Vows of Venom

Chapter four ;First Morning

The house smelled like coffee when I woke up. For one disoriented moment, I didn't know where I was. Then I did.

Then I lay there for exactly four seconds doing the thing I never let myself do, which was feel the full weight of the situation, all at once, before I put it away and got up. Four seconds is enough. It has to be.

Five forty-seven.

I dressed efficiently and went downstairs. He was at the stove. Still dressed, which meant he had either not slept or had risen before me in the dark, and given the hour, both options said something about him that I was not sure I knew how to interpret yet.

He had made enough coffee for two. I poured a cup and sat at the kitchen table without speaking, and he did not speak either, and the silence between us was not comfortable,

I was not prepared to call it comfortable, but it was not the particular sharp-edged variety that requires active management. It was simply quiet.

Two people occupying the same space without requiring the space to perform for them.I could work with quiet.

He set a plate in front of me. Eggs, toast, precisely the way I took them, which I had not told him and which meant he had noticed something at some point the diner, maybe, or simply extrapolation from the coffee. I filed the observation without comment.

"I need to be at the pack house by eight," I said.

"I know." He sat across from me.

"I'll be on the north boundary today. There's a section of the territorial marker near mile seven that someone's been tampering with.”

My mug stopped halfway to my mouth. "Tampering how."

"Old symbols. Carved into the stone. Not Ironwood, not Ashcroft."

He held my eyes steadily. "Not any pack I recognize."

Something sharpened in me.

This was new information my own scouts had not flagged, which meant either they hadn't gone that far or they had and not considered it worth reporting, and either option was a problem.

"When did you find it."

"Three weeks ago. There were two last month. Now there are four."I set down my mug. "You've been tracking this for weeks."

"I had no one to tell. I'm a rogue. Your pack doesn't take reports from me."

He said it without resentment, just fact, flat and accurate. He was right. That was an irritating amount of right. I picked up my fork.

"Show me tonight." Something crossed his face briefly, quickly managed. Surprise, I thought, and underneath it something that might have been a relief, though I was not going to name it that yet. "All right," he said.

We finished eating in silence.

I washed my plate; he washed his.

We moved around each other in the kitchen with a choreography that was not quite natural but not collision either adjusting without discussion, giving space without being asked.

At the counter we reached for the same cabinet at the same moment, both pulled back at the same moment, both paused. He was close.

Closer than the first two times I had been near him, when I had been prepared for proximity. In a kitchen, at six in the morning, without preparation, I became suddenly and entirely aware of how much space he occupied not aggressively, not as assertion, simply as a fact of him. "Sorry," he said.

"It's fine," I said.

We were both still for a half second too long. He stepped back. I took the cup I had been reaching for. The moment dissolved.

"The symbols," I said, because I needed to be talking about something practical immediately.

"Pattern? Spacing?"

He was pulling on his jacket, facing away from me. "All on north-facing surfaces. All face inward."

Inward. Into Ravenhollow. Not away. "Tonight," I said, and left.

The pack house received me the way it always did: the particular combination of respect and attention that came with my position. People straightened. Conversations paused.

I had decided at twenty-one that I preferred respect to being liked, because respect was reliable and liking was weather.Today something else lived in the room. A tightness.

A cluster of senior warriors near the back speaking in undertones. My second, Dael, steady as stone on his worst days, looked like he hadn't slept.

"What happened," I said.

"Marcus Cole's boy. Seventeen years old. His parents found him at the north woods edge this morning at four a.m. Standing asleep."

"Sleepwalking."

"Third one this month. All young wolves. All near the north boundary. None of them remember leaving their beds."

I thought of Caden's words over breakfast. North-facing surfaces. All facing inward.

The symbols multiplying.I thought: he knows more than he's told me.I thought: I knew that yesterday and agreed to work with him anyway. I thought: I need to decide how much rope to give this man before I know whether he'll use it as a bridge or a knot.

"I want a full report on all three incidents by noon," I told Dael. "Locations, times, which direction the wolves were found facing."

"Facing."

He looked at me. "That's a strange detail.""It's the detail I want." I met his eyes. "Trust me. "He nodded, once, and went.

I stood at the window of the pack house and looked north, toward the tree line, toward the boundary, toward whatever was carving itself into our territorial stones.

I thought about a man I had known for three days who had been tracking this quietly and alone, and I thought: either he is trying to protect something, or he is trying to stop something.

I intended to find out which before another seventeen-year-old wolf was found standing in the dark.