Page 72 of Property of Prophet

Sleep starts pulling at me the way it hasn’t in five years, with another heartbeat for company. Beyond the frost-furred window, the night stands clear and enormous, stars strewn thick across a sky with nothing left to throw at me. Alaska has settled into her deepest stillness, the kind she saves for the coldest nights, when even the wind gives up its arguments.

Out there, the temperature could kill a person in an hour.

Out there, believers dream of a broken god.

In here, the stove burns and the furs hold our shared heat. A man who fell out of Heaven breathes slowly and evenly beneath my cheek.

Out there, the temperature could kill a person in an hour.

Neither of us knows what to call this. Nothing in my medical vocabulary covers it, and apparently nothing in his ancient one does either. But right now, under my hands in the dark, it doesn’t need a name.

Whatever tomorrow asks of me, this is what I will be defending.

Chapter Nineteen

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Fury

Snow dies a foot short of me, the way it has since the world was young. It falls, it softens into rain against the heat I carry, then it steams off into the dark. The south tree line wears a ring of bare, wet ground wherever I stood through the night.

Alaska resents me for it.

The mountain can take a number and wait its turn.

Dawn is still an hour out, and the Devoted are moving, not toward us, but around us. They have been widening their circle since midnight, drifting through the spruce in pairs, spacing themselves along the ridgelines with a patience no sane human owns at forty below. My ears track their boots through the snow. My nose does the rest.

A hellhound counts souls. It is the oldest part of the work, older than the fire, older even than the gate. Every soul carries a weight, and every weight leaves a scent in the air. Both of them tell the truth, even when the mouth attached to them lies. So, I have walked my arc all night, melting a black path through the drifts, sorting heartbeats out of the wind.

Forty-two exactly, and I count the bastards twice because I don’t like what the number does to my gut. They’re spread through the wilderness in a rough wheel with this cabin sitting dead center, every one of them facing inward and waiting.

Some of them are dying. I can smell the grace-rot coming off the eastern ridge, scorched and sickly beneath the cold. Calix is cooking them from the inside out, and still the stupid bastards hold their ground. Men with futures hesitate, but these people have already spent theirs.

Under the rot, fainter, I catch the other thing... hope. Curdled, fermented, and long past saving, but hope all the same, forty-two variations on the same ruined sweetness. Grief looking for a door, sickness looking for a cure, and faith looking for a god who answers.

He farms it. He plants himself in the middle of human wanting, and he harvests.

Hell never disgusted me. Hell is honest work, debts collected, sentences served, a ledger kept to the last decimal of the last soul. This disgusts me. My hackles have been up since midnight, and the snow around my paws has not survived a single flake of it.

The count travels back with me through the trees when the sky finally starts to gray. By the time the cabin comes into view, I am on two legs again, dressed in the spare clothes Rooster packed, steam lifting off my shoulders in slow ropes. Bear meets me at the edge of the clearing, gives my scorched trail one offended look, then escorts me in anyway. The dog has opinions about most of us, but he keeps them loudest for me.

Inside, the cabin smells different this morning.

Two scents fully combined now. His and hers, no line between them, no telling where one ends. Part of me wonders if they both know it. Another part doesn’t care. He wants her. She wants him. Love is not in my wheelhouse, but I know it when I’m standing in it.

Prophet stands at the stove with his sleeves pushed up, working eggs in a pan while Lily cleans her rifle at the counter. Neither of them touches, but they don’t have to. Whatever happened in this cabin last night is hanging in the fucking air.

Hollywood is forty dollars richer and is insufferable about it. He caught my eye when I came through the door and mouthed the number at me, grinning the grin his kind were built with.

“You’re a parasite.”

“A rich parasite.”

Rooster looks between Prophet and Lily. “I had sunrise.”

Lily doesn’t look up from her rifle. “Would either of you like to finish that sentence?”

Rooster suddenly finds his coffee fascinating, and I grin despite myself.