10. Silas #3
The third man hits me at the waist, and we go into the side of the delivery van parked at the curb, metal ringing under the impact. He drives a knee toward my ribs, but I catch his leg, and flip him into the street with enough force that he doesn’t immediately try to get up.
The first man is on his feet again, broken wrist and all.
His face has changed. The performance is gone. What’s underneath it is uglier and more honest.
“Freak,” he spits.
The word hits my wolf like a spark hits an accelerant.
My eyes change. I feel it happen, the physical sensation of the shift, the green going wolf-gold, luminous, nothing human left in it.
There’s nothing I can do about it because it’s forward enough that controlling the shift is the battle I’m fighting and it’s taking everything I have.
My pupils narrow. The light in my eyes is wrong, too bright, too focused, the kind of wrong that a human notices even if they can’t name what they’re seeing.
I grab the second man by the collar and put him into the van. The metal dents. He drops.
The third man has gotten up. He hesitates.
I hit him once, a final punch designed to take him out without killing him. He goes down onto the pavement and stays there.
The first man charges, the decision of a man who has run out of options and is substituting anger for strategy. My punch lands across his jaw. He spins almost in slow motion and drops onto the sidewalk. Around us, the street stops moving.
My chest is heaving. My hands are shaking with the tremor that comes from holding my wolf back.
Keeping it from what it wanted to do, which was considerably more than what I actually did.
Blood runs from the corner of my mouth, warm and copper-sharp.
My eyes are still wrong. I can feel it—the brightness that isn’t human, my wolf still close enough to the surface that I can feel it at the edges of everything.
Otto approaches from the doorway, carefully, like he hasn’t entirely decided the situation is finished.
“Silas,” he says. “They’re out.”
I know. I can hear their heartbeats. Two fast and erratic, one slower and steadier.
But alive.
I wipe the blood from my mouth with the back of my hand and push the wolf back, bit by bit, like closing a door against the wolf when it doesn’t want to retreat.
It resists. It recedes. The brightness in my eyes drops by degrees as I force my breathing to slow, my pulse to drop, the wolf-sight fading back into the ordinary limited vision of a man standing on a sidewalk in the morning.
And then I catch it… Different from everything else in the air. Softer. Warmer.
My head turns.
Norah has moved across the street.
She’s standing very still beside a sandwich truck, one hand braced against the metal counter, looking at me with an expression I cannot read from here but that I can feel from here.
Beside her, the woman she came in with has both eyes fully open, her mouth parted on a breath she appears to have forgotten to complete.
She’s taking in the three men on the pavement and me standing over them.
Norah is not doing that.
Norah is completely still.
She saw all of it.
I don’t know exactly when she came out of the cleaners, whether she saw the beginning or caught the middle, but she saw the end; saw the wolf in my eyes.
She saw the strength that was wrong for a man and the three men on the ground.
And now she is looking at me from across the street with an expression I can’t name.
It sits in my chest with a weight the fight didn’t put there.
It recoils.
That’s the only way to describe it. A rapid withdrawal, pulling back from her gaze.
She saw me. Really saw me. The one underneath the composed surface. The one that puts a man into the sides of delivery vans and leaves them on the pavement.
She saw that. And she is standing very still across the street. And I have no idea what to do with this.
I look at her and she stares back at me.
Her expression doesn’t change, but her eyes do. Whatever is moving through them I don’t have the right to cross the street and ask about. Not right now. Not with blood on my mouth and three men on the pavement and it’s still close enough to the surface that I can feel it at the edges of everything.
I get in my pickup and close the door behind me. The engine turns over, steady and mechanical. I pull away from the curb without checking the mirror. Because she knows what I did, what I am, and looking at her again isn’t going to change the accounting.
Two weeks of the patient work of being someone she might trust. Then I go and put it on a sidewalk in front of her and her friend.
The truck moves through the intersection, and the cleaners disappears behind me. The restlessness that drove me there this morning is gone, replaced by the weight of what I just did. I can’t undo it.
She saw the wolf. Enough to be frightened.
And I drive away before I know what she thinks about that. This is either the most composed decision I’ve made today or the worst one.
I genuinely cannot tell which.