Page 87 of Property of Prophet

“Flint will ward the seal before we leave,” he says quietly, reading me the way he reads everything. “He’ll come back every solstice and check the wheel until the mountain wears out. Her master is caged, Lily. And we’re going to make damn sure he stays that way.”

“I know.” My eyes stay on the tree line a moment longer. “I’ve heard prognoses delivered as curses before. It doesn’t mean the tumor gets a vote.”

His laugh moves through me from the side, and the morning resumes.

By early afternoon, the ridge belongs to the wilderness again.

The convoy Blade summoned has swallowed the last of the Devoted, vans, and two chartered buses at the logging road, driven by unsmiling men who owe the Kings favors. Troopers will meet them in town with a story already shaped. The clearing where an angel was buried looks the way clearings look. Fresh snow is already at work on the evidence, and Alaska continues her policy of magnificent indifference.

The brothers gather on my porch, and what happens there has no ceremony in it at all.

Blade crosses to where Prophet sits on the top step and closes a hand around the back of his neck. One brief grip, then he lets go. Fury appears with coffee and puts a mug in Prophet’s hands unasked, black, fixed the way Prophet makes it. Ranger says nothing whatsoever. He sits on the step beside him, shoulder to shoulder, and stays.

My throat manages it fine, but my eyes require a moment of supervision.

Then Fury crosses the porch a second time, and a mug arrives in my hands as well, black, with one sugar. Nobody here has ever asked me how I take it, which means somebody watched. He nods on his way past, the economical kind exchanged between people who held a line together, and the heat that comes off him is as pleasant as a woodstove.

“Doc,” is all he says. From the hellhound, it lands with the weight of a patch.

Rooster, of course, cannot leave a sacred silence alone.

“Slept all right in the end,” he announces to the porch at large, stretching until his spine crackles. “Once the service let out next door.” He tips his mug toward Prophet with a grin built for slapping. “Years of sermons, brother, and it turns out your best preaching is in vowels only. Thought the cabin had caught the spirit. Kept waiting for someone to shout amen, and then, hell, someone did.”

Scout chokes on his coffee. Hollywood’s grin arrives with theatrical slowness, and even Blade’s mouth commits a small movement.

Prophet sips his coffee, entirely serene, a man with centuries of practice at absolution.

The look I give Rooster has ended arguments in three hospitals and one operating theater. It crosses the porch, lands, and settles. Rooster’s grin dies with honor. He becomes vividly interested in the bottom of his mug, then in a knot in the railing wood. Beside him, Vex lets one slow smile show exactly two teeth.

“Ma’am,” Rooster says to the railing.

Blade’s voice reaches me through the open door later, pitched low and meant for one man, while my hands sort what remains of my supplies.

“Talk to me about after.”

“After.” Prophet’s voice turns the word over. “I don’t know what I can offer the chapter now, Blade. The grace is gone. What’s left of me reads maps and makes coffee.”

“You were never only the chaplain.” The growl in it is quiet and absolute. “You were our brother first, before Heaven’s leftovers came into it. You know things no library owns. Knowing doesn’t leave when the grace does.” A pause, boots shifting on old boards. “And you’ve got something else now that the rest of us ride a long way to look at.”

No answer comes for a while. Through the doorway, without meaning to, I watch Prophet’s eyes find me across my shelves of gauze and iodine, and hold.

“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”

He asks me at the overlook, of course. The man understands terrain.

Late light, the two of us are alone above the whole white world, and Bear is off insulting a raven somewhere below. Prophet stands beside me at the rail of rock the way he stood the morning after the memories came back, and when he speaks, he speaks carefully, a man placing weight on new ice. “I want to call you mine,” he says. “If you’ll allow it.”

The word does what he knew it would. It sits up and presents itself for examination.

“Allow.” My breath fogs and vanishes. Five years of making every decision alone, and even now, he makes damn sure this one is mine. “I’ll allow it.” His whole body shifts toward me, and I hold up one hand. “But I’m not wearing anything stamped Property Of. Not a cut, not a ring with a brand on it, nothing with an inventory number.”

“I’d never ask you to.” No hesitation lives anywhere in it. His scarred hand lifts and tucks the loose hair back from my face, and his voice drops into the register kept only for me. “I’m asking you to come down from the mountain, Lily.”

The valley spreads out below us, vast and blue with evening. Somewhere down there are roads, and a clubhouse full of impossible men, and a world I resigned from five years ago with prejudice.

“Yes,” I say.

His hand comes to the side of my face, and for a moment he only looks at me, as if he’s checking the word against my eyes and finding it true.