9

Eleven weeks later, I fainted in the middle of a grocery store.

It was embarrassing, but it was also, I would learn, the best thing that could have happened. I had been living on stale bread and bus tickets for three months. I had slept in a motel room that rented by the week, scrubbed dishes in the back of a diner, and tried very hard to think about nothing. I had been standing in the canned goods aisle holding a tin of beans and trying to decide if I could afford it when the shelves began, very gently, to tilt.

A woman in a white coat happened to be buying instant noodles two aisles over. She caught me before my head hit the shelf, propped me against a stack of beans, and said in a voice like a rusty hinge, "Okay, kid. You're coming with me."

That was how I met Evelyn Cross.

She ran a tiny clinic above a laundromat in the human quarter, a place with peeling green paint and a single chair that doubled as an exam table. She was twenty-eight and sarcastic and wore her hair in a messy knot held up by a pencil. She did not ask why I smelled like a pine forest, or why my eyes glowed a faint green in the lamplight. She took my blood pressure, listened to my heart, and frowned at the clock on the wall as though it had said something rude.

"When was your last period?"

"I don't know." I tried to laugh. It came out crooked. "I haven't exactly been counting."

"Hm." She ran her thumb across her lip. "Lie back."

I lay back. She squirted cold gel on my stomach and slid a small wand across it, and the screen beside us flickered with static. Then it flickered again, and a soft, fast thudding filled the room.

Whump-whump-whump-whump.

I stopped breathing.

"That," Evie said slowly, "is a heartbeat."

"That's impossible."

"It's eleven weeks, give or take. Maybe a little more." She turned the screen toward me. A tiny shape curled there, fuzzy and gray, with a small bump of a head. "Sage, you're pregnant."

"No. No, I can't be. Wolves can't..." I stopped, because I had never actually been told that. I had only ever been told that bonded mates conceived easily, and unmated wolves almost never did. "It was one night."

"It only takes one."

My hands flew to my mouth. I did not even know whether the sound that came out of me was a laugh or a sob.

Wren was awake. I could feel her, curled in the corner of my mind with her ears pricked, listening to that tiny hammering heart, and her voice when she spoke was almost reverent. "Sage. There's someone else in here."

"I know."

"He's so loud."

"Wren, I can't..."

"It's all right." Her warmth wrapped around me, gentle and sure. "We'll be all right. I'll make sure of it."

I thought of him then, though I had told myself I would not. A man's hand lying open on a pillow. The crack of a mug splitting in two. I'm not leaving, he had said, and I had left, and now there was a heartbeat on a screen that was half his. I tried to picture telling him. I could not make the scene hold still. Every version ended with Elder Marcus standing in the doorway, counting.

"I thought I'd feel more," I said, to no one in particular. "I thought it would be one big feeling. It's like fifty small ones, all arguing."

"That's most things," said Evie. "Welcome to being a person."

Evie put a hand over mine. She was holding it, I realized, and she had been for some time.

"Whoever he is," she said gently, "you don't have to tell me."

"He's a Lycan."

"Okay."

"A powerful one. His enemies will..." I swallowed. "My enemies, if they find out, they'll..."

"I figured," Evie said. She did not sound surprised. She handed me a tissue, then pulled a second chair close and sat in it like a woman settling in for a long conversation. "Also, one more thing. Your blood work is the strangest I have seen in my entire career. Whatever you are, whatever your people are, that baby has something in it I've never seen on any chart."

I wiped my face. "Is that bad?"

"I don't know. It's interesting." She grimaced. "I hate that word. It's what doctors say right before something goes sideways."

"Evie."

"I'm kidding. Mostly." She squeezed my hand. "Listen. You need a place to sleep that isn't a motel, and you need food that doesn't come out of a can. My couch is lumpy and my landlord is a demon, but it's yours until you figure out what comes next."

"You don't know me."

"You fainted in my grocery store, kid. I know you well enough."

I laughed again, shakily, and this time it was almost real. We sat there in the little room with the green walls and the humming machine, and neither of us spoke for a minute. Outside, the laundromat's dryers rumbled steadily below us. The window was cracked open an inch, and a cold wind carried up the smell of detergent and rain and the cheap hot pretzels the man on the corner sold.

And woven through it, faint but unmistakable, was the scent of pine.

Wren went rigid. Down in the street, a man in a dark jacket stood beneath the laundromat sign with his face tilted up toward our window like a dog catching a trail.