CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It felt like rest.
The wolf, having gotten what he wanted, had gone strangely peaceful.
He had not. He was reconstructing his defenses with the methodical attention of a man who'd spent fifteen years building them and was now noticing how each one sat against the next.
Which would need to be moved. Which removed entirely. Which could stay.
Most could not stay.
He drank his coffee.
The cabin around him was the cabin he'd lived in alone for thirteen years. Sparse, exact, lived in by one man. In thirteen years he had not let another person inside it. The cabin had become the shape of his solitude, and the shape was one the wolf, this morning, was no longer happy with.
She would fit here. Not in words. A body-knowing he received and chose not to fight.
He finished the coffee. Stood. Pulled on running shoes and a jacket and stepped out into the dark and shifted in his front yard.
He ran. Hard. Not patrol pace. The flat-out run of a wolf working something out of his body.
He came back at 0700 with sweat in his hair and his lungs burning and the wolf settled. Showered. Dressed. Went to the perimeter office.
Marcus was on the porch of his and Lucy's house when Jackson drove past, holding a coffee. He didn't wave. He tracked Jackson's truck the few seconds it took to clear the porch sightline, then went back to looking at the trees.
Jackson knew, without seeing, that Marcus was registering him. Knew Marcus would tell Dominic eventually, in the bear-coded way Marcus told Dominic things, which was without speaking unless asked.
He did not, this morning, mind being registered.
* * *
Claire was at her own kitchen table at 5:00 with coffee in both hands and Helen open and the private field log in front of her. Nine days now, nine pages long.
She hadn't slept well. She hadn't slept badly either. She'd slept the way a body slept when it had made a decision and was metabolizing it.
She wrote:
Day nine. Site seven, second visit. Sustained pulse, low, continuous. Direction east. Confirmed orientation toward unmarked area I have been calling Site X in private notes.
She paused.
Wrote:
Day nine. Personal: I do not regret the fire tower.
Underlined it.
Her hands were warm on the paper. Helen sat beside her with the official survey log open and waiting.
She closed the private notebook and started the morning's official entries.
Readings to take, sites to map, a schedule to keep.
She was not, despite everything, going to let this contract slip on her end.
Her work had been her honor for nineteen years. It would continue to be.
The phone rang at 9:03.
Cascade Valley operations.
She picked up.
"Dr. Dunn."
Not the project manager she'd been working with. A woman she didn't know — brisk, professional, the voice of a corporate executive assistant.
"Dr. Dunn, Mr. Lindqvist would like to schedule a call to discuss preliminary findings."
"I have not filed preliminary findings."
"He'd like to schedule the call before you do."
"I see."
"Tomorrow at four pm Pacific?"
"That works."
The voice gave her a number. She wrote it down. Hung up.
She sat at the table with the cup in both hands until the coffee was cold.
The pressure had arrived.
She'd known it would. She hadn't, until the call, known what it would feel like in her body when it did. Her hands had stopped humming. Gone very still. Not the stillness of the rock face. The stillness of a woman doing a calculation about her career.
She made the calculation.
It came out the way she'd known it would the moment she opened the contract two weeks ago in Portland.
She was not going to lie about what this land was.
She didn't know yet how much that decision was going to cost her.
She was going to find out.
She picked up her bag. Drove to the trailhead. Jackson was already there at 9:42, the way he'd been every morning for nine days, except this morning, when she pulled in beside his truck, he stepped out of his and walked the four feet to her driver's door before she had her seatbelt off.
He opened her door.
He hadn't opened her door before.
He didn't say anything.
She got out. He looked at her face. He saw whatever he saw. His own face did the small particular shift that meant the wolf was reading her.
"What," he said.
"They want a call tomorrow."
"Cascade Valley?"
"Yes."
"What are you going to tell them."
"What I have to."
He didn't respond. Didn't need to. He looked at her a beat longer. Then stepped back, gave her the foot of professional distance the contract required, and said in his trailhead voice, the one she'd been hearing nine days:
"Site eight today?"
"Yes."
"I'll see you up there."
She walked up the trail.
He gave her thirty seconds of head start, more than the standard.
Then he followed.
The wolf at the back of his head was no longer warm and quiet. He was alert. Alert the way a wolf was alert when something was coming for what was his.
He did not tell him to shut up this morning.
* * *