He walks the prisoners back through the trees.
Fen does not look at them.
Fen does not look at anything but me.
I keep my eyes on his. I do not blink. I do not soften. I have no idea what I am doing and every cell in my body knows what I am doing, and the two are not at war, they are agreeing, and Isit cross-legged in the dirt and I hold a feral male in lock with my voice and my eyes and myI am not afraid of you,and behind me, twenty yards back in the trees, my alpha is watching.
It takes Fen a long time to lower the rest of the way.
I count by my breathing. Slow, deep. The way Thaw taught me. The claws shorten. The teeth retract. When he is done, he is sitting against the tree again. Hands loose. Jaw working for words.
His eyes find mine.
The black is still in them. The red is still moving under it. But the center is back. He is back.
"Jen," he says.
"Hi," I say.
The corner of his mouth moves. It is not a smile. It is, however, closer than I have ever seen him to a smile.
I do not stand up. I do not approach. I sit cross-legged in the dirt across from him and I let my voice come back to normal, and I say:
"You did good, Fen. Thank you."
He nods.
He closes his eyes. He breathes.
Then, behind me, I feel Thaw move.
He has been holding twenty yards back for the entire time. I feel him come up now — slow, deliberate, the way an alpha walks into a room where something has shifted — and he stops just behind me, his hand finding the back of my neck, light.
He is stunned. Underneath the stunned is something deeper — the slow registering of a thing he has just witnessed.
He says, very quiet, against my hair:
"Jen."
"What?"
"What just happened?"
"I told him to stop."
"You told himdown.Like a dog."
"He is not a dog."
"No. He is not. And he went down like one anyway. Like he was answering you. From a place under language. Jen."
"What?"
"You did not order him as his mate. You did not order him as his pack. You ordered him as something above him."
I close my eyes.
I have been sitting in the dirt telling myself the word was just the working voice. The voice you use when an animal is about to do something it cannot take back. A frame I know. A frame I have lived inside for years.
