Head Up

Chapter 2:

The rain found me before I found the road.

I got twenty feet from the side door before I heard the front doors of the hall bang open behind me and the whole pack come spilling out into the courtyard like water out of a cracked bucket. Boots in the mud. Coats half on. Somebody laughing — that same laugh, carried out into the night air where it could breathe.

"There she is." A man's voice, thick with drink. "There she goes."

"Jane!" A woman, cupping her hands. "Jane, honey, come back inside, you'll catch your death —"

"She won't catch anything. She can't catch a cold, she can't catch a wolf, she can't catch a man—"

The laugh rolled across the courtyard and hit me in the back.

I kept walking. The gravel drive was slick and my shoes were the wrong shoes, thin soles, and every step skidded a little, and I made each step anyway. Head up. Chin level. I remember thinking: don't run. If you run they'll chase.

"Jane!" Miriam's voice cut through the rain, bright and carrying, the voice she used for toasts. "Jane, don't be like this. Come have a drink. It doesn't have to be a whole thing."

I didn't turn around.

"She's not going to answer you," Karl said. Loud. To the courtyard, not to her. "She's doing the walking-away thing. It's a whole production."

"The production," somebody echoed, and the laugh came again.

Then something hit me between the shoulder blades — not hard, a shoe, a rolled-up program, I never found out — and I stumbled one step and caught myself and did not turn around.

That's when it happened.

It started in my chest, at the place where the rope had gone slack an hour ago. It wasn't pain. Pain I could have put somewhere. It was a snap, a real one, a physical snap like a green branch breaking under a boot, and it went through me front to back and out through my arms into my fingers, and my knees went out from under me.

I went down on one knee in the mud.

The courtyard made a sound — that awful rising ohhh that a crowd makes when it sees blood.

And then the laugh came back twice as loud, because now it was funny, now it was really funny, the fat girl on her knees in the mud.

"Get up," I said. Out loud. To myself. Nobody heard it over them. "Get up."

I got up.

My hands were muddy. My dress was muddy to the thigh. The rain was coming down in sheets now and the whole courtyard was watching me climb back to my feet like it was a show with a ticket price, and I stood up straight, and I put one foot in front of the other, and I walked.

"That's it," Karl called after me. "That's the walk. Everybody look at the walk."

"Karl," Roderick's voice, low, from the doorway. "Inside."

"In a minute."

"Now."

The Alpha's voice did what it did. Half the courtyard turned and started filtering back through the doors, grumbling, laughing, shaking the rain off their coats, already telling the story to each other the way they'd tell it for years.

"Jane." Miriam again, closer now, hurrying on the gravel behind me. "Jane. Jane, wait, I'm trying to be decent to you —"

I turned around.

I don't know what my face looked like. Something in it made her stop three feet short with her mouth half open.

"Say it," I said.

"What?"

"Whatever you came out here to say. Say it and go back inside."

Her mouth worked. Rain ran off her hair and down her face and she didn't wipe it. "I just — I wanted you to know it's not personal. With me. It's not like I asked for this."

"No," I said. "You just stood next to me for an hour and told me to smile."

Her face changed. Something honest came up through it, ugly and quick, and then she put the sweet one back on like a coat. "You're going to be fine. You've always been — you're fine. You're fine, Jane."

"Say it," I said again.

"Say what?"

"You know what."

She didn't. She looked past me at the courtyard, at the audience, and she chose them, the way she always chose them. "I hope you get home safe," she said sweetly, loud enough for the front row, and turned and went back.

I walked. The gates were a hundred yards off, tall iron, standing open the way they stand open on ceremony nights. Wet iron, black, and the road beyond going dark into the tree line.

I was twenty feet from the gates when Karl came after me.

"Jane."

I kept walking.

"Jane. Jane, stop —" He caught my wrist.

He caught my wrist and turned me around and I was looking up at him with the rain coming between us, and his face was a mess, angry and sorry and young, and his hand was warm and he was still holding my wrist.

"You could have said something," he said.

"What."

"In there. You could have said something. You just stood there. You just stood there like a —" He stopped himself.

"Like a what."

He let go of my wrist.

"Like you knew it was coming," he said. "Like you'd already decided I was going to do it, so why bother opening your mouth. So now I'm the one who has to be the —"

"You said it in front of three hundred people."

"I know what I did."

"You said it in front of your father."

"I know what I did, Jane."

"Then what are you out here for?"

He didn't have an answer. He stood there in the rain with his hands at his sides and the doors of the hall behind him and the whole pack at the windows of the hall behind that, watching him stand in the rain with me.

"Because I'm not —" He wiped his face. "Because it's not — it's not because of your — you know it's not because of —"

"Say it plain."

"Don't do that. Don't make me say it plain."

"Say it plain, Karl."

"It's because I'm going to be Alpha." His voice cracked on the word like it was too big for his mouth. "And an Alpha's mate has to — my father's whole life is — do you know what they'd say? Do you know what they'd say about me? Every day for the rest of my life, in every room I walked into, every time I had to make a call and a wolf looked at me sideways —"

"So it was my hips."

He flinched like I'd slapped him.

"You stood up there and stared at my hips for ten minutes," I said. "I watched you do it. Don't tell me it was the pack. Don't tell me it was your father. You looked at me and you did math."

"That's not —"

"Say it plain."

"I couldn't do it," he said.

The rain came down. Somewhere behind him a door opened and Miriam's voice said his name and he didn't turn around.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay." I stepped back from him, one step, and then another one, and my thin shoes slid on the wet gravel and I didn't fall. "You couldn't do it. I heard you. Three hundred people heard you. You'll never have to do it again."

His face went strange. "Where are you going?"

"Home."

"Jane —"

"Your father told somebody to get me a coat. Nobody got me a coat. So I'm going home."

"I'll walk you."

"No."

"It's three miles in the rain —"

"No." I was at the gate now. The iron was wet and cold and my hand closed around the bar. "You said let her cool off. So let me cool off."

He didn't laugh. That was the one mercy of the night, he didn't laugh, he just stood there in the courtyard of his father's hall in the rain looking at me like he'd swallowed something he couldn't get back up.

"Jane. Come back tomorrow. Come back after you've — we'll talk about it. It doesn't have to be over. The claim's rejected, that's a ceremony thing, that's not — people say things at ceremonies —"

I walked through the gates.

"Jane!"

I walked out onto the dark road.

"Let her go," Karl said, to the courtyard, to Miriam, to the windows full of faces. Loud. Wanting to be heard being fine. "She'll be back by morning. They always come back by morning."

Somebody at the windows laughed.

I pulled the gate shut behind me because the gate was mine now to shut, and the heavy iron swung on its hinge and crashed into the post, and the sound went off down the dark road ahead of me into the tree line.

Three miles. Rain. No coat. Mud to the thigh. Something broken in my chest where the rope used to be and my wolf — I reached for her, the way you reach for a light switch in a room you've lived in your whole life, and reached, and reached, and there was nothing there to reach.

I kept walking.

Chapter (2) Ends.