Page 12 of One-Track Pride

"Yes."

"That's not adrenaline. That's not search-and-rescue training." Her voice climbs a fraction and she hauls it back by force. "I have spent four days building a rational file on you, and you just set it on fire in front of me."

"I know."

"Do not tell me you know. Tell me what you are."

"Not here." I take a slow step, palms still out. "There are twenty-nine people on this train who don't have the time for us to have this conversation while the floor fills with water. So I'm asking you for some time. Be the steadiest person on this train. Then you can ask me anything, and I mean anything, and I'll answer it. No more careful, no more half-truths."

For one endless heartbeat she just stares at me, and I watch a dozen reactions surface and get overruled, one after another, by the engineer who logs the hazard and works the problem anyway. When she speaks, her voice is thin, but it holds.

"When we’re off," she says. "Everything. And if you're lying to me again, monster or not, I will end you myself."

"Deal. Front carriage next… Can you run the passenger evac from here?"

"I've run worse with less." She's already pivoting toward the wounded, spine straightening under a weight I can't carry for her. "You. Old man's wife, Barbara, I need you steering people through the rear doors and counting heads out loud. Everybody else who can stand, follow her voice. Move!"

I go, because she told me to. Her voice rises behind me, calm and iron-hard, herding strangers toward the doors exactly as I asked. Whatever she decides about me when the clock runs out, she's decided this part first, and out loud: the people come out. Whoever I am underneath, today we save them together, and I hold onto that as I climb toward the crushed nose of the train and whatever's left of the man driving it.

9

CAMILLE

The last passenger clears the rear doors at the eleven-minute mark, and I stop counting because there's nobody left to count. Thirty-one, plus the conductor and the attendant. All out, all breathing, huddled in the lee of an overturned baggage car while the storm keeps trying to bury us. Leonard's the last off, favoring a wrapped wrist, hauled clear by a firefighter who rode in on a snowmobile and answers to the name Amy.

She's Evander's sister, I clocked the resemblance before anyone said a word, the same steadiness, the same trick of turning a catastrophe into a task list. She got a crew up the service road while the county still had the pass logged as impassable, and I don't have to ask how she knew to come.

I find Evander at the tree line, away from the lanterns, his back to the wreck he pulled people out of.

"They're all accounted for," I tell him. "Every passenger. Two broken bones, a concussion, a lot of shock. Nobody's dying tonight because of that."

"Because of you." He turns, his eyes are ordinary now, dark, nothing burning in them. "You held that car together. I lifted things, you kept people from trampling each other."

"We're not doing this where you hand me credit so I forget what I saw." I stop a body's-length short, close to talk low, far that the distance is mine this time. "You promised everything. So, everything."

He doesn't stall. "I'm a shapeshifter. My family is… We're lions." He watches my face for a flinch. "The Shaws have held this mountain for generations because it's where the pride dens. That's the secret Northstar can't buy and can't be allowed to find. Not the land's value, what lives on it."

The wind fills the gap where my response should go, but I've got nothing. I've interviewed liars and saints and men who'd bankrupt a town without blinking, and I've always had a next question. Right now I'm just cold, staring at a person I kissed an hour before he peeled a roof open with his hands.

"Say something," he says. "Anything's better than that."

"I'm recalibrating my entire understanding of what's real." I pull a breath of freezing air and start talking, because talking is how I think. "Okay. Questions. When you caught me on the ledge… that was you not shifting, holding back."

"Yes."

"The diner, you lifting me on the sidewalk. Every time you've felt inhumanly solid and I just thought I was rattled."

"All that was me keeping the lid on." He shifts his weight, and even that small motion carries more control than any ordinary man bothers with. "I've made sure I make myself smaller so nobody looks twice. Tonight there wasn't a smaller version that got those people out."

"No. I guess there wasn't." I hear my own voice come out steadier than I feel, the investigator taking the wheel because I’m not ready to drive. "Here's what matters, so answer it straight. Did you get close to me to find out what I knew? To manage the outside before I could put Stonehaven on a map somebody dangerous would read?"

His jaw sets. "That's a fair question, and I hate it."

"You knew what I was the day I arrived. An investigator poking at the exact land your family would kill to protect." I hold his eyes. "So tell me the getting-close wasn't a strategy."

"It started as watching you." He doesn't turn away, and I respect that more than I want to. "Amy will tell you I parked myself like a fool, convincing myself you were a threat I had to contain. That lasted about a day, by the diner I couldn't sell it anymore, and I said so on the train, before any of this, when I had no reason to flatter you." A muscle works in his throat. "If managing you were the plan, I ran it badly. I told you the truth in pieces because I couldn't stand lying to you, not because it was smart."

I turn that over against everything I've logged about him. The evasions were never about my questions, they were about this. Nobody reveals a four-generation secret to an investigator as a containment play. You do it because the alternative, me walking off thinking he's a monster who used me, is worse than the risk.