Chapter Seven
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Lily
There’s no moon tonight, and at thirty below, that matters more than it should.
Moonlight at least gives the snow something to throw back.
Without it, the dark past the window is total, the kind that swallows the porch light three feet past the glass.
The only thing still working overhead is the stars, hard, white, and close, doing absolutely nothing to help anybody see.
I’ve loaded the stove low for the night.
Prophet sits across the table from me, cleaning the rifle I never asked him to clean.
It’s become its own quiet thing between us, him finding the chores I haven’t gotten to and doing them before I notice they’re not done.
His hands move over the barrel with a care that no man who’s never held a gun should have.
I watch his fingers work the cloth down the metal.
He makes so little sense, and I have stopped trying to make him make sense at all.
“You’re staring,” he says, without looking up.
“I’m assessing.”
“That what you call it?”
There’s no bite in it. There rarely is, which should be a relief, except it leaves nothing for me to push against. I reach across the table for the oil rag he’s already used, and our hands find the same six inches of space at the same time, and neither of us pulls back from it the way we should.
His hand is warm. It’s always warm, warmer than a body running this much cold has any right to be, and I tell myself that’s the only reason I don’t move mine first. His thumb slowly runs once along the side of my wrist, testing, as if he’s not sure he’s allowed it.
I should say something clinical, but the words don’t come, and instead, I find myself looking up at him and finding him already looking at me.
He leans in. Not fast. Nothing about him is ever fast, apparently.
My chest is doing something erratic, and entirely outside my control. I let him close the distance because some honest, traitorous part of me has been waiting weeks for him to do exactly this and has stopped pretending otherwise. His breath is warm against my mouth.
Bear loses his mind.
Not the low growl from before or the patient, watching stillness he gave the thing at the tree line weeks ago.
Full bark, high and frantic, the kind I’ve heard out of him exactly twice in five years, and both times it meant something was already inside the wire.
He’s at the door in two strides, claws scrambling against the wood, throwing his whole weight at it like he means to put himself through it.
Prophet is already up. Whatever was happening between us half a second ago is gone, folded away like it never started. I’m moving, too, the rifle in my hands quickly, because five years out here teaches your body to do that action faster than your head can follow.
“Step back from the window,” I tell him and hate how steady my voice sounds, and that some clinical part of me is already running triage on a threat I haven’t seen yet.
He doesn’t step away from the window.
He’s at it instead, palms flat against the cold glass, head tipped slightly, listening to something I can’t hear over Bear’s barking.
And then I hear it too. It’s not the slow, deliberate weight from before.
Something is moving fast through the trees, breaking brush, a sound with a rhythm to it I recognize, even though I’ve never had reason to before.
Two legs, a human stride, coming on at a dead run, straight for the cabin, and not stopping.
I bring up the rifle. My hands are steady. They have to be.
“Prophet—” I don’t finish it. I don’t get the chance to.
He doesn’t decide to do whatever happens next. I watch it not be a decision. His hands come up in front of him the way you’d raise them against a blow you already know is coming.
And then there’s light.
Not fire, light. White, total, edgeless, the kind of light that throws no shadows because it comes from too many directions at once. It pours out from his open palms, through the window and across the clearing, turning thirty-below darkness into day.
Something screams. Not human. Then it runs.
Prophet is standing exactly where he was, hands still raised, palms out, staring at them as if they belong to someone else. I cross to him, grab his wrists, and turn his hands over in mine. Nothing. No burns, no marks. His skin is warm beneath my fingers.
I look up at his face, and he looks as surprised as I feel.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.” His voice is rough, lower than usual, as if whatever went through him took something on the way out.
“I didn’t think about it. I didn’t decide to do it.
It just—” He stops. Looks at his hands again as if he’s expecting them to explain themselves.
“It happened the way breathing happens. The way ducking happens when something’s coming at your head. I didn’t choose it. It chose itself.”
I let go of his wrists, and don’t move very far away.
“You don’t know what you are,” I say. It isn’t a question.
I’ve not been asking this question for five weeks, and suddenly, I’m too tired, standing in the wreckage of whatever almost happened between us before Bear started barking, to keep not asking it.
“No,” he says. There is defense in it, no wounded pride, just the truth, laid down flat between us the way he lays down everything.
“And whatever that was out there.” I nod toward the window, toward the dark that’s gone back to being only dark. “It knew enough to run.”
“Yes.”
Whatever left my clearing at a dead sprint had a body—had legs that worked the human way.
Not a wolf or a bear stirred too early from a den.
A person, coming on deliberately through thirty below dark, toward a cabin forty miles from anything and then turning fast enough to leave skin on the brush the second light came out of a stranger’s hands.
I think about the crater. The wing prints scorched thirty feet wide into permafrost that hasn’t thawed since before I was born.
I think about the word I have never once let myself write down, not anywhere, the one that would make every single piece of this man fit cleanly into a single terrible box.
I don’t write it down now either. I’m not ready.
I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely ready, but tonight especially, standing in a dark cabin with my dog still growling low at the door and my pulse refusing to settle, I am further from ready than I have been since the night the sky tore open.
“What does it mean...” he says, after a while, “... for you that I’m not alone here?”
It’s not the question I expect. I expect him to ask what he is, what’s hunting him, whether I’m afraid, all the obvious questions.
He asks instead about me, about what changes on my side of the equation now that whatever just ran off into the dark has confirmed, beyond any more arguing, that this isn’t going to stay contained to the two of us, a dog, and forty miles of snow.
I think about it for longer than the question probably deserves.
I think about five years of building a life specifically so that nothing could ever again show up at my door uninvited, how thoroughly that plan has already failed, and how strange it is that the failure of it doesn’t currently feel like the disaster it should.
“It means...” I say finally, “I’m still making breakfast.”
Something moves across his face. Not quite a smile, but close enough.
I set the rifle down on the table, within reach, the way it’s lived within reach since the night I dragged him in from the snow.
Bear finally stops growling and leans his whole weight against my leg, a solid warmth I am grateful for.
Prophet sits back at the table across from me, and neither of us says anything at all about what was happening between us before Bear started barking, though I catch him looking at my mouth once, briefly, before he forces himself to stop.
I don’t bring it up either. I tell myself there will be time, though I don’t actually believe it, not with whatever just ran from this clearing is still out there somewhere in the dark, regrouping, reporting back to whoever sent them.
Outside, the wind has gone still. The forest stands black at the edge of the clearing, and somewhere past it, something that knew enough to run is still running.
I don’t sleep for a long time. Beside the stove, Prophet doesn’t either.
We lie there in the dark, awake for entirely different reasons. Because whatever happened in this cabin tonight was never really about the thing that ran off into the trees. It was about what made it run.