"I need to move."
"Stay where I can see you."
I put on Daron’s boots because I can lace them up tight enough to at least stay on my feet. I still feet a little clown-like stomping around the forest.
The four scorch-prints from Thaw are still there, dark against the rest of the ground. I walk past them. I do a slow loop around the edge of the clearing, staying inside the line where Dean's eys track me.
The air is sharper. The cold off the wind is not registering as temperature but as information.
I look down at my hands.
The nails are darker.
The tips have gone from human-pink at the quick to a deeper black color at the tips. The shape is wrong too. The edges have come to points I did not file. The free edge of each one ends in a curve that did not exist this morning when I washed my face in the cabin mirror.
I turn my hand over.
The palm is my palm. But the nails.
I look at the other hand.
Same.
Every one of them ends in something my body did without telling me.
I run my tongue across my teeth.
The canines are not right.
Not enormous. Not fangs. But the shape of them under my tongue is wrong — longer than my tongue knows, sharper at the point, the curve coming down a fraction lower than it should. I push the point of my tongue against the right canine and it gives back more than enamel should.
My breath is going faster.
I close my mouth.
I am about to call for Dean.
Then the wind shifts.
And I get him.
Hot metal under cedar smoke. Faint. Two miles east. I have never put words to what Thaw smells like because his scent hasalways been background. Now it is a line drawn through the air from the ridge to my face and the line saysThaw, moving fast, hot, breathing heavy.
I stop walking.
I turn my face into the wind.
I take another breath.
Stone. Wet rock. The mineral cold of a riverbed. Somewhere behind Thaw, lower on the slope.
Crull.
I take another breath.
Wet bark. Moss. The deep green smell of a forest floor where the light does not reach. The lowest to the ground, the closest to invisible, the hardest to find.
Harek.
