Chapter 18

Asher’s POV

“Stay down,” I said. “Stay in the grass. Don’t move until I come back.”

I said it with my mind, wolf to wolf, the way I had never been able to speak to anyone but Micah. The words went across the gap between us like a stone skipped over water, and I felt them land in her.

I’m not a dog, she snapped back.

I know. Please. Stay.

Then I was gone up the ridge.

Ari ran the way he had wanted to run for three years, with nothing holding him. The pines flashed past black and silver. The scent was easy at first. Burnt powder. Hot metal. The cold stink of silver that set every hair on my back on end.

Then lavender.

Then nothing.

I came out onto a flat rock at the top of the ridge, a lookout shelf where my father used to bring me to watch the valley. There was nobody on it. A dent in the moss showed where someone had been lying flat on their belly. A single brass shell casing lay in a crack in the stone, still warm.

I put my nose to the moss. Lavender soap. Mint. And under that, damp earth, as though somebody had scrubbed mud on their boots to hide where they’d come from.

The trail went over the far side of the ridge, into the creek bed, and died in the running water.

Ari snarled at the creek. He wanted to tear the whole hillside apart with his teeth.

Behind me, a light snapped on.

I spun. A flashlight beam hit me square in the eyes, then dropped to the ground.

“Easy,” said Kezia Vane. “Easy, Alpha. I’m not the one with the rifle.”

She stood at the edge of the rock in her black tank top and a pair of boots, breathing hard, with the flashlight in one hand and nothing in the other. Her cheeks were red from running. Her eyes went to the shell casing in the crack.

I didn’t change back. I stood over that casing with my lips peeled back from my teeth and let her look at every one of them.

“I heard the shot from the guest house,” she said. “I know what a silver round sounds like. It’s flatter than lead.” She took a step closer. I growled. She stopped. “I came to see who’s trying to take my fight away from me.”

I didn’t move.

“Do you think I did it?” she said. “Look at me. I’m in a tank top. Where would I keep a rifle?”

Ari didn’t care where she kept a rifle. But under the anger, I noticed things. The flashlight was a cheap plastic one from the guest house kitchen. Her boots were dry. She smelled of motor oil and apple and sweat, and not one breath of lavender.

I let myself change.

It hurt more going back. It always did. I came up out of the wolf on my knees on the cold rock, naked and furious, and Kezia turned the flashlight away and looked politely at the sky.

“Thank you,” I said through my teeth.

“I’ve seen men before. Your scar’s ugly.” She kept looking at the sky. “Who smells like lavender in this house?”

I didn’t answer.

“Thought so,” said Kezia. Her voice went flat. “Uncle Simon’s been sneaking around since I got here. Uncle Reuben wants her in the ring alive. He wouldn’t be happy about this.” She frowned. “Whoever fired that shot either can’t aim, or wasn’t trying to kill her.”

“Then what were they trying to do?”

“Put silver in her.” Kezia picked up the shell casing with the hem of her shirt and held it out to me. “A graze would do it. A scratch. A Hearth who heals by taking poison in. A little more silver in her blood before the full moon. She’d be slower. Heavier. Easier to put down.” She looked at me then, straight and hard. “Easier to make yield.”

I took the casing. My hand closed so tight around it that the edges cut my palm.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I told her already,” said Kezia. “I don’t win with somebody else’s knife.”

She turned and walked down the ridge with her cheap flashlight bobbing. Halfway down, she called back over her shoulder without stopping.

“Go get your clothes, Alpha. Your Luna’s down there in the meadow looking at your bare backside, and I don’t think she minds.”

~

Noa did not say a word all the way down the mountain.

She had changed back on her own. She had found her clothes and mine. She had stood at the edge of the meadow with my sweatpants clutched in both hands, white and shaking, and when I came limping out of the pines she had thrown the sweatpants at my head without looking at me and then turned around and put her hand over her eyes.

Micah met us at the bottom of the ridge with two warriors and a truck. He took one look at her face and didn’t ask questions. He drove. She sat in the front. I sat in the back with the shell casing in my fist.

At the pack house, she walked straight past me into the kitchen, and shut the door.

I stood in the hall outside it for a long time.

Micah came and found me there at one. He held out his hand, and I dropped the shell casing into it.

“Thirty caliber,” he said, turning it over under the hall lamp. “Hunting round. Somebody cast this bullet by hand. You don’t buy silver ones at the feed store.”

“Lavender on the ridge. Mint. Mud on the boots to hide the trail.”

“Simon.” Micah’s face was hard. “Except it can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“Because I put two of our wolves on the doctor’s door after the night he came for your bandage. Quietly. I didn’t wait to be told.” Micah closed his fist around the casing. “They were there all night. They swear he never left his rooms. His light was on until midnight, and they could hear him snoring after that.”

I stared at him.

“Then someone wanted me to smell Simon on that ridge,” I said slowly.

“Or Simon has a friend who borrows his soap.” Micah shook his head. “Either way, the shooter’s still out there, Asher. And they know the meadow. They knew where the Stones run. Not many people do.”

“Double the patrols on the north ridge. Nobody goes up there without my word. Not even council.”

“Already done.” He hesitated. Then he nodded at the kitchen door. “She hasn’t come out. She’s been baking since we got back. You should go in.”

“She shut the door on me.”

“She shut it,” said Micah. “She didn’t lock it.”

He went back up the hall.

At three in the morning, I knocked.

“It’s open,” she said.

She was at the table with her sleeves rolled up and dough on her hands. Six loaves were cooling on the racks. Two more were in the oven. There was flour on her cheek and flour in her hair and flour all down the front of her apron, and she was punching a ball of dough with both fists so hard the table rocked.

“You should sleep,” I said.

“You should sleep.”

“I can’t.”

“Neither can I.” She punched the dough again. “Close the door. You’re letting the warm out.”

I closed the door. I stood just inside it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I took you up there. I didn’t check the ridge. I should have checked the ridge.”

“Stop it.”

“Noa...”

“Stop saying sorry for things that aren’t your fault. I can’t tell which ones are anymore.” She stopped punching. She stood there with her floury hands flat on the dough, and her shoulders started to shake. “I was so happy. Do you know that? For ten minutes I was so happy I forgot I was me. I forgot about the ring. I forgot about Abigail. I forgot I was the fat girl from Silverlake whose mother said she should have made herself worth keeping.”

She looked up at me. Her eyes were swimming.

“And then the tree blew up over my head.”

I crossed the kitchen.

I didn’t touch her. I stopped on the other side of the table, close enough to see the flour caught in her eyelashes.

“You were the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Up in that meadow. Running. You were gold. You were the moon coming down to the ground.”

“Don’t.”

“You asked for the truth. Term six. That’s the truth.”

She stared at me. A tear spilled over and ran down through the flour on her cheek, leaving a clean line.

“Come here,” she said.

I came around the table.

“Knead,” she said, and pushed the dough at me.

I blinked. “What?”

“Knead. You’re making me nervous standing there with your hands at your sides like a soldier. Put them in the dough.”

So I did. I put my hands in the warm, soft, springy dough, and I pushed, and folded, and turned, the way I’d watched her do a hundred times. It was strange. It was the most ordinary thing I’d done in years. She stood beside me and watched, and after a minute she reached out and put her hands over mine.

“Not like that,” she said. “Heel of your hand. Push it away. Then fold it back.”

“Like this?”

“Better.”

Her hands were warm over my knuckles. Her shoulder was against my arm. I could feel her breathing, slow and shaky. The oven ticked behind us. The whole kitchen smelled of bread and honey and her.

I stopped kneading.

She didn’t move her hands.

“Noa,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I want to kiss you. I’ve wanted to since the lake. Since before the lake. Since the first second I smelled you.” My voice was hardly there. “Can I?”

She turned her head. Her face was inches from mine. Her eyes were wet and brown and very steady.

“Yes,” she said.

I kissed her.

I meant it to be gentle. I had planned it a hundred times in my head, slow and careful, a question. It lasted about one second. Her lips were soft and tasted of salt and honey, and she made a small sound against my mouth, and the dough was forgotten and my floury hands were in her hair and hers were fisted in my shirt, dragging me down.

She kissed me back like she was angry with me. Like she’d been waiting for years and I was late. Heat went through me so hard my knees nearly went. Ari was roaring. The broken thread in my chest flared so bright I swear I saw gold behind my eyes.

I lifted her onto the edge of the table. A bowl went over. Flour exploded across both of us in a white cloud, and she laughed into my mouth, and I kissed the laugh, and her legs came around my hips and pulled me in.

“Asher,” she gasped against my jaw.

“Tell me to stop.”

“Don’t you dare stop.”

A bell rang.

It was high and sharp and frantic, somewhere far above us in the house. Not a doorbell. An old brass handbell, the kind they kept by the beds of the sick.

We froze.

It rang again. Wild. Clanging. Then it stopped mid-ring, as if the hand holding it had let go.

Noa’s face went white under the flour.

“That’s from the north tower,” she whispered.

I was already pulling back. My heart was slamming for a whole new reason.

“That’s my grandfather’s bell.”