Chapter 5 #2
I look at this woman, worn down by old wounds and still fierce, still pouring everything she’s got into a wiry ten-year-old who plays off her left foot.
Whatever life did to her, it never touched how she loves that girl.
My admiration for Jessa just keeps growing with each encounter.
I’m suddenly reminded of my uncle’s words for me to get a mate so that Bella has a mother.
“Saturday,” I tell her hoarsely. “I’ll bring Bella by at eleven.”
She doesn’t want me there. The reluctance is written all over her, the distance she keeps putting up and I keep crossing.
“Fine,” she says.
She gathers her bag and walks out of the office. I trail them out as far as the front steps, hands in my pockets, and I watch her buckle Mia into the back of a loaner sedan the rental place must’ve sent over while the dead Ford rots on the connector. I stay until the taillights clear the gate.
Then I find Bella inside, hanging off the office assistant’s desk, and crouch to her level.
“Bell.” I tug one loose braid. “I secured your playdate.”
She gasps, eyes going huge. “With Mia? At her house?”
“Saturday.”
She throws herself at me. I catch her, laughing into her hair. For once, the wolf and I want exactly the same thing.
The week crawls. I tell myself it doesn’t.
There’s a school to run, donor folders breeding on my desk, a junior squad to drill, and not one of those things slows the clock down to the misery it becomes between Monday and Saturday.
Jessa drops Mia at the gate each morning and won’t meet my eye, peeling off before I can do more than lift a hand.
Each afternoon she’s parked across the street, engine running, ready to spirit the kid away the instant the bell sounds.
It changes nothing. Mia and Bella have fused at the hip.
They sit together, eat together, plot together, and twice I find them with their heads bent over a phone Bella’s not supposed to have at school, giggling about something neither will repeat.
My niece hasn’t come this alive since she was small enough to ride my shoulders.
That alone would be reason enough to keep this family close.
It isn’t the only reason, and I’ve stopped pretending it is.
She’s not married. The paperwork said so, her bare hand says so, and the more I turn it over, the more a low, patient heat builds in me.
I’ve spent ten years giving women nothing but the leftovers, the easy ones who wanted as little of me as I wanted of them.
Jessa wants none of me on purpose, which is something I’ve never once had to work for, and the wolf finds the challenge delicious. I decide to stop being polite about it.
By Wednesday, I’ve got half a plan and a head full of a woman who hates me.
I’m in the kitchen working a pan of chicken, since Mrs. Dunn’s gone home and Bella’s been promised a real dinner.
Through the window I can see her out in the long garden, kicking a ball against the low stone wall, fair braids bouncing.
She boots one wide, watches it skip off into the trees at the garden’s edge, and trots after it.
“Bella, dinner’s ready,” I call through the screen.
I plate the chicken and pour her milk. The silence runs a few seconds too long before it registers.
“Bell?”
Nothing answers. I look up from the counter, out the window, and the yard is empty. The ball’s not back. Neither is she.
I wipe my hands on a towel and step out onto the back porch. “Bella!”
The wind moves through the firs at the tree line. No small voice calls back.
A thin needle of unease slides into me. I come down off the porch, scanning the grass, the wall, the dark seam where the lawn gives way to forest. “Bella, this isn’t funny. Dinner’s getting cold.”
No answer comes. I pull her scent off the evening air, that warm scent of her I’ve known since the night I carried her out of a house I’ll never enter again.
It threads across the garden into the trees, and I follow it, my pace quickening with every step.
The wolf is up now, hackled, anxious, a growl gathering low in my chest that I don’t bother to swallow.
“Bella!” My voice dies among the trees.
The trail pulls me deeper than she should ever have gone, past the old swing, past the rotted log she’s forbidden to climb, far enough that the lights of the house have shrunk to a glow behind me.
The animal claws at the inside of my ribs, frantic now, and I break into a run, branches whipping my arms.
I find her in a hollow between two firs. She’s crumpled on the leaf litter, one arm flung out, braids fanned across the dirt, and she isn’t moving.
“Bella.” I’m on my knees beside her, gathering her up, and her head lolls against my forearm. “Bell, wake up. Wake up for me.”
Her chest rises and falls. She’s breathing, shallow and slow, lashes still against her cheeks, and she won’t surface no matter how I say her name. I press two fingers to the pulse under her jaw. It flutters, much too weak.
“No, no, come on.” I cup her face and tap her cheek. “Open your eyes, baby, please.”
She won’t wake, and I don’t understand it. There’s no blood, no broken limb, no fall I can find. A healthy nine-year-old doesn’t drop in the woods behind her own house with her heart stuttering and weak.
I gather her to lift her, to run her to the car, to the healer, to anyone, and that’s when another smell reaches me.
It’s bitter, green, and it goes straight past my brain into the oldest part of me, the part that knows what it means.
I go still with my daughter in my arms.
A few feet from where she fell, half hidden under a fern, an open vial lies tipped on its side, a dark liquid still beading at the lip.
I don’t have to read a label. Every wolf alive is born knowing this scent, passed down from a time when it was the last thing too many of us ever smelled.
Wolfsbane.
My pulse roars. The shifters burned the sources to ash a hundred years ago.
We hunted it across every territory and salted the ground where it grew, generations of us, until there was none left to find.
There’s no wolfsbane left in the world. None has existed since long before my father drew breath.
And it’s here, twenty yards from my back door, with my daughter limp and cold against my chest.