Chapter 10

POV: Nora Ash

I did not sleep.

I lied on the narrow bed with my eyes on the ceiling and my father's number glowing on my phone screen and those words sitting in my chest like something swallowed wrong.

 She was here before you were born. I read the message eleven times. I know because I counted them, the way I counted the seconds watching Damon kissed my cousin ,one, two, three — like if I looked long enough the thing in front of me will rearrange itself into something that makes sense.

But it did not .

Someone used my father's phone to send that message. Either he is sitting somewhere with a stranger reading over his shoulder, or his phone is in a hand that is not his, and both of those possibilities opened a hole in my stomach that I cannot close by staring at the ceiling.

I tried calling him again at midnight. 

Voicemail.

At twelve thirty. 

Voicemail. 

The recorded version of his voice is so ordinary that it made the fear worse ,measured like the voice of a man who has spent thirty years being exact with words. A man who taught me to be patient.It was the same man who apparently knew something about me that he never said out loud.

I put the phone face-down on the mattress.

I stared at the ceiling until the ceiling started to feel like an answer I am not asking the right question for.

At one a.m in the morning I got up.

The floorboards were cold under my feet. The sticky window above the bed showed me a sliver of Creston sky , dark, low clouds, the orange wash of city light underneath them. 

I pulled on the grey sweatshirt from the box under the bed, the one that still smells faintly like someone else's life, and I went downstairs without turning on a light because my eyes now adjusted in a way they never used to which was another thing that has changed without explanation among the other things I have been filing away without knowing what file it belongs in.

The diner is dark and still and smells like the end of a long day , coffee and grease and the ghost of every person who sat in it and left. I did not turn on the lights as I sat on a counter stool and I looked at the front door, at the fogged glass, at the empty street beyond it painted orange by the lamp on the corner.

The silhouette is not there.

But I looked anyway because now I knew it was there once, I will probably always look.

Mae was already in the kitchen when I pushed through the swing door. She did not look surprised to see me. She was standing at the stove in a house robe and slippers, heating milk in a small pan, and she looked at me over her shoulder with the expression she uses when she has been expecting something and is simply noting its arrival.

She poured two cups without asking.

I sat at the small prep table and wrapped both hands around the warm ceramic 

 "Someone used my father's phone."

Mae sat across from me. "Yes."

"You already knew that was possible."

 "I knew it was the kind of thing Victor Hale does."

There it is again. 

That name.

 The second time I have heard it in one night and already it sat differently than it did the first time. The first time Cole said it, it was information. 

Now it feels like a shape I am learning , the outline of something large that I have been standing too close to see whole.

"Tell me what you know about him."

Mae looked at her cup. Then at me. She was doing the filing thing , choosing the order, the way she always does. But this time the filing is faster. Like she has decided that the order matters less than it did yesterday.

She usually does not tell me everything and I perfectly understand that,Mae does not give things before they are ready to land.But this time,she gave me enough. 

Victor Hale is the Alpha of Ironwood Pack, the largest in the region. He has been on the Summit council for twenty years. He is patient, politically careful, and he has been looking for something for a very long time,something specific and something he believed was hidden inside Silver Creek.

She stopped there.

 "Me?" I said rather than asjing

She did not confirm it but she did not deny it either.She wrapped both hands around her mug and she said 

"Your mother passed through this diner twenty-three years ago. She was running. She did not say from what."

The warm cup in my hands suddenly feels like the only solid thing in the room. I held it tighter.

"She smelled like you. Exactly like you. Like silver and something older than silver." Mae continued 

 "What does that mean?"

She looked at me directly and said "It means you are not the first. And it means Victor has known that for longer than you have been alive."

The milk pan on the stove has gone cold. Neither of us moved to fix it.

I went back upstairs at two in the morning with more questions than I came down with, which is how it always goes with Mae, and I stood at my sticky window and looked at the sliver of orange sky and I thought about Cole's question tonight.

“ Did your father ask which city?”

He had not asked.

He already knew.

And the understanding that has been building since I replayed that phone call has fully arrived now, solid and terrible: my father has been afraid of something for twenty-two years. Not the ordinary fear of a parent watching a child grow. Something older. Something that made him hold his breath every time my phone rang and breathe in a way that was not entirely relief when I said I was safe.

He knew about Victor.

He knew, and he said nothing, and somewhere tonight his phone is in someone else's hand.

I sat on the edge of the bed and I made myself be honest about what I feel, the way I have been learning to do , without dressing it up, without managing it into something more acceptable.

 I was afraid for him. I was also angry in the specific way you are angry at someone you love who has kept something from you that changed the shape of your whole life. Both things are true at the same time and neither one cancels the other out.

I picked up my phone. I did not call my father again. I opened Cole's thread instead and I looked at his last message.

 Twelve minutes. 

And before that: Don't open the door.

Both times tonight, he knew before I did.

I typed slowly: My father's phone was accessed. Someone sent a message from it. I need to know what a White Wolf is.

I hit send before I can rewrite it into something smaller.

The reply comes in forty seconds.

Not a text but a call.

His voice when I picked up was low and even, the same voice from the cabin, from the truck, from the diner, the voice that does not need volume to fill a space.

 "Are you alright?" He asked 

"I am awake and I have questions. That is about as alright as tonight gets."

There was a short pause.  

"I know." He sounded sure that I had to think how much he knows about me.

He said he was still in Creston and did not drive back to Black Ridge. He said it the way he says things that reveal more than he intended,quickly, cleanly, moving past it before either of us can examine it. I filed it beside the Thursday diner visits and the forty dollars and the three words from the road.

"Tomorrow morning. I will tell you everything I know. Not tonight over a phone."

"Cole." I called shaking my 

 "Nora."

"Is my father safe right now?"

The pause before his answer is three seconds long. Three seconds is a long time when you are holding your breath.

 "I have someone checking."

I lied back on the narrow bed with the phone on my chest and the ceiling above me and that word turning over and over in my head.

White Wolf.

My mother ran through Creston twenty-three years ago smelling like silver and something older than silver, and Victor Hale has been looking for that scent for twenty years, and my father held his breath for twenty-two years every time the phone rang, and Cole drove back to Creston and sat outside instead of going home, and none of it is coincidence since all of it has my name in the middle of it.

I closed my eyes.

The thing inside my chest ,that same thing that has been waking in pieces since the night I crossed Black Ridge's border stirred Slowly yet certainly like a tide that does not ask permission.

I did not know yet what I am.

But at three in the morning, lying in a borrowed sweatshirt above a diner in Creston with the orange city light pressing through a sticky window, I understood one thing with absolute clarity:

Whatever I am, Victor Hale already knows.

And he is not the only one who has been keeping that secret.

My phone buzzed one last time before I slept.

It was Cole and he had one message.

“Jared ran the check. Your father's car left Silver Creek at eleven PM. He is driving but we do not know where yet.”

I sat up.

Because my father has not driven anywhere at night in twenty-two years.

Not since the night my mother died.