CHAPTER TWO
"You look like a man who's expecting weather," Mae said.
Jackson did not deny it. He drank his coffee.
The diner smelled like bacon and cedar smoke off the grill, Mae's late-August specialty, the cured-meat-and-burning-wood smell that had been here before he was head of security, before he was pack at all.
Before Dominic pulled him out of a worse life and gave him this one.
Thirteen years, and the smell hadn't changed. Mae hadn't either.
She was looking at him the way she'd looked at him his first month in town, when he was twenty-six and dangerous and not yet anyone's beta. The look had a name. He didn't have the word for it. He recognized it anyway.
"Marcus is coming," Mae said.
"You called him?"
"I didn't have to."
Jackson set his cup down. The diner at 0530 was three quarters empty. Two regulars at the counter, both pack, neither pretending not to notice him. Nothing was secret in this pack. He'd known that for thirteen years and built his life around knowing it.
The bell over the door rang. Marcus slid into the booth across from him with the unhurried weight of a bear who'd decided where he was going to be and was now there. He didn't greet Jackson. He nodded at Mae. Mae brought him coffee.
"You're not at work," Jackson said.
"I'm at work," Marcus said. "I work where I'm needed."
"I'm fine."
"Hm."
Marcus drank his coffee. Marcus did not, generally, fill silence.
The silence sat between them. Jackson watched the gray-blue light at the booth window go a little less gray, a little more blue, the way late-summer pre-dawn shifted in two-minute increments if you were looking for it.
He'd been looking at it for three days. Each increment was the day advancing.
The day advancing was her, a little bit closer.
He hadn't said that to anyone. He wasn't going to say it to Marcus.
Marcus said: "You know where I am if you want to talk about it. You also know I won't make you."
"I know."
"Lucy asked twice about the Cascade Valley filing."
Jackson looked up.
"Twice in two days," Marcus said. "Which is twice more than she usually asks me about pack security. She's paying attention to the land in a way she doesn't always share with me."
Jackson sat with that. Lucy's wards had rooted into the Pine Ridge soil seven weeks ago, a binding that visibly altered the land he patrolled.
He felt it on his route. The whole pack felt it.
The bear read it as home, the wolves as calm.
And since the rebinding Lucy hadn't expressed concern about anything, in any direction.
Lucy was a woman who'd stopped looking over her shoulder.
Lucy paying attention to a county clerk filing meant Lucy was feeling something that the rest of them weren't.
"What's she feeling?"
"She doesn't know yet. She said it's not a threat. It's an arrival."
Jackson drank his coffee and didn't answer.
Mae came back with the pot and refilled his cup without being asked, and her hand brushed his on the counter as she passed, quick, no comment. He didn't look up. Mae had said what she was going to say. Mae was not a woman who said a thing twice.
He stood. Put a five on the table. Marcus didn't stop him.
"You eat yet today?" Marcus said as Jackson reached for his jacket.
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked."
Jackson didn't answer. Marcus didn't press. He left the diner with the bell ringing behind him and the morning advancing in two-minute increments. The wolf settled into something that wasn't patience. The alert stillness of an animal that had decided.
Three days.
He drove to the security office and started his shift.
* * *