Fen has registered boots and his body has filed it as threat coming for her, and the man is up and the want that he has been holding has just found a direction it can finally go in. He is coming up. All the way. His body is in motion and his hands are claws and his teeth are wrong and his eyes are gone, no human structure left in them at all.
He is going to kill the two Syndicate prisoners.
Crull is coming up the slope with both of them at gunpoint. Crull is going to walk into a Fen who has just turned all the way over.
"Fen."
I do not know I have said it until it is already out.
It comes out flat.
Not pleading. Not panicked. Not the way I said his name through the mesh of the cargo box. The way I said it just now is the way I used to saydownto a working dog in a yard when the working dog was about to put its teeth into something it would regret. Flat, low, total.
His body locks.
Not stops. Locks. Mid-motion, mid-shift, mid-stride toward the trees — every muscle in him goes still at once, the way a body goes still when a high-frequency signal hits it that the brain has not yet processed. The claws hold their position.
He turns his head, slow, all the way around, until his eyes are on me.
I don't back down.
I sit there with my hands in my lap and meet his eyes. The word came out of me without permission. The locking happened without permission. Neither of us moves.
The whole forest is silent.
Crull has stopped on the slope. The two prisoners are not moving. Dean is not moving. Daron is not moving. Thaw is twenty yards back and Thaw has not moved either.
I say it again, just to be sure.
"Down."
I do not sayFen.I do not give him the name. The name is what kept him sitting against the tree. Thedownis what is keeping him from going through the trees and into the prisoners.
His body responds before the man does.
He lowers. Not collapses. Lowers. His knees give one fraction of an inch, the way a body gives when a command lands in it from outside, and his shoulders drop a quarter inch.
He is not back to himself.
But he is not going through the trees.
"Crull," I say. Still flat. Not looking away from Fen.
A pause. Then Crull's voice — slower, lower, the way he speaks to his alpha. "Yes, Jen."
"Walk the prisoners around. Not past us. Not in his line of sight. Take them back to the truck."
"Ok."
"Tell Daron to come down. Daron is with me from now until we are off this mountain."
"Daron heard you."
"And Crull."
"Yes."
"Tell Thaw to stay where he is. Do not move toward me. Not yet."
