12. Chapter 12 #2
"He isn't entirely human. The program's been studying him for years."
"What is he?"
I pause. "They call him a demon hybrid."
She stares at me. "A demon."
"That's what they wrote down."
"There are demons," she says. Quieter. Not to me. To the window.
She doesn't look at me for a minute. When she does, her eyes are wet and her mouth is set hard.
"All this time I thought it was bad lab work," she says. "A year of panels that didn't make sense, and I kept re-running them, thinking somebody fouled the draw." A short, wrecked breath. "It was never the lab. It was me. It was in me the whole time."
"It was. Your blood was their tell. They've been watching anyone whose numbers looked like yours."
"How many people are walking around like that? With my numbers? Not knowing."
"We don't have the full registry. They have a list of twenty-three women they're actively moving on. There are more than that — twenty-three is just who they've decided to take."
"And you're getting them out."
"As fast as we can. You're the first."
She doesn't answer. She looks at her hands, still shaking, and presses them flat to the duffel.
"I'm scared," she says. Quiet. "I'm not breaking, but I'm scared."
"Good. Say it as many times as you need to."
Her breath shakes on the way out.
"Where are you taking me?"
"You tell me. Is there anywhere the Syndicate wouldn't think to look — someone out of state, off any paper that connects to you, that you'd trust with your life."
She's quiet a moment. “My college roommate. Colorado. We're not on anything together — no bills, no lease, nothing with both our names. She'd take me and never ask why."
"Then that's where you go. We drive you the whole way and we don't leave until you're inside her door."
"Who is driving?"
"Daron. Wolf-shifter, born that way.”
"The men in the van. They're Syndicate."
"Yes."
"They won't find her house. In Colorado."
"No paper leads there. You'll be somebody nobody's looking for at an address nobody's got. That's the safest thing we can give you."
"And after."
"After is yours. Stay with your friend, start over somewhere new, go back to your old life when the danger's past — you decide.
We'll give you a number to call if you ever want to, and we'll check that you're all right.
We won't make you disappear unless you want to disappear.
You see any more vans and you contact me. "
She looks at me a long moment. "You mean that."
"I mean that."
She turns her face back to the window.
The drive to Colorado is long. Daron and I take it in shifts of silence and low radio, and Elma's breathing stays uneven for the first hour and then evens out, and somewhere past the state line she sleeps.
We reach the friend's house after dark — a small place on a quiet street, porch light on, a woman already at the storm door because Elma called her from the road.
They hold each other on the step for a long time.
Elma picks up the duffel, and before she goes in she turns back to me.
"You'll come back."
"If you need me to. That's a promise."
"You'll tell me what's happening with the list."
"I will."
She turns to Daron, leaned against the side of the truck. He meets her eyes.
"Thank you."
"That's the job."
She goes up the steps. At the door she looks back once. Then she's inside, and the door closes, and the porch light stays on.
We get back in the truck.
Daron doesn't start it right away. He's looking at the closed door. Then he turns the key.
"Next name's a long way north," he says. "There's a place we can stop halfway."
"Okay."
The motel is one story, paint peeling, gravel lot. The sign reads VACANCY in red. The manager takes cash and doesn't look up. Daron pays for one room.
Queen bed, a chair, a dresser, a window. Brown carpet. The bathroom light flickers when you flip the switch.
He locks the door, slides the chain, walks the perimeter — window, bathroom, angles — and turns around, and the second he's done being careful, he stops being careful about anything.
Daron's standing across the room, shrugging out of his flannel like the last twenty-two hours finally caught up to him.
Broad shoulders. Strong hands. His jaw's set, and those pale ice-blue eyes are still watching the door, still making sure we’re safe.
He drove eleven hours to save a woman he'd never met. He'd admitted he was afraid. Then he'd gone anyway.
I cross the room before I think better of it.
"Daron."
His attention shifts to me.
"What?"
"Thank you."
A faint crease forms between his brows.
"For what?"
"For saving her." My throat tightens. "One less Syndicate horror story."
Something in his expression softens.
"We got one out."
"We did."
The tears hit before I can stop them.
He closes the distance without another word.
One arm wraps around my shoulders, solid and warm, and I fold into him.
