.
“You look happy,” he says.
I look back across the snow.
“I am.”
“Good.”
“If Bergstrom clears me, we're doing it again tomorrow.”