I know what it is. I’ve been holding the bear back from making his mark on her, and he’s been patient, and now his patience is done. She’s gone, and the thing between us is half-made and left open. Torbjorn tried to tell me. I asked him what would happen if the bond wasn’t sealed, and he said I wouldn’t want that to happen.
This is what he meant.
It comes up hot, and nothing in me can hold it.
The sound that comes out of me isn’t a man’s. It’s not a sound the bear has ever made either.
The doorframe gives under my hand. I hear it crack before I feel it, wood splitting off the bolt plate. The night guard is backing away down the corridor with his hand on his radio and his eyes wide, and some far-off working piece of me knows he’s right to be afraid.
The animal is at the surface, all the way at the surface, wearing me this time. And what he wants is to go through the wall the door is set in, through the gates around the place, down the mountain, and take apart everything out there until something gives her back.
Boots. Voices. The wing waking up around the sound I made.
And then, when it feels like something’s about to explode, it changes.
I’ve felt this once before, years back, hunting a thing with the power to end me. The moment shrinks away.
The roar drains off. Everything left goes narrow and simple.
She’s not here.
But she’s somewhere. Somewhere is a direction, a distance, a window of hours. That’s a trail. Trails are the one thing on this earth I’ve never once lost.
I burst out through the people gathering in the corridor without seeing their faces. The yard is gray and cold. I stand at the center of it, inhale deeply, and go to work.
Her track is there. Faint, cold, but hers. Out the side door by the storage block, along the building shadow, downwind across the yard. I follow it at a jog, and twenty steps along it crosses another scent line. I stop like I’ve been shot.
Mine.
Her trail crosses my own night circuit. Forty feet behind where I stood at the fence staring at her window. She walked past my back. Downwind, patient, wrapped in her gift, close enough that if the air had turned once, I’d have had her. She watched me stand guard over an empty room, and she kept walking.
I hold back a snarl that surges up my throat.
Now’s not the time to lose control.
I keep jogging. Her path runs to the wire mesh, through at the gate, onto the south road. On the packed gravel of the roadside it goes thin, and a quarter mile down, where the frost turns to mud at the first bend, it ends the way trails end when wheels take over. Boot prints to a road. A road to anywhere.
Jericho catches up to me there. He’s armed, half-dressed, Nadia three steps behind him with her jacket over sleep clothes. They both stop short of me.
“Decker.” Careful. “Talk to me.”
“She’s gone.” My voice comes out scraped. “Used her magic to get past the wing watch sometime after midnight. Walked out the south road. A vehicle took her at the bend.” I look up from the mud, and whatever’s on my face sends Nadia’s hand to Jericho’s arm. “She’s gone to them. She’s trading herself for her sister.”
“How do you know—?”
“Because I set it up.” It comes out flat. There’s no reason left to hold anything back. “I knew what her blood was worth and I didn’t tell her. Someone else did, last night. She came to me, and I confirmed it, and then I let her go back to her room because I believed she’d wait for morning.”
I turn to him. His hand reaches out, hovers near