He smells like cedar, gun oil, and the cold night air still clinging to his clothes. Safe.
I press my face against his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart.
"I needed that to be different," I whisper.
"I know."
"No." I lift my head enough to meet his eyes. "I needed you, Daron."
His breath catches.
Then his mouth is on mine and there's no gap — his hands already up under my shirt, already learning me again like it's been years and not days, walking me back toward the bed and talking into my mouth the whole way.
"Every drive," he says. "Every patrol. You walk past me in that kitchen and I have to go find something to fix with my hands.
" He gets my shirt over my head and drops it.
"I'm the worst liar in this pack and everybody knows my eyes are on you at all times.
Thaw laughs at me. Said I'd crack first. Told me I’d run out of patience. " A grin. "Told me to quit pretending."
"He was right."
"He's always right, it's insufferable —" and then he stops talking because he's got my jeans open and his hand between my legs and whatever he was going to say leaves him.
His forehead drops to mine. "There you are. So damn wet for me."
He strips the rest off me fast, no ceremony, laughing once when the belt catches and swearing at it and just getting us bare, and lays me back on the bed and looks at me for one second like he can't believe it — and then he's going down my body, mouth at my throat, my breast, my stomach, not slow, greedy, and when he gets his mouth on me his whole body goes loose with it, a sound coming out of him against me that's half groan and half laugh, like he can't believe he's finally allowed.
He eats like he talks — all in, nothing held, telling me with his hands what his mouth can't get to.
Two fingers curl into me and find the place that arches my back off the bed and he stays there, relentless, until I've got a fist in his hair and I'm coming on his tongue with his name breaking out of me, and he works me through it and doesn't stop until I'm shaking and pulling him up.
He comes up grinning, mouth wet, ice-blue eyes blown.
"Loud," he says, delighted. "Knew you'd be loud."
"Daron —"
"Roll over."
I do.
He gets a hand around my waist and pulls me up onto my knees and fits himself against my back, and when he pushes into me from behind, I feel him stretch me, we both go still for a second, and I hear the breath go out of him like it's the answer to something he's been asking for weeks.
He can't hold slow. He tries, for me, four strokes maybe, and then the wanting takes it and he's driving into me with everything he's got, one arm banded across my chest to hold me back against him, his mouth at my ear, and he does not stop narrating any of it.
"Finally — God, finally — you feel like heaven and home. God damn you take me so sweet —"
Because Daron says his whole heart out loud whether he means to or not.
I break around him with my forehead down on the mattress, and it takes his control with it — there was never much — his rhythm snaps and he's coming before he means to, my name coming apart in his mouth, both arms hauling me back into him like he's scared I'll be somewhere else when it stops.
I'm not. I'm right there.
He turns us so we come down on our sides, still wrapped, his chest to my back, his heart going hard against me.
"That was —" he starts.
"I know."
"No, let me — I've been composing this, Jen, in my head, for weeks, and now I've got nothing, I've got —" he laughs into my hair, wrecked with it. "One setting. I told you. Turns out this is it."
I find his hand and lace my fingers into his.
He goes quiet, which for Daron is the loudest thing he does.
When I turn to look at him his eyes are wet at the rims, the way they were at the barn.
"That was a long time coming," he says, and I feel how much he means every word of it.
I press my palm flat over his.
"You're mine. The bond, the whole thing. I'm one of yours."
I hold my hand there.
He gathers me in and tucks his face into my hair and holds on, and the pack-bond hums low.
He talks a while — quiet now, into my hair, about nothing, about everything, because the day Daron runs out of things to say out loud hasn't come — and I let it wash over me until it slows, and thins, and stops, and he's under.
I stay awake a little longer with him wrapped around me. I don't tease him about falling asleep first.
The radio cracks at six. Daron's up and across the room and back in ninety seconds, jeans and bare feet, and hands it over.
"Go ahead."
"You good?"
"We're good. Both of us."
The line goes quiet.
I set the radio on the dresser. Outside the window the lot is gray with early light. South of us, in Colorado, Elma is asleep in a spare room in a house nobody's looking at, learning how to live knowing the Syndicate is out there.
North, the next name is sleeping somewhere, not knowing yet that a van is already deciding when to park outside her building.