The Exiled Alpha's Human Mate

CH.13 - Pulling the Thread

Anna's POV

I don't see him leave.

I stand at my window for a long time after the lock clicks, my forehead nearly against the cold glass, watching the dark tree line above the house. The night's gone still the way it does after midnight, the boats barely knocking, the sea a low hush beyond the dock. At some point a shape moves through the pines, fluid and fast and wrong for a person, and then it's gone, and I don't know if it's Evan or whoever he went to find. He doesn't come back to tell me. No knock. No message. Nothing. Just the dark, and the water, and me at the glass with my heart going and a hundred questions and not one answer.

He can smell people in the dark. He said he heard something, but that was a lie. I watched him lie. I'm getting good at watching him lie, at catching the exact half-second where his face closes like a door. He smelled someone. From my dock. In the pitch black. And his eyes, when he turned and told me to get inside, weren't the eyes of a boy who heard a twig snap. They'd gone flat and pale and dangerous, silver catching the streetlight like a coin at the bottom of a well, and every hair on my body had stood up. Not from fear. That's the part I'm not dealing with tonight, the way my body answers his even when it should be running.

I barely sleep. Again. This is becoming a pattern and I resent it. I lie in the dark with the ache humming low in my chest, pointed out toward the tree line, toward wherever he's gone, and I stare at the ceiling until it goes grey with morning.

By the time the light comes I've made a decision, and it's the wrong one, and I know it's the wrong one, and I'm going to do it anyway.

He won't explain himself. Fine. Then I'll explain him myself.

Because here's what I've got. A boy who's too fast and too strong and too strange, who smells danger in the dark, whose eyes catch light like an animal's on a road at night. A boy who runs with a crew that gambles on rigged fights, and who last night stood on my dock and told me, dead serious, that someone was watching my house. Somebody is watching my house. That's not a mystery I get to shrug off and go to swim practice about. That's my family's house. My parents asleep down the hall, my dad up before dawn to take the boat out, both of them with no idea that anything's circling us in the dark. If there's something dangerous out there because of whatever Evan's tangled in, I'm going to find out what it is, whether he wants me to or not.

The syringe is where I start.

I keep coming back to it. The one I saw in the trash at the party, in that locker room, when Evan and I argued and Will turned up looking twitchy and wrong. A used syringe, in a place where people box for money. I didn't think much of it then. I think about it now, turning it over on the walk to school, in the back of class, in the pool with my face in the water and nothing to do but count strokes and wonder. You don't need a needle to throw a punch.

So I do what I'm good at, which is being somewhere I'm not supposed to be and looking like I belong there.

It takes me two days.

I don't do anything dramatic. I ask around, careful, casual, the questions folded into other questions. I've got an advantage nobody ever credits me for, which is that when you're the fish girl, people talk in front of you like you're a bit of harbor furniture, like the smell of you means you don't count, and I've spent years learning to listen hard while looking like I'm barely there. I find out where the crew really fights. Not the party ring, that was for show. The real one, the regular one, an old cannery on the industrial stretch past the docks that's supposed to be condemned, windows boarded, chain across the gate. I find out which nights the cars come. I find out that money moves through that place, real money, far more than a few local boys throwing hands should ever pull in.

And I find out about the fighters.

That's the part that stops me cold.

There's a boy I half know. Went to my school two years above me, left without graduating. Everybody said he got into the fights and did well for a while, made money, bought a car, and then just stopped. Dropped off. I always assumed he'd moved away, the way people do, chasing something better up the coast. He didn't move away. He's still here, and I find him at the harbor one grey afternoon, sitting on a bollard at the end of the east pier with his shoulders curled in, staring at the water like it's asking him a question he can't answer.

The wind's coming in cold off the sea, tugging at his jacket, and he doesn't seem to feel it. When I say his name it takes him three whole seconds to turn his head. And when he does, his eyes don't quite land on me. They slide, drift past my shoulder and come back, like focusing costs him something. There's a slur to him that isn't drink, not at this hour, not with no bottle in sight. His hands shake where they hang between his knees. He talks in loops, starts a sentence and loses the thread of it halfway and starts again somewhere else, and there's a young man in there, somewhere, behind the fog, but he's a long way back and it feels like he's still going, still drifting further out, and nobody can reach him to pull him in.

I crouch down in front of him so he doesn't have to look up, so I'm in the drift-path of those unfocused eyes.

"They give you something," I say gently. "For the fights. Don't they. To make you faster."

"Faster." He agrees like it's a good word, and he smiles, and it's the worst thing I've seen in a long time, that smile, loose and far away. "Faster. Yeah. You go so fast. You don't feel anything, that's the thing, you don't feel it when they hit you. It's good at first. It's real good. Will says." He loses it. His brow creases, hunting. Finds it again. "Will says just a little. Just before you go on. But then they want you fighting more, and they want you faster, and it's a little more, and a little more, and now I—"

His hands come up in front of his face, and he looks at them shaking like they belong to a stranger.

"Now it's like this," he says. "Now it's always like this."

I sit with him a while. The bollard's cold and the wind's coming in and I don't have anything to give him but company, so I give him that, until the light starts going and he seems to forget I'm there at all. Then I walk back along the pier, and I get around the side of the old net shed where nobody can see me, and I put my hand flat against the cold brick and just breathe for a minute, because I'm shaking too now, though not the way he was.

Because I understand the syringe now.

Whatever they put in those fighters makes them fast and eats their mind, a little at a time, until there's nothing left but the fog and the shaking and a boy on a bollard who used to have a whole life. Will runs it. The crew runs it. The money runs it. And Evan, whatever else he is, whatever strange impossible thing he's hiding behind those silver eyes, Evan fights for that crew.

Does he use it? The thought lands like a bucket of harbor water down my spine. Is that the too-fast, the too-strong, the thing that put every hair on my arms up in that ring? Is he going to end up on a bollard someday with his hands shaking and his eyes sliding out to sea, getting further and further back behind the fog until there's nothing left of him to find?

No. Something in me refuses it flat, before I've even finished the thought. Whatever makes Evan fast isn't in a needle. I don't know how I know that. I just do, from underneath, from the same place that's been aching since the night I went into the water, the place that knows things about him I have no business knowing.

But he fights for the people who do this. And someone above them, someone Evan looked genuinely, bone-deep afraid of last night, is watching my house.

I'm still there against the brick, still getting my breath back, the cold of the wall seeping into my palm, when a shadow falls across me and a voice I don't know says, far too pleasant, "You're the swim girl. Anna, isn't it?"

I look up.

There's a man leaning against the shed wall a few feet off. Older, heavyset, a lit cigarette hanging off his lip and a smile that doesn't come anywhere close to his eyes. I've never seen him before in my life. But I know, the instant he says my name, the instant I see that smile, exactly what he is. Crew. And he found me here, at the far end of the harbor, tucked out of sight where I thought no one was looking. He knew where to look. He knew who I was. And he's watching me the way you watch something you've been told to keep an eye on.

"Do I know you?" I say. I keep my voice flat and even, because I will be damned before I let him see my pulse jump in my throat.

"No." He flicks ash, still smiling. "But we know you. You've been asking a lot of questions, sweetheart. Poking around where a nice girl's got no business poking her nose." He pushes off the wall, unhurried, and he's big, bigger than he looked leaning, and the harbor's gone very empty and very quiet around us, the last of the light draining off the water. "Somebody wants a word with you about that. Why don't you come along with me."