Chapter Four

Damien’s POV

I told myself I was doing this because she needed to know.

That was the only reason I sent out the text. The only reason I gave her the coordinates to the east ridge overlook, rather than just texting her what she needed to know and ending the conversation was.. Information could have been passed in a paragraph. For that you don’t need to be here. It didn’t require me to get to the Ridge twenty minutes early, to watch the last light go out over a sky I knew as well as any knew exactly which side her car wouldn’t be coming from.

Information was an excuse. I knew that. I used it anyway.

Rhen hadn’t said anything when I let him know. He had merely regarded me with those cautious dark eyes, and then looked purposefully away, which was in some way worse than anything he could have uttered.

“The eastern threat is still unidentified,” I informed him.

“She’s already been targeted once. Keeping her informed is a tactical choice.”

“Absolutely,” Rhen said, to the window.

“It is.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Right. Your silence said a lot.”

He had turned around at that moment, and for a brief second the hard neutral mask softened and something real looked out… the shadow behind the lieutenant, the friend who had seen me bring up three years of intentional separation as if suffering was the adult answer.

“Just…” he started.

“Don't.”

“Damien…”

“Rhen.”

He came to a stop. Nodded. Let me go.

Her headlights came into view at the bottom of the ridge road at the exact time she’d given. I noticed that… the exactness of it. Not five minutes late with an apology, not early and unsure. She had given a time and stuck to it, which told me something about how she moved through the world. Like someone who understood the value of other people’s time because hers had perpetually been stretched thin and she never had time to waste on anyone else.

I saw her get out of the car. She glanced up at the overlook and then at me, and even at a distance of thirty feet I could see her doing that thing she seems to do … the lightning-fast internal debate over what she feels and what she has decided to present to the world. She smiled faintly and settled for something composed and walked up the ridge path with the careful step of someone determined not to look like they were on unfamiliar ground even when they were.

She came to a stop a few feet from me.

Looked at the view—the valley below, the small town lights beginning to twinkle through the gloom of early darkness, the treeline extending like a dark sea in the east.

“You could have just texted me,” she said.

“I could have.”

She turned and looked at me then. “Why didn’t you?”

There were several answers to that. None of them were things I was prepared to say out loud yet.

“Because what I need to tell you is the kind of thing that requires you to be able to look at my face when I say it,” I said instead. “So you know I’m not making it up.”

There was a change in her look. The calm didn’t waver but something behind it tilted forward, that part of her I was starting to view as the real her. The one beneath all the I’m fines and the carefully self-sufficient.

“That’s either very honest,” she said carefully, or a very cultured dishonesty.

“Which do you prefer?”

She looked at me for a moment. The wind blew through her hair and she didn’t fix it , just let it go, and that littlest uncalculated thing triggered something in my chest that I absolutely refused to take a look at.

“You strike me as the type of person who decided a long time ago that lying is too much work,” she said. “So you just… don’t. Even if the truth is inconvenient.”

That sense of precision settled down somewhere soft and deep.

“Sit down,” I said, because the alternative was saying something I wasn’t ready for. I gestured to the flat rock on the ridge lip where I’d been sitting before she got there. She looked at it, then me, then she sat.

I sat beside her. Not close. But not with the wary distance of strangers, either — the shaped distance of two people who had gone beyond the point at which distance was simply honest.

I looked out at the tree line.

"What I’m going to tell you," I began, "is going to sound like one of those things it really isn’t."

“Like what?”

“Like I’m unstable.”

She made a small sound. Almost “not quite” a laugh. “Go ahead.”

I turned and looked her in the eye. This was the moment I had been calculating since the ridge road… how best to say this. I had rehearsed a dozen lines and discarded them all because there was no way to say this for it to land softly. There was only the truth told in the most matter-of-fact manner, and then there was her response to it.

“The people who live in this territory,” I told her, “and the people who have been moving through the eastern woods these past couple weeks… we are not exactly human.”

Silence.

The valley lights twinkled below. Somewhere in the far treeline something called once and went quiet.

Mara sat very still.

“Define not entirely,” she said. Very Carefully.

“Wolves,” I said. “We shift. Between human form and wolf form. It is real, it’s not some kind of condition or delusion, and the thing that was tracking your car this morning was one of them… not from my pack.”

More silence.

I watched her face. This is the place where most people faces all fold — they collapse with fear or they collapse with disbelief, and then they roll up into the same ball. I had told three humans, in my life. The three of them had walked away and never came back and that had been the right outcome every time.

Mara’s face did seem to be neither of those things.

She looked at the treeline.

Then she said, extremely softly: “The way you smelled the blood on my hand last night before you could have seen it.”

I went still.

“Just how you knew I had gone south by night,” she said, as if she were placing something together piece by piece.

“That you were already on the move before I called you this morning? The look in your eyes…” She stopped. Swallowed. “Last night, in the dark, you saw the light differently.”

