Warmth lingers against my skin anyway.
I don’t look back.
But I’m smiling when the door closes.
Chapter Nine
ROGUE
Day one establishes the pattern, and Charlie fights everything like the feisty vampire she is. Not aggressively, not always, but with a brand of resistance that involves equal parts genuine effort and deliberate sabotage, as if some part of her has decided that succeeding at my instructions too easily would constitute a concession she’s not ready to make. We work in the shade. The sun is one more thing her body is fighting, and I’m not adding to it.
She sits where I tell her to sit.
She breathes the way I demonstrate.
Charlie closes her eyes when I ask. Then, three minutes later, she opens them with an expression of theatrical despair and announces that meditation is a concept invented by people who had never experienced a genuine problem.
By the second morning, we’ve found our rhythm, which is to say Charlie has found new registers of complaint.
“I’m sitting on a forest floor…” She groans, both palms flat against the cold earth, the way I showed her, pine needles pressing into her hands with the quiet insistence of something that doesn’t care about the supernatural crisis occurring above it. The mountain air moves through the clearing in slow currents, carrying the smell of pine resin and creek water, and there is the stillness that exists in pack territory, where the land has learned, over generations, to be quiet and watchful. “I’m sitting on a forest floor in the middle of nowhere, breathing in a pattern you described using the words‘find the center’three separate times as if that phrase has any content whatsoever, and I would like you to know that I am not centered. I am, in fact,profoundly decentered. I am so far from centered that centered is a rumor to me.”
“Try again,” I say.
She gives me a look that contains multitudes, most of them unfavorable.
But then she huffs dramatically and closes her eyes.
The hunger moving through her is visible even from where I stand, ten feet away, leaning against the trunk of a Douglas fir with my arms folded and my attention on every micro-expression crossing her face. Two centuries of Bloodguard training means I read bodies the way some people read text, involuntarily and with a completeness that misses very little. The tension in her jaw, the slight flicker of her throat working against the need, and the way her hands press harder into the earth when the hunger surges, as if she’s anchoring herself to the only solid thing available.
She’s trying.
She’s trying with everything she has, and the fact that it doesn’t look like conventional effort is beside the point, because I understand what it costs her to maintain composure when every new instinct she possesses is demanding she do the opposite of composure, every second of every minute of every hour since she turned.
The sun filters through the canopy in fractured gold, touching her skin without burning, but I can see the way she fights it anyway, the faint tightening around her mouth, the subtle shift of her shoulders as if she wants to lean away from the light and refuses to let herself move. For a newly turned scion, the first months are a lesson in irritation, a constant hum beneath the skin, like a low-grade sunburn. Add hunger to that, and meditation becomes less about peace and more about endurance.
Watching her try is not helping me maintain the professional distance this situation requires.
She’s got pine needles in her hair, which I’m choosing not to mention. Her eyes are closed tight enough to wrinkle the corners, the way a person closes their eyes when they’re not relaxing but simply refusing to look at the thing threatening them, which is close enough to the actual technique that I’m going to count it. Her jaw sets and releases in a rhythm she’s probably not aware of, working through the hunger in increments while the sunlight brushes her skin again and again, each touch something she has to ignore consciously. The early morning light catches the sharp line of her cheekbone in a way that makes my chest do something I’m categoricallynotgoing to examine right now.
Four minutes pass.
Four and a half.
Then five, and something shifts in her posture, a fraction of the tension bleeding out of her shoulders. Her hands go from actively pressing into the earth to simply resting there, grounding instead of bracing, and for the space of five seconds, she looks like a person who has found something approaching stillness, who has managed to wedge a sliver of calm between herself and the twin irritations of hunger and sunlight.
“Five minutes,” I say quietly.
Her eyes open. Something moves through them, surprise, then a complicated satisfaction, then the immediate work of containing that satisfaction before it becomes anything too obvious.
“Don’t,” she growls, preemptively.
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were about to be encouraging in a very Rogue way, and I’d like to maintain my dignity, thank you.”
“Your dignity is intact,” I tell her. “Five minutes is real.”
She plucks a pine needle out of her palm, and I say, before I can stop myself, “There are still two more… in your hair.”
