He keeps grinning.
He drops to all fours and the shift is a single fluid collapse — body folding in on itself and coming up as a different body inone motion. What stands on the porch boards is dire-sized. The shoulder of him is at my chest. His coat is dark blond — the color of his hair, deeper at the shoulders, lighter along the belly — and his ice-blue eyes are his.
The huge wolflooks at me.
I am still red.
He huffs once — a wolf-laugh, the sound coming out as breath through his teeth — and steps off the boards into the clearing.
Behind me on the porch, Dean has not moved. He is holding two rifles now. He is the only fully dressed man here.
Four monsters in the clearing.
My brain does not have a word for it. I have lived over thirty years and there is no shelf in my head for four creatures the size of cars standing on the dirt outside a cabin breathing. Thaw is the largest thing I have ever seen and the clearing was not built to hold him. Crull has gone past man-shape and into something that is not built to fit through a door. Harek is moving in a way nothing should be able to move. Daron is the smallest of the four and is still the size of a horse.
I am breathing fast.
They look at each other.
The four of them stand in the clearing in their full forms and they read each other — Thaw's gold eyes sweep the wolf, the orc's amber meets the fae's luminous green, Daron's ice-blue takes in the monsters his brother lived with for two years in cells he did not know about — and something settles among them. The bond at my sternum carries it.
Thaw turns his huge plated head toward me. He lowers it. The smoke curls off his back. He meets my eyes and the bond floods with one word, that isyes.
Then he turns.
He moves through the clearing toward the tree line in a low fast run, the plates rippling along his flanks. Daron falls in athis flank. Crull goes in the second wave — his enormous body moving faster than something his size should move, the ground giving where he steps. Harek flows last and silent and the shimmer under his skin pulses once at the edge of the trees and then he is gone.
The clearing is empty.
I stand on the porch.
Four piles of clothes.
I am breathing very fast.
It is not fear. It is the breath of a body that has just seen something true and is rearranging itself around having seen it.
Dean is one pace behind me at the doorframe. He has a rifle across his chest and his brother's rifle slung across his back. He is just there, guarding me.
We stand there for a long time.
Far off, three bonds and one thread in my chest, my pack runs free for the first time in years. My calves tighten in time with Thaw's stride. Daron's gait is smooth, but I feel him missing his twin. Behind me on the porch Dean's weight shifts on the boards in the same rhythm as his brother.
I do not have a name for what I am.
But whatever I am — it runs with monsters.
Chapter fourteen
Jen
Forty minutes.
That is how long I last in the cabin. The bonds are humming — all four of them — and the part of me that is hooked into three men on a ridge two miles east is not the part that fits inside four walls.
I close the book Dean handed me. I walk out to the porch.
Dean does not turn his head. His eyes stay on the tree line. "You okay."
