“There’s a hot spring vent on the second switchback and you didn’t mention this?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Take me there. Today. After the bite.”
“After the bite.”
She’s up before I finish uncurling, already at the workbench, already writing.
The morning bite is on her neck, the left side. She tilts her head, I lower my mouth, and the noise she makes goes through me.
She’s made this sound every morning since the first bite, and I can’t get used to it; my venom surges every time, and every time I have to clamp down harder. Today I hold two seconds past the dose, and she doesn’t call it out. She tips her head further and gives me more of her throat, and the surge that goes through my glands is so strong my vision blurs.
I pull back. She opens her eyes. Neither of us says anything about the extra seconds.
“The vent,” she says. Her voice is rough. “Now.”
The walk down is forty minutes. She keeps up, her boots on the rock sure and unhesitating. The morning is bright and cold, the sky clear.
I’m ahead of her on the switchbacks, and when the path narrows she’s close behind me, close enough that I can feel her body heat against my tail.
I know every foot of this mountain, two years of hunting and walking and watching the approaches: the choke points where the rock walls close in, the wide section at the second switchback where someone could camp unseen, the ice shelf above the eastern approach that would bury anyone underneath if it let go.
At the vent, steam rises in a column. She crouches at the edge and examines the mineral deposits, scraping samples into a vial, testing the water temperature with the back of her hand. I watch her work, the way her hands move, careful and certain.
“The sulfur content is high,” she says. “And there’s calcium carbonate in the deposits. This lets me split the killing half from the bonding half, no heat.” She looks up at me. “This changes the timeline.”
I don’t understand half of what she said, and I don’t need to. Her face is enough, the way it opens when the problem gives her something to work with.
“You’re pleased,” I say.
“I’m very pleased.” She stands and brushes her knees. “This is the first real lab resource I’ve had in ages. You’ve been sitting on a sulfur vent for two years and using it for nothing.”
“I used it to keep warm.”
“That’s nothing.”
She looks up at me from three feet below, and the corner of her mouth moves, not quite a smile, close. The mountain wind pushes her hair across her face and she doesn’t fix it.
“Thank you,” she says. “For the crystals. And the hare.”
“The hare is just food.”
“The hare is the first food anyone’s given me in a while that wasn’t handed over in exchange for leaving faster.”
The bonding response surges, and this time I don’t clamp it down. I let it rise, let the warmth fill my glands and sit there, and watch her standing in the steam with sulfur crystals in her hand and the wind in her hair.
The walk back is slower. She asks questions about the mountain, not her science questions but real ones: how long I’ve been here, what the first winter was like, whether I can hear the river from the cave when the ice breaks in spring.
I answer in short sentences, but something in the space between the sentences is different. Less guarded.
At the narrow section of the trail, where the drop is steep on the left, she loses her footing on the shale, and my tail catches her before she falls, wrapping around her waist and pulling her back to the path. She grabs my arm, her fingers closing around the scales above my wrist, and she holds on for three seconds longer than she needs to.
“Thanks.”
“The shale is loose here.”
“I noticed.”
