Thaw turns back to me. His hands at my shoulders are warm through the sweatshirt I slept in. The bond is open.
"Five minutes. Duffel. Boots. Anything you can’t leave."
"Nothing I cannot leave is in this cabin."
His hands at my shoulders tighten.
"That’s not true for me. In fact it is the exact opposite."
I look up at him. His gold eyes are steady on mine.
"I meant my stuff."
"I know."
He presses his forehead to mine for one second. Then he is moving. The bedroom empties around me.
I get up. I pull a jacket over my sweatshirt. I pull on the borrowed boots. I am moving through the room gathering the few things that are mine — toothbrush, sweatpants, the book Dean handed me — when I feel Harek behind me. He has come up without sound. He reaches past me and picks up my duffel. He looks at me once. The third thread under my ribs goes warm and full. Then he is gone down the hall with the duffel on his shoulder.
I walk down the hall.
I pass the back bedroom. The door is open. Crull is sitting beside the bed with one massive hand at Fen's neck, holding his head up. Fen's eyes are open. He is not fully there. The bond-hollow at my sternum has gone cold and quiet. Crull is talking to him — too low to catch the words, just the rumble of his rebuilt voice, the same one he uses with me when my pulse climbs. Fen's eyes track Crull when he speaks. Slow. He hears it. Crull stays where he is.
I do not interrupt. I keep walking.
The kitchen. Harek is in the doorway from the porch with the second duffel on his shoulder. He stops. His free hand brushes the edge of the kitchen table once — just once. The shimmer at his shoulders comes up and goes still. Then he keeps moving. He does not look back.
I stop where I am. The spot by the wall is empty. This is where Harek sat when I found him after sunrise. The mark at my throat warms.
Dean's voice comes through the open door — low, tight.
"Wind just shifted. Northwest. We have maybe twenty minutes before that thermal is overhead."
I set the bag down. "Thaw."
He is in the kitchen doorway from the hall before I finish the second syllable, Crull behind him, Fen between them — limp, head against Crull's massive shoulder, breathing slow and shallow, the hollow at my sternum gone cold and quiet.
"Twenty minutes," Thaw says.
"Twenty if we are lucky," Dean says from the porch. "Get Daron. Tell him now."
I am already moving.
Chapter sixteen
Jen
We make it twenty minutes down the road before Fen wakes up.
I know it before any of them do. The cold flat place under my sternum flickers — small, the way the needle on a gauge ticks once before the meter swings — and I sit up between Thaw's boots on the floor of the truck. Some part of me has been listening to the cargo box behind us since we pulled away from the cabin, and that part is now telling the rest of me that the wait is over.
"He is coming up," I say to Thaw, whose hand has not let go of mine since we got in this truck.
His gold eyes go sharp. The bond at my sternum tightens. "How far up?"
"Not all the way. Surfacing."
He raps the mesh once with a knuckle. The rumble on the other side changes immediately — Crull, registering, deepening the low continuous note he has wrapped around his unconscious brother since we left the cabin.I have him.
