15 Finn #2
“You ran messages,” Nell said. Not a question. “Chalk-runner. I can see it in how you’re standing. You’ve got one foot pointed at the door.”
Sloane blinked. “Most people don’t notice that.”
“Most people weren’t raised getting handed off between strangers.” Nell’s voice had a burr in it. “You can put the foot down. Nobody here is going to make you run. If they try, I’ll break one of theirs.”
Sloane’s laugh caught the air and pleased my wolf. Yes. More of that.
Genny came through the cluster with a tray of steaming mugs—cider, by the smell, apples cooked down with something darker under them—and pressed one into Sloane’s hands without asking, then folded Sloane’s fingers around it when she saw they were shaking.
“Hold that,” Genny said. “It’s good for the hands. Gives them a job.”
I stepped back a pace to give the women their circle, and Brann and Santos closed in on my flank the way they’d been waiting to.
“Victorian accountant of pain,” Santos said, conversational, watching Nell fold Sloane into the group. “I’d have gone with monk, but Tommy’s got a gift.”
“Tommy is alive because I value his chainsaw work over his personality,” I said.
Brann huffed. It was the closest our Sovereign came to laughing. “You laughed, though. First time in years. I felt it through the link. Half the crew did. Kenji thought something was on fire.”
“Something is always on fire. It’s our whole job.”
“You know what I mean.” Brann’s arms were crossed, but there was no weight in it.
He watched his own mate, belly round with a pup, lean her shoulder into Sloane’s, saying something that made the new gold in Sloane’s eyes go soft.
His voice dropped into a register the crew rarely got out of him.
“It’s a good thing to watch. Her folding in.
We don’t get many nights like this. Bank it. ”
The feast went soft after that—plates scraped, cider gone around twice, the runners no longer sitting with their backs to the door. My wolf had been patient through all of it, lying quiet behind my sternum, but patience had a floor, and we’d been standing on it for a while now.
Sloane’s laugh had gone loose. Her exhaustion showed at the edges, the good kind, the kind that comes after your body finally believes it can stop.
I crossed back to her and set my hand at the small of her back, and the touch ran up the bond like current finding copper.
“Time,” I said, low, against her hair. She smelled like violets and chalk dust and, underneath, that spice of clove that had lived in the back of my throat for a week. “You’re exhausted. Let me take you somewhere quiet.”
She turned into me. Her nod was answer enough.
Kaia squeezed her hand once. “Go. Nobody expects you to close down the party.”
We made it four steps toward the corridor.
Nadia stepped into the gap between us and the door.
She was compact, dark-eyed, silver rings stacked to the knuckles, a black cotton dress with those deep pockets she kept her vials in.
“Sloane Addice.” Not a greeting. An intake. “Reed says you were flagged in the ravine. Fifth Line. I need blood.”
Sloane went to ice against my side.
I felt it come up the bond before her face changed—a spike of pure white terror, wordless, the animal reflex of a body that had spent its life learning that a stranger with a case and a needle meant an alchemist, a harvest table, a suppression protocol coming down like a lid.
Her breathing snagged. Her fingers closed hard around mine.
The Executioner in me stood up before the man did.
I stepped in front of her. Placed my body in the line between the doctor and my mate, and I let the Treaty Court authority come off me the way it had in the ravine.
“Doctor.” My voice went flat and exact. “Put the case down.”
Nadia did not put the case down. She didn’t step back either. She looked at me with the unimpressed patience of someone who’d threatened to sedate wolves twice my rank.
“She’s carrying a royal line,” Nadia said. “She poisoned her own biology for months to keep her wolf under. I don’t know what those suppressants were cut with, I don’t know what they did to the pregnancy, and I am not going to find out by guessing. I need a sequence. That means blood.”
“You need information,” I said. “Not a needle. There’s a difference, and you know it.”
That landed. Her eyes narrowed.
Behind me Sloane’s terror was still climbing, and it was starting to feed the wolf’s protective fury into a loop, his and mine and hers braiding tighter, and in about four seconds I was going to lose it.
Kaia got there first.
She slid past Nadia’s shoulder and took both of Sloane’s hands out of mine, pressing them flat between her own.
“Sloane. Sloane, look at me.” Kaia’s voice was the one she must have used on frightened dormants for years, low and even and certain.
“She’s prickly. She never knocks. She’s going to say something more rude before we’re done here, guaranteed.
But she’s the one who put me back together and helped us get all the dormants out.
Sloane—it was her potions that let me and Tommy get back inside and blow open the doors with you.
Her. She’s safe. Do you hear me? She is one of the good ones. ”
Sloane’s eyes went from Kaia to Nadia to me. The terror began to ebb. Reason got a foothold on it.
Nadia shook her head. “I—I’m sorry that was poorly done. I’m usually better about—” She waved at the world around her. “It’s a celebration. I know that. It’s just being around other witches, around Maren, again. I’d forgotten what it was like—”
To be around her own kind, I realized. The insight flashed down the bond to Sloane. She’s been our pack doctor for as long as I’ve been a hotshot here. But she’s not pack.
Nadia raised a hand to rub her forehead. “I lost my cover and it’s been years since—”
She shook her head again as if she could shake off the old grief I could now see had been wearing down her shoulders for a long time.
“Would it be all right if I did a reading? No blood. Not tonight. No needles. Just a reading to make sure everything’s okay.”
Sloane nodded. “Yes.”
“The cloth will tell me if the pup’s viable and if the resonance is corrupted.
That’s all tonight needs.” She was already moving, setting the case on the nearest table, drawing out a folded square of hand-marked cloth and a small bound bundle of dried stems. “Sit her down. She doesn’t have to bare anything but a hand. I need skin, not a vein.”
Sloane sat. I sat beside her, close, my arm around her back, her palm turned up in Nadia’s grip.
Nadia struck a match to the bundle. The smoke came up low and dense, and it smelled like wet ash and turned earth and the underside of an old forest floor after rain, the kind of smell that lived in the ground long before anyone thought to name it.
Nadia laid the cloth over Sloane’s open hand and began, low in her throat, to shape a sound that wasn’t quite a word.
Sloane’s fingers twitched. I held them.
Stay with me, I told her. I’m not going anywhere. She’s reading the pup, not you. And the pup is a Treaty line and a wolf line and it comes from the two most stubborn bloodlines in this hemisphere, so it’s going to be fine, because it doesn’t know how to be anything else.
A watery laugh moved up the bond. You’re editorializing.
I’m being literal. Have you met its mother? Have you met me?