CHAPTER 6
Uneasy Truce
It took two days, one furious phone call from Agatha Vane, and a promise Kade had no real right to make before Wren Calloway agreed to meet him at the boundary stone instead of somewhere either council might notice — which was how Kade found himself, at an hour he generally reserved for patrol, standing across from a woman he was not supposed to want the way he wanted her, trying to explain a monster he could not name to someone raised from the cradle to consider him one.
Agatha's call had come the morning after the churchyard, before Kade had even finished explaining to Rourke what had happened, her voice cold enough down the phone line that he'd half expected frost to form on the receiver itself.
*You will not be seen with her again without my knowledge of it,* she'd said, *and you will explain to me, in full, exactly what nearly killed a Calloway on ground this pack is sworn to keep peaceful, or I will conclude you're hiding something considerably worse than a trespass.
* He had told her everything, in the end — the deer, the spiral, the cold that flinched from him but hadn't flinched from Wren until he arrived — and had watched, even down a phone line, the particular silence of a ninety-year-old woman recalculating a threat she'd assumed she understood.
She had called him back an hour later, calmer, though no less exacting.
"You will use her," she'd said, "carefully, and you will not let this pack's safety hinge on sentiment.
If she can see what we cannot, that is worth more to me than thirty years of quiet.
But the moment sentiment starts making your decisions for you, Kade, I want to know about it before the rest of the council does, so I have some hope of managing what comes next.
" He had agreed, and had already, standing at the boundary stone the next morning, begun to suspect he was going to have a very hard time keeping that particular promise.
"So we're agreed," he said now, to Wren, the boundary stone slick with morning dew between them. "You tell no one at the hunters' council. I tell no one on mine, beyond Rourke and Agatha, who already know too much to be talked out of it."
"We're agreed on secrecy." She had a notebook, he noticed, already half filled with her father's cramped handwriting copied out in her own steadier hand, underlined and cross-referenced like evidence for a trial only she seemed to be building, page corners already soft from repeated handling. "We are not agreed that I trust you."
"I didn't ask you to trust me. I asked you to help me figure out what's killing things on my land before it finishes whatever it started on you."
"Romantic."
"I wasn't going for romantic."
"I noticed." But there was the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth when she said it, gone almost before he caught it, and Kade felt something in his chest loosen half a degree that had been wound tight since the churchyard. "Fine. Where do we start."
They started, predictably, by disagreeing about everything — where the cold had first appeared, whether the deer and the churchyard were connected or coincidence, whether her father's decades of scrawled paranoia counted as evidence or noise.
She argued like someone who'd spent years being told her instincts didn't matter and had decided, somewhere along the way, to trust them anyway, out of spite if nothing else.
He found he liked that about her more than was strictly convenient, liked the way she planted her feet when she disagreed with him, liked that she didn't soften an argument just because he outweighed her by eighty pounds and could, if he wanted to, end the conversation simply by being more physically immovable than she was.
"Your deer," she said, crouched at the tree line where he'd first found the kill, two days gone but the wrongness still faintly clinging to the ground like a smell that wouldn't wash out no matter how much rain fell on it. "Show me exactly where the spiral was."
He did, tracing the memory of it with a careful finger held an inch above the frost-browned grass, unwilling to touch the ground itself after what he'd seen it do at the churchyard.
She went still over it in a way that reminded him, uncomfortably, of the stillness that had come over her right before the cold arrived at the chapel — not fear, he realized, watching her more closely than was probably wise.
Attention. Whatever gift ran in Calloway blood, it was paying very close attention to something he could not perceive at all, her eyes tracking a shape in the empty air that, as far as he could tell, simply wasn't there for him to see.
"There's a shape to it," she said slowly.
"Like a ward, except inside out. Wards keep things out.
This feels like it's holding something *in* — barely.
Fraying at the edges, like a knot somebody tied a long time ago and nobody's checked on since.
" She looked up at him, and for the first time since the boundary stone there was no wariness in it at all, only the sharp, focused interest of someone finally given a problem worth solving.
"Your land is sitting on top of something old, Kade Thornwood, and it's coming loose. "
Hearing his name in her mouth did something entirely unhelpful to his concentration. He filed the reaction away with the others he wasn't examining too closely yet, a growing list that included, if he was honest with himself, nearly everything about the last four days.
"Can you tell what it is?"
"Not yet." She straightened, brushing frost-damp dirt from her knees, wincing slightly at some ache left over from two nights before that she hadn't mentioned and he suspected she wouldn't, out of pure stubbornness.
"But I think my father could. Or thought he could.
I need to go back through everything he wrote, properly this time, instead of flinching every third page. "
"I could help."
"You could," she agreed, "but you're not setting foot in my father's house, and I think you know exactly why."
He did. It didn't stop him from wanting to anyway — not for the notes, if he was honest with himself, but for the simpler, more foolish reason of not wanting the morning to end with her walking away from him again, the way she had at the boundary stone, the way she had at the churchyard.
There was a particular, specific ache in watching her leave that he had not felt in ten years and did not especially want to examine too closely while standing this close to her.
"Then we split it," he said instead. "You take the notes.
I'll take the pack's own records — there'll be something from my grandfather's time, if this has happened before.
We've kept archives longer than your family's kept grudges. "
"Careful," she said, though there was no real heat in it. "And if it hasn't happened before?"
"Then we're the first to survive it," he said, "or the first not to," and was rewarded with something that was almost, despite everything, a real laugh — startled out of her, quickly suppressed, but real.
They spent the better part of the next hour walking the wider perimeter of the kill site, Kade pointing out the boundary markers as they passed them, half out of genuine necessity and half, he admitted to himself, because it gave him an excuse to keep her talking.
She asked sharp questions about pack structure, about how territory worked, about whether an alpha's authority was inherited or earned, and listened to his answers with the specific, focused attention of someone who intended to remember every word of it later, filed away for whatever use it might serve.
"Your council," she said, at one point, "they'll want me gone the moment they learn we're doing this."
"Probably."
"And yours—" she caught herself, correcting, "—the hunters' council. They'll want the same, if they learn it from your side instead of mine."
"Then we make sure neither side learns it before we've solved the actual problem," Kade said, "and worry about the politics of it after, when there's less at stake in the answer."
"That's not a plan. That's a hope with a deadline attached."
"It's the only kind I've got," he admitted, and watched something in her expression soften, fractionally, at the honesty of it, the same way it had softened, however briefly, at the boundary stone.
? ? ?
They agreed to meet again in three days, at the old sugar shack a half mile inside pack land that nobody had used since before Kade was born, a location remote enough that neither council was likely to have eyes on it and close enough to the deer kill that it seemed worth investigating for its own sake.
Walking back toward his truck alone afterward, Kade found himself replaying the morning the way he hadn't replayed anything in years — not the details of the threat, though those mattered plenty, but the particular, specific way she'd said *fine, where do we start,* like a woman deciding, deliberately, to trust a process even while refusing to trust the man leading her through it.
He understood that distinction better than he wanted to admit. He had been making it himself, in one form or another, for ten careful years.