Sixty Three

She's not going to run.'

"No, there’s no need, she has nowhere to run to" I agreed.

She did a systematic sweep, left to right, measuring the circumference of the situation with those dark eyes.

Running the numbers. Arriving, I suspected, at the same conclusion I would have arrived at in her position — which was that the numbers were terrible and that there was exactly one variable in the entire situation that was not yet fixed.

Me.

So I stepped out of the tree line and walked toward her.

My boots were wet and the forest floor was soft after the rain and I made no particular effort to be silent.

There was no point. She knew I was there the moment I moved. She turned to face me before I had taken three steps, and the shift in her focus — from the pack to me, from the general to the specific — told me she had already identified that I was the Alpha. Not by my size, not by my leather, but by the way the other eyes and body adjusted when I moved. It was a Pack orientation. She'd grown up in a pack. I guess knew how that worked.

I stopped in front of her and crouched down to her level — she'd gone to her knees at some point, which told me the legs were failing before anything else — and looked at her.

I shook my head inwardly as I looked at her. She was a disaster and there was no more polite way to describe it.

She was bleeding from her back, her arm, a cut above her hairline. Her dress was barely a dress anymore, it was in ruins. Her hair was plastered down the sides of her face in dark ropes. Her lips were going slightly blue from the cold.

Then she looked directly back at me and said, with a voice that barely existed:

"Who... who are you?"

Not: please don't kill me.

Not: I'll do whatever you want.

It was who are you?

Howard Quinn raised this.

Howard Quinn looked at this and called it nothing.

I looked at her for a long moment. The wolf had stopped doing anything at all. It had simply gone to that rare absolute stillness — the stillness it only found in sleep, or in the two or three moments in eleven years when something had happened that required it to recalibrate from the ground up.

I found I was looking at her more carefully than I had intended to.

The pendant. She was still holding the pendant — fingers closed around it against her chest, like the last action her body had been capable of prioritising before the legs gave out was to make sure that one thing, specifically, was still there.

A wolf. Small, silver, carved with more care than the rest of her circumstances tonight.

I looked at it and smiled.

I would come back to that later.

"Interesting," I said.

It came out quieter than I'd planned. Aimed more at myself than at her.

She held my gaze for another second — remarkable, given the state she was in — and then her eyes went out like lights, and she dropped.

I swiftly caught her.

“Rex, you have gone quite now that I have her. What’s wrong?”

“I sense nothing Aiden. Nothing”

“Hmm. You were wrong again” I sighed with her still in my hands.

Well there was always plan B.

She weighed almost nothing. Less than she should. Less than someone who had just survived everything she had survived tonight had any right to weigh.

I stood with her and looked at Nathan, who had come up on my left at some point. He was looking at me in that careful, non-committal way that meant he was taking the most thorough mental notes of his career.

"Let’s take her to the Mansion," I said. "And have the Medic and Healer attend to her now."

I paused once again looking at the necklace.

"The necklace stays on her."

Nathan received this information without visible reaction. He took her from me carefully — he was rough with most things and careful with very few, which was a distinction I had noticed about him early and which told me several things about his read on the situation.

Then I turned back toward the river and looked at the far bank, there were four pairs of eyes watching.

Maxwell. Marcus. Daniel. Peter.

I knew all their names now.

They were all watching me hold Howard Quinn's daughter in my arms. They saw me hand her to Nathan and disappear into the tree line.

I rolled my shoulders and cracked my neck. Rex was already at the surface, calm and very focused.

“Four of you escort Nathan back” and four immediately vanished and followed him behind while the rest of them came forward with glowing eyes at me.

“The rest of you. Let’s Hunt”