CHAPTER FIVE: THE SHAPE OF SOMETHING BREAKING
769 Words
Priya and I were arguing that night.
We were on the floor of my room with the door locked and the lights low, and she was working through a bag of crackers and I was telling her everything. The creature. The voice in the dark. What I said to Cade in the field at noon. She listened with the focused attention she gave to things she found genuinely important.
When I finished she said, "He knew where the creature went."
"He wasn't surprised when I found the track. He had already worked it out."
"But he didn't say so."
"No."
She ate a cracker. "What else?"
"He decides what people know and when. He admitted it without any hesitation when I asked. He said yes and looked at me like that was simply the way things were and I could have opinions about it but the answer would not change."
"Charming."
"It was aggravating," I said. "But it was honest. That's a different thing."
Priya looked at me with the quality she had when she was deciding whether to say the obvious thing out loud.
"Say it," I said.
"Your wolf goes quiet around him."
"Yes."
"She's never quiet."
"I know."
"Zara." Priya set the bag down. Her eyes, one brown and one green-grey, were very direct. "You know what quiet means."
"I know what people say it means."
"People say it means mate." She said it plainly. "I am not saying it to make this harder. I am saying it because it is the thing you are not saying and I think you need to hear it out loud."
I looked at the floor.
My wolf was doing the quiet thing right now. Curled and still and certain, the way she only ever was when I was deep in a book I loved, or sitting with Mum, or in that narrow window between waking and sleep when the day had not started yet.
"He's thirty-six," I said.
"Yes."
"He barely looked at me."
"That is not true," Priya said. "I watched him at breakfast. He looked at you exactly the way someone looks at something they know is going to change everything, and then he looked away."
The room felt very quiet.
Outside, the packhouse sounds had dimmed to almost nothing. The pack settling. Guests from Ironveil distributed into their quarters. Two groups of wolves finding the level they could share.
"It doesn't matter," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because even if my wolf is right, it doesn't change who he is or why he is here. He came because something is targeting this pack and he needs to find it. He is not here for me." I looked up at her. "And I am not going to be a distraction from that."
"No one is asking you to be."
"He isn't asking me to be anything. That's my point." I pressed my thumb over the scar under my jaw. "He has work to do and I have whatever it is I have, and I am not building something on a quiet wolf when the man it belongs to is treating the whole situation like it is not a situation."
Priya looked at me.
"You're angry," she said.
"I'm practical."
"You're both." She picked up the crackers. "For what it's worth, he's here for at least a week. That is a long time for two people to pretend something isn't happening."
"People manage it."
"People whose wolves are not involved manage it. This is different."
I didn't answer.
She finished the crackers. I turned the light off and lay on my back and listened to her breathing slow into sleep. Outside the window the sky had cleared to that deep country dark that only exists far enough from a city, and the stars were sharp and enormous and entirely indifferent to everything happening in this house.
My wolf curled.
Still.
Waiting.
I had the sense, lying there, that she had already resolved something I was still arguing with myself about, and she was simply waiting for me to catch up.
I thought about amber eyes in the dining room, there and gone before I could be sure I had seen them.
I thought about a voice like woodsmoke and cold air giving me no answer and walking away into the dark of the eastern field.
I thought about the way my wolf had gone quiet, twice now, in the presence of a man I did not know.
Sleep came slowly.
And somewhere underneath it, just before it took me, something that had no shape yet but was already there.
- Writer
