Page 12 of Wretched Thorns

“Until I tell you.”

She walked back across the kitchen.

He thought she was going back upstairs to the phone. He did not turn to watch her go.

***

The bond moved.

Jasper would swear it for the rest of his life. He had been pressing at it the same way the whole night. The same muffled frequency. The same cold wrapping. Then, in the space of a single heartbeat, the bearing changed, the muffling relaxed just a bit, and his hand was off the window before his mind had finished the word.

“Something’s changed,” he said.

Eli was on his feet.

“He moved.” Jasper’s mind was already at the back door. “South. Toward the grove.”

“Mom said—”

“He moved south, Eli. Toward the grove.”

***

The cold of the night air hit Jasper in the chest like a hand.

He took it like a wolf takes water on the first day after a long heat. His lungs had been holding their breath the whole night, and the cold opened them up at the back. Spanish moss moved overhead. The smell of the preserve came up from the soil the moment he cleared the fence: green water, cypress rot, the wet old smell of a Louisiana night that had been holding its breath alongside him.

He didn’t shift. He didn’t trust his wolf with that much control right now. He was barely holding it together as it was.

His legs found the path by themselves. He had run this preserve in the dark since he was a boy. He could have run it blind. The path to the grove was barely a path, an absence in the undergrowth, a direction the land had agreed to over many years of his family walking it, and his feet knew the ground without thinking.

The bond moved with him. Not faster. Not slower. The bearing held south.

Halfway in, his wolf began to note something at the edge of the preserve’s scent. A wolf-scent. Not familiar exactly. Not unfamiliar either. Just something tickling at the far edge of his nose that his wolf was lifting its head toward and that Jasper himself could not pull into focus.

The ley lines came up through the soil before the grove was visible. The particular warmth of them in the bones of his feet. He had been waiting for that warmth since he cleared the fence, and the moment it reached him, his lungs finally loosened enough for a real breath.

The grove meant home, and home was still the only thing in the world that felt safe.

He came through the south edge of the grove at a dead sprint and stopped.

Callum was in the cradle of the great magnolia’s roots.

His face was wrong on the left side. His left eye was closed and dark. His shirt was soaked through with dried blood, rust-colored and stiff. His wrists hung along his ribs where someone had laid them. His mouth was open. His head rested back against the bark, arranged with care.

Breathing.

Jasper’s wolf locked onto the breathing and would not let go.

His mother was on her knees beside Callum.

Her hair was loose. Her hands were already moving over him the way they had moved over Jasper a thousand times when he had been small and bleeding from doing something stupid.

Jasper had not heard her leave the house.

The scent he’d been chasing the last quarter mile of the run was right in front of him now. There was a man at the same magnolia, or a wolf rather.

Big dude. Bigger than Callum, and that wasn’t a thought Jasper was used to having about another wolf. Dark hair. Silver at the temples. Standing three feet from Rowena like he had every right to the air there.