Page 21 of Wretched Thorns

The truck rolled to a stop. Jasper was out before the engine finished ticking.

A man sat on the porch steps. The man looked at him, and stood slowly. Jasper looked back, and never changed his stride. Jasper saw it. The moment of recognition, that minor shift in the man's stance. The man made the critical mistake of hesitating. Jasper didn't. Nor did he give it another thought. His attention was already on the barn.

The doors were closed. Not locked. That gave him pause.

An hour before dawn. A property this isolated. A barn full of something worth guarding. The doors should have been chained, padlocked or at the very least barricaded. Instead they stood shut and waiting. Like whoever was inside already knew who was coming.

Eli came up beside him. The sky was beginning to pale beyond the trees, little more than a thinning of the dark, but it was enough. Jasper looked at his brother and felt something tighten in his chest. Eli's eyes had that look again. The one they got after too many nights buried in forbidden journals. Archivist. More wolf than man. The line between them worn thin.

The leather case hung from Eli's left hand.

Together they walked toward the barn. Neither of them hurried. Neither of them needed to. Whatever waited inside wasn't going anywhere.

***

Glenn was sitting on a hay bale at the back of the open space, where the lantern light was thin and the dust hung in the air the way dust hangs after something has been moved.

He looked up when the brothers came in.

His face made the same expression Jasper had noted in his own backyard, the night Glenn had stood over the destruction he had incited and grinned at Serena like a man delivering a calling card. The same face. Older now, somehow, in a way Jasper couldn't quite put his finger on.

He did not get up.

“Voss,” Glenn said. Just the one word. Then: “I figured.”

Jasper crossed the barn in five strides and lifted Glenn off the hay bale by the front of his shirt and put him against the back wall hard enough that the wall gave a half inch.

“I figured you’d be polite about it,” Glenn said into Jasper’s face. The corner of his mouth pulled. “Disappointed.”

Jasper did not answer.

Glenn’s mouth pulled wider. “I figured, but didn’t count on it.”

Then he moved.

He came off the wall with the speed of a wolf who had been pretending he was tired and was not. Claws came out of his fingers in the same motion that brought his arm around in an arc Jasper had to twist his head to keep his throat out of. The arc clipped Jasper’s jaw instead. The line of it opened along the bone. Jasper did not slow down.

He hit Glenn in the chest with his shoulder and put him through the side of the hay bale.

Glenn rolled. He was good. He came up on the other side of the bale low to the ground, half-shifted, the bones of his face moved into a configuration that was no longer a man’s face and not yet a wolf’s. His teeth elongated. He came in fast.

They went into each other.

Jasper had a wolf’s reflexes and pack discipline, and Glenn had the kind of speed only a wolf who had done forbidden things to his own body could have. For a stretch of the next several breaths the barn became a place where two wolves were trying to put each other on the floor. Jasper took claws across his ribs through his shirt. Glenn took Jasper’s elbow through the side of the head hard enough that the loose end of one of Glenn’s teeth came out into the dust, and the partial shift hesitated for the fraction of a second Jasper needed.

Jasper put him down.

He put a knee on Glenn’s neck and he held him there. Glenn’s wolf was still pressing at the inside of his face but there was nowhere for it to go. The half-formed claws scraped at the dirt floor. A line of blood ran down from one of Glenn’s ears.

Jasper did not move.

“Where is she?” he asked.

Glenn smiled. The smile had blood in it. “Who?”

Jasper bent his head closer.

“Fillion. I will take your throat out with my teeth in this barn tonight if I have to. And then I will rip your balls off and put them on the hay bale beside you. Your fucked-up wolf might heal things out of the ordinary, but I swear to you it will not heal that. Every wolf you meet for the rest of your unnatural life will smell what you let happen here. Where is she?”