Chapter 8: Bitter at the Heart

Preston's convoy left the east gate at midnight, six black trucks in a tight line with their headlights cutting the redwood dark. Nora's pickup and its motorhome trailer rode last, with the Silver Hollow crest on the door that she hadn't gotten around to scraping off.

"Seven seats up front," Brooks said, sliding into the trailer's kitchenette like it was his own. "And a stove. You have a stove. Who wouldn't want to marry you?"

"Plenty of people," Nora said. "I have a list."

"Not anymore." His ears flicked up, silver and soft, and then flattened as he remembered himself. "Sorry. Too much?"

"Sit down, Brooks."

He sat. Jackson Rowe took the far corner of the couch and folded his arms, pretending the trailer didn't interest him. Hudson leaned against the doorframe, watching the headlights ahead through the window. Nobody spoke for the first few miles.

Then Brooks slid his duffel off his shoulder and set it on the table with a heavy thud.

"I wasn't going to show you this till Saturday," he said. "But after what Hudson told us on the porch, I don't think it can wait."

He unzipped the bag. Inside, wrapped in a rag, lay a heartstone the size of a fist, the color of old pine.

Nora's breath caught. It hummed under her skin before she even touched it, but the hum was wrong. It was thin and sour, like a violin string wound a quarter-turn too tight.

"I took it from a feral wolf we put down at Fort Sable two weeks ago," Brooks said. "Not a beast. A wolf. He used to be one of ours, a trapper named Dale. Forty years old, never had a restless day in his life. Then he went feral in a week."

"Wolves can go feral," Jackson said.

"Not like this." Brooks pulled the rag back. "There's a taint. We tried to refine the heart, and the Bureau soothers wouldn't touch it. They said it would hurt them."

Nora closed her fingers around the stone. A thread of lightning, thin as a hair, slid from her palm into the crystal.

The gray fog inside parted. She saw it, as clearly as she had seen the cracked pebble at the market: a dark vein of bitter green threaded through the heart, fine as a root. When her power touched it, the vein recoiled.

She knew that taste. She had been drinking it every night for years.

"Wolfsbane," she said. "Distilled and sweetened. Somebody fed this to Dale, and I'd bet a lot of money it wasn't one dose."

Silence filled the trailer.

"The tea," Hudson said slowly. "The one they gave you at Silver Hollow."

"The same herb. Slower there, because they wanted me weak and obedient. Faster here, because they wanted him feral." Her stomach turned cold. "It's not a poison that kills. It's one that breaks wolves."

"Who would do that?" Brooks whispered. He looked about twelve.

"Someone who profits when wolves go feral," Jackson said grimly. "Or someone who wants them out of the way."

Nora burned the taint out of the heartstone with a single clean pulse. The stone brightened, warm and amber and clear, as if it had exhaled. She set it back in Brooks's palm.

"Keep it. Don't give it to anyone at the Bureau. Don't tell anyone where you found it."

"And Preston?" Hudson asked.

Nora thought of the cologne, and the bitter trace beneath it. "Especially not Preston."

---

She spent the next hour making tonic.

It was the only thing she could do for them. Out of her shopping bag she took the level-three greenheart shard from the Lantern Market, cupped it in both hands, and drew its energy off drop by drop, dissolving it into four small vials of clean water. When she was done, the water glowed faintly green.

"One each," she said. "Drink it at the ridge, not before. It won't make you stronger, but it'll keep your minds steadier when the beast is close."

Brooks accepted his like a holy relic. Hudson took his with a grin and a murmured thank you, wife, which earned him a pillow in the face.

Jackson held his for a long moment.

"I'm not going to take advantage," he said stiffly.

"I know you're not."

"I said I'd pay you to break the match, and I meant it."

"I know."

"You didn't take the money." His voice dropped. "I haven't slept since Monday, Whitlock. I've tried everything. Then you touched my wrist, and I slept for eleven hours."

Nora looked at him, at the tired lines around his eyes and the stubborn set of his jaw. "Then drink it. And lie down. I'll wake you when we're close."

He hesitated, then drank, and stretched out on the couch. Within ten minutes his breathing evened and the tension fell out of his shoulders. One hand slid off the cushion. His head rolled to the side and came to rest, absurdly, against Nora's knee.

She stared at the top of his brown head. Brooks, across the table, stifled a laugh with both hands.

"Not a word," Nora said.

"I would never."

Hudson looked at them from the doorway, amber eyes warm in the dim light, and didn't say anything at all.

---

They reached the ridge east of Lake Larch an hour before dawn.

It was black pine on black rock, with a thin bruise of purple light on the horizon. The convoy halted on a gravel clearing, and Preston stepped out of the lead truck in his cream coat, cane tapping the stones, with his four gray attendants at his shoulder.

"Gentlemen," he called. "Lady. Let us begin."

Nora took her place at Hudson's side. She wore a plain gray jacket and a hood, and a pine-tar smear behind each ear. The others looked at her as if she were a stray they'd agreed to tolerate. That suited her.

"We'll flush it from the north slope," Preston said. "Captain Pierce will lead. My men will cover the rear." He smiled. "I trust you're all quite ready."

A low rumble rolled over the ridge. Birds burst from the pines. Somewhere in the dark, branches cracked like gunshots.

Preston's attendants had already drifted back toward the trucks. Not a single one raised a weapon.

"Hudson," Nora said quietly.

"I see it."

The Thornback burst out of the treeline.

It was twice the size of a truck, black-furred, with a ridge of bone spikes running down its spine and eyes that glowed a sick, dull green. It hit the clearing at a dead run. Hudson's body blurred, and in one heartbeat a lean russet wolf stood where he had been, snarling. Brooks's silver form leaped past him. Jackson, still half asleep, shifted with a growl.

The first strike sent Brooks tumbling across the gravel. The second caught Jackson's shoulder.

Nora dropped to one knee and pressed her palm to the earth. Green tendrils of wood-magic uncurled under the soil, wrapped around the Thornback's hind legs, and pulled. The beast bellowed. Lightning hissed down her arm, quick and silent, and snapped into its spine.

It staggered. Hudson hit it from the side, jaws closing on its throat. Brooks and Jackson circled to take the flanks. The Thornback shrugged Hudson off like a sack of flour and swung one spiked forearm at Nora's head.

She rolled. The spikes gouged the gravel where she'd been kneeling. She came up with a fistful of living root and flung it. The vines whipped around its muzzle just as Jackson's jaws locked on its shoulder. Brooks hit the other side. For a long, ragged breath the three wolves hung on, claws scoring the stone, and Nora poured everything she had into the lightning.

The Thornback went to its knees with a crash that shook the ridge.

Then, as the light went out of its green eyes, it began to change.

The spikes shrank. The black fur withdrew. The immense body folded in on itself, bone by bone, until a man lay curled on the gravel, naked and shivering, covered in blood.

Nobody moved.

"That's not a beast," Brooks whispered.

Around the man's neck hung a thin leather collar, cracked with age. Nora crouched beside him, pushed the matted hair from his face, and turned the tag toward the dawn.

Stamped into the brass was a crest she knew better than her own reflection: a silver hollow set in a ring of pine.

Silver Hollow.

Nora's hands had gone cold. She had worn that crest on her sleeve for years. She had signed her freedom beneath it. And here it was, hanging from the neck of a dying feral on a ridge three miles from her mother's cabin.

Behind her, the trucks had gone silent. When she glanced back, Preston Pierce stood perfectly still beside the lead truck, his cane resting loosely in his hand, watching her with an expression she couldn't read. It wasn't surprise. It looked far more like satisfaction.