I make myself sit up against Dean's shoulder. The hollow is still full. The bond is still bright. The forest is still quiet.
"Tell him yes," I say to Dean. My voice is thick. "Tell him I'm okay. Tell him I'm coming."
Dean speaks into the radio.
I get up off the ground.
The walk toward the south edge of the campground is the second-longest walk of my life.
Chapter twenty-one
Jen
Fen is sitting where Daron said he was.
I see him from twenty yards out — at the south edge of the campground, his back against a fir, his knees drawn up, his hands loose at his sides. Not crouched. Not pacing. Sitting.
His head comes up when I clear the tree line.
The eyes are not human.
They are black. The man behind the black is up. All the way up. He has been up since Daron's truck pulled off the road and he has been steering his own body for the first time since I have known him, and what he steered it toward this morning was a fight he could survive and a fight he could win without coming near me.
He does not stand.
I stop ten feet out.
Dean is behind me. Thaw is behind me, twenty yards back. Daron is somewhere in the trees, the rifle on Fen, not because he expects to use it but because Daron is the fail-safe.
It is just me, and Fen, and ten feet of forest.
"I am okay," I say.
He nods.
The nod is the same nod Crull does.
"You protected me," I say.
He nods again.
"You did not come for me."
His jaw works. He has the word but he cannot make his mouth shape it yet, and what he does instead is shake his head — a small one, ano I did not.
"Okay," I say.
I sit down across from him.
Ten feet between us. I sit cross-legged in the dirt with my hands in my lap and I look at him and he looks at me, and the bond is full and warm and aimed, and I let myself have one minute of looking at the man who is on the other end of the not-yet-thread. He is dirty. There is blood on his face that is not his. His black hair is wet at the temple. He is the most beautiful broken thing I have ever seen and my body knows it. I sit cross-legged ten feet away from him and let myself want him.
Then his head snaps to the side.
He has heard something. A second later I hear it — boots, coming up through the trees from the east, more boots than the wolves' boots — and the bond spikes with adrenaline, and Fen moves.
He is up off the ground in one motion. Faster than Harek. He is between me and the east trees in half a second.
But the something coming through the trees is not Syndicate. The boots are too loud and too uncoordinated. The bond to Dean is steady, not alarm. It is the two surrendered shooters beingwalked through the trees by Crull, who has come up from the truck after all because Crull does not stay below when his pack is in the woods.
