Page 43 of Property of Prophet

“What kind of something?”

“An Ancient, Calix, one of the first to fall, older than most of what we know. He’s been at the tree line. He wants my grace... well, what’s left of it.”

“Fuck.” A pause. “What does he want it for?”

“To finish something he started a very long time ago...” I pause. “He’s not working alone. I’ve had things at the perimeter for weeks, something running the tree line at night, a wolf that wasn’t right, movement that reads human but isn’t behaving like it. He has people. How many, I don’t know yet.”

“Understood.” The flat register Blade shifts into when he’s already planning. He’s quiet for a moment. Not hesitating, only processing. “How long?”

“Days. Maybe less.” I look at the window. The spruce stand in their line, patient and indifferent. “He’s deteriorating. That makes him faster, not slower.”

“What do you need?”

“All of you,” I say. “And you come on her terms.”

“Whose terms?”

“The woman whose cabin I’m in. Whose mountain this is...” I pause. “She’ll have a rifle on you the whole way in from the tree line. She won’t lower it until she decides you’re trustworthy, and she doesn’t decide quickly. You’ll introduce yourselves and wait.”

A pause. I can almost hear Blade turning this over, the sound of a man working every angle. “Who is she?”

“She’s why I’m still alive,” I say. “Her name is Lily. She pulled me out of a crater and kept me through the winter and didn’t ask for anything back. You treat her with that in mind.”

More silence. Different in quality from the first, something in it I haven’t heard from him before, or haven’t heard in whatever portion of the past I can access. Something almost careful.

“Understood,” he says.

We work through the rest of it fast, the way men who’ve sat at the same table for years work through things. No excess, no repetition, each of us carrying our half without needing it spelled out. He’ll bring the full team. The terrain will dictate their approach. No road access means one thing for a group of men who are not entirely men, and we both know it.

“In their forms,” I say.

“Yeah.” No hesitation. “Two days.”

“Good.”

“Prophet.” His voice drops slightly, not softer but steadier. “You’d better be standing when we get there.”

“Working on it,” I say.

The line goes quiet. I set the phone on the table, sit with the cut on my shoulders and the coordinates still glowing on the screen, and for a long moment, I don’t do anything at all.

Lily turns around. She reads whatever is on my face the way she reads everything, clinically and thoroughly, before she lets herself react to it. She’s been doing that since the first morning I was conscious enough to have a face worth reading. She moves to the table and sits across from me, and neither of us speaks.

The stove ticks. Bear is somewhere behind me, the warm weight of him not quite touching my leg but near enough to be felt.

“Two days,” I say.

“Two days,” she repeats. Not a question.

“They’ll come in from the north ridge. You’ll hear them before you see them...” I pause. “They’ll be in their forms. I should tell you what that means.”

“Tell me,” she says.

So, I do. I start with Blade, a Kodiak bear shifter, president, the man who is my brother but also the one who keeps us all in line and alive. Lily listens without expression. I tell her about Ranger, a werewolf, our enforcer, the kind of man whose wolf is always closer to the surface than the skin. Her expression stays level. I tell her about Fury, a hellhound, our sergeant at arms, who walks around trailing heat in a country that runs thirty below. Something moves across her face. Not disbelief, but the precise, controlled recalibration of a scientist receiving data that doesn’t fit the current model.

“Vampires,” she says.

“Vex. VP. Centuries old, not decades.”