The hollow is leaning toward the back of the cargo box like a face turned to a window.
It yanks. I make a sound through my teeth.
Thaw's hand is flat to my chest in the same beat. The bond floods. The yank settles to a pull I can breathe through, but only because he is pulling against it from his side.
"Slow," he says. Low. Right at my temple. "Slow, Jen. Breathe with me."
I breathe with him. The bond carries his rhythm down to mine — slow, deep, deliberate.
Behind the mesh, a sound.
Not the half-whine. Not the broken growl. A whine, high and thin and aimed, the sound of a body that has located its target and cannot reach it.
"Crull," Thaw says.
"Half-dose is wearing fast." Crull's rebuilt voice, rougher in the middle of the night than I have ever heard it. "Faster than the breach dose did."
"Time."
"Minutes. Not many."
In the front, Daron has both hands at ten and two, ice-blue eyes on a road that is mostly black with a fog of yellow where the headlights are not on. Dean is in the passenger seat with the scent sensor in his lap. The forming thread to Daron has been tight since we got in the truck. He is doing the math up there. Routes, distances, dose timing, the alternate vehicle. He is not going to interrupt his alpha to deliver it, but he has it ready.
Harek is in the seat beside me. He has not spoken since we got in the truck.
He puts his hand over mine. He does not say anything, but his thumb moves once across the back of my hand.
Somehow that helps.
Behind the mesh, the whine sharpens.
"Pack." Crull is talking to Fen now, not us. The rumble climbs. "Pack, brother. Pack."
The word does something. The whine breaks — not into a growl, into something softer, the sound of a body being told what it is and remembering. Crull is talking him.You are pack. You are with pack.
It works for about ten seconds. Then the smell of me must hit Fen again, or the pull must spike, or something I cannot see from this side, and the whine comes back twice as high.
I sit up further.
"Thaw."
He looks down at me. The gold eyes do the thing where the alpha softens for me, the thing he reserves for me.
"Jen. If we put him in another vehicle —"
"He's spent two years of his life in a cell because of what they wanted from his body. Two years. And the first thing his own pack does when we get him out is split him off."
"From the thing his body wants more than air," Thaw says. "Which is you."
I stop.
I'm very tired and very stubborn and I'd like to win this argument. I'm not going to win this argument. He's put his finger on the part of me that wanted to fight and turned it sideways, and now the part of me that wanted to fight is sitting there confused, goingoh.
"That's the dirtiest pool I've ever seen you play," I say.
"Yes," he says.
"It's also right."