She had catalogued it. All of it. Filed it away somewhere in that meticulous mind of hers and held onto it until she found the piece that would make the pattern complete.

She turned and looked at me.

“Show me,” she said.

Of all the answers I expected, that was definitely not one of them.

“Mara…”

“If you want me to believe you — and I can tell you want me to believe you — then prove it.” Her voice was even. I noticed her hands were flat on her knees — the posture of someone holding still when they’re more nervous than they’re pretending to be. "I'm not going to run. I have to see it, to make it real in my head. I can’t work with something I can only half believe.”

I can’t work with something I can only half believe.”

She was already thinking about how to use it. Not running from it. Not breaking down. She had listened to “we are not quite human” and immediately began wondering how to live with that information.

I looked at her for a long moment. And then I rose and went back ten feet from the edge of the ridge and pulled off my jacket.

“Stay there!” I said.

“I’m not moving,” she said.

I shifted.

It wasn’t bloody — it never had been for a wolf who’d been hunting for twenty years. A clean, fluid slide into the other shape, the world expanding and clarifying at one and the same time — colors diluting and being replaced by data, scent becoming a map more thorough than anything the eyes alone could create. The rock beneath my paws. The crisp, high altitude air under my fur.

And her scent, which smacked me with the same force it had in the forest last night and once more this morning, that certain mix that my wolf decided was the axis all other scent information revolved around.

I spun around and glanced at her. She had gone very still.

Not the stillness of terror — I knew that stillness, had manifested it before, it had a certain quality of held breath and readiness to flee. This was different. This was the freezing point of someone faced with something so outside of what they previously believed to be true that they could only stop and try to begin rebuilding the framework around it.

Her eyes roamed me slowly. Taking inventory. A big grey and black wolf with pale eyes was sitting at the ridge in the dark and there she was twelve feet away on a rock not doing anything but “looking.”

Then, in human form so quietly I might have missed it:

“You’re beautiful,” she said. Like she hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

There was something flowing through me of which I had no name in either state.

I shifted back. Dressed. I went back to the rock and sat down next to her, closer than before, and this time neither of us mentioned the distance or the emptiness of it.

She was quiet for a long moment.

“The thing in the trees this morning,” she said finally.

“Not my pack,” I said. “I don’t know yet who they are or what they want. But they were tracking you specifically. Your scent, your direction — not the road, not random movement. You.”

“Why me?” Her voice was even. Truly asking.

“I don’t know yet.”

She turned and looked at me with a look I couldn’t quite understand — something layered, something that contained multiple emotions all at once. Then, so suddenly that it rearranged something in my chest.

“Third time,” she said.

“What?”

“Third time you’ve said I don’t know yet.” The corner of her mouth moved. Barely. Just enough. “You really don’t make a habit of it.”

I looked at her. “No,” I said quietly. “I don’t.”

The wind moved between us. Down below, the town lights remained fixed in the dark. Overhead, the first stars were taking up residence in openings in the clouds, weak and leisurely.

“I’m not going to pretend this is normal,” she said.

“It isn’t.”

“And I’m not going to pretend I’m not frightened.”

“I know.”

But I’m more scared of that thing in the trees than I am of…” She stopped. Vaguely motioned in my direction. At whatever category I now occupied in her understanding of the world.

“Me, more than you are of me,” I concluded.

She looked at me. “Y- yeah.”

I held her gaze and whispered the thing I’d spent all day trying not to say — the thing that had been resting in the center of my chest since the moment she’d said ok this morning in a single word that fell like something being set down after a long carry.

“You’ll be safe with me,” I told her. “I realize you have no cause to know that yet. But I want you to know I’m not .. this isn’t” I stopped. I rewrote the sentence. “I don’t normally get involved in things. Beyond this pack and this territory. This is not something I engineered or created to happen. But something in those woods has decided you matter, which means…”

“You’ve decided I matter now?” she asked quietly.

I was struck by how true it was.

“Yes.” I said. Pure. Because there was no point in disguising it with anything else.

She looked at me for a long, unreadable moment.

Then she looked back down at the valley, and the treeline, and the dark waiting woods beyond.

“Okay,” she said.

One word. Again.

But this time it was bigger… I was feeling it on a more solid ground. That meant I’m staying in this. It meant I’m not running. It meant I’d made a decision that my reasonable mind was still resisting, and I was going to get on with it.

I knew that feeling more than she did.

We sat on the ridge until the cold was too real to deny and we no longer talked about leaving beyond what was necessary.

And when she finally rose to go, and I took her to her car, and she looked up at me in the dark with those weary, unwavering eyes that had seen far too much and still hadn’t gone cold.

I did not do what every iota of instinct I possessed told me to do. I stepped back. Gave her space. Watched her drive away.

And when she turned her car off at the bottom of the ridge road and I stood there till her tail lights disappeared and the night receded back into its usual form — said form was missing one thing that was never really going to be ordinary again.

“Control,” I told myself.

The word seemed a lot less compelling than it did before.