11

Millbrook was the kind of town where everyone knew everyone else's business and nobody asked about mine.

That was exactly why I had chosen it. It sat at the end of a long road between two hills, with one stoplight, one church, a bakery that smelled of cinnamon at dawn, and a landlady named Mrs. Adaeze who took one look at me stepping off the bus with a backpack and a belly and said, "You are too thin. Sit down. I am bringing rice."

She brought rice. She also brought a blanket, a pot of stew, and, on the third day, a secondhand crib she had somehow dragged up the stairs by herself. She did not ask who the father was. She told me her own daughters had given her three grandchildren and one great disappointment, and she patted my cheek and called me my child as if it were a title.

The town took me in with a casual, unquestioning kindness that nearly undid me. The baker slipped me day-old buns. The old man at the hardware shop fixed my window latch and refused payment. Nobody asked for a past, and it took me weeks to stop flinching at every friendly face, waiting for the price.

I became Sage Hale. Evie forged the first set of papers with a laminator and a stolen printer, and in a town without wolves nobody checked them twice. I found work at a copy shop at night and kept books for the bakery by day. By the seventh month I could feel Leo moving, a small, restless, impatient flutter against my ribs, and Wren had given up pretending she was not delighted.

"He's kicking," she announced one evening, as I stood at the stove stirring Mrs. Adaeze's stew.

"He's always kicking."

"That one was a statement."

"What did he say?"

"He said he wants more salt."

I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the floor.

I thought about the penthouse more often than I wanted to admit. I thought about cedar and woodsmoke, and a man's hand curled open on a pillow. At night I would lie in bed in my small room with the window cracked and the stars thick over the hills, and I would count them until I lost track, a habit from the omega quarters, and I always started again. I kept the white card behind my library card. I never took it out.

It was Evie who stayed with me for the birth. She drove three hundred miles through the rain after my first call, a medical bag on the passenger seat and a thermos of terrible coffee between her knees, and she had not stopped talking since she walked through the door. "Breathe," she said. "Not like that. Like you mean it. You're not blowing out a candle, you're pushing out a person."

"I hate you," I gasped.

"That's fair."

"I hate him, and I hate you, and I hate this kitchen."

"Good. Hate is great for contractions. Push."

I had been in labor for nineteen hours by then. The storm that had been building all afternoon finally broke around midnight, a great rolling thunder that shook the windows and made the lamp flicker. Mrs. Adaeze hovered in the doorway with a basin of hot water, praying under her breath in a language I did not know, and Evie bullied us both into obedience. Wren was no help at all. She had gone quiet around hour twelve, curled tight and trembling in the corner of my mind, and every time I reached for her she whispered the same thing: "It's coming, Sage. It's almost here. I can feel it."

At twenty past three in the morning, with lightning cracking the window and the whole house shaking under the thunder, a thin, furious wail cut through the room.

Evie laughed out loud. She held him up in the gray light, tiny and slick and angry, and cut the cord with hands that shook just slightly. "It's a boy," she said. "Sage. Look at him. It's a boy."

She laid him on my chest, and I forgot every pain I had ever had.

He was so small. He had a thatch of black hair stuck damp to his head and fists the size of walnuts, and he screamed at the ceiling as though the world had insulted him. I pressed my cheek to his head. He smelled like rain and something wild and warm, cedar and woodsmoke, and I started to cry.

"Hey," I whispered. "Hey, you. I'm your mom."

His crying stopped. It stopped like a tap being closed. He blinked, and his eyelids lifted, and a pair of eyes looked up at me, wide and unfocused and so bright that Evie dropped her thermos.

They were silver. Pure molten silver, glowing faintly in the dark like two small moons.

"Sage," Evie said slowly. "That's not normal."

"I know."

"That's really not normal."

"I know." I stroked his cheek with one finger. "He has his father's eyes."

"So the Lycan is the father. Fantastic." She sat down hard on a kitchen chair, wiped her face on her sleeve, and looked at us both for a long moment. "Does he know?"

"No."

"Are you going to tell him?"

I looked at the small glowing face on my chest and thought of Elder Marcus, of the enforcer in the lobby, of every wolf who would ever want a Lycan's heir in their hands. "Not yet," I said. "Maybe not ever."

Evie did not argue. She nodded slowly, and her eyes were very bright. "Okay. What are you naming him?"

I thought about what she had told me in the alley. Name him after something brave. I thought of a battered stuffed lion with one button eye, which was sitting on the windowsill where I had propped it, watching the storm.

"Leo," I said. "Leo Sterling. Like a lion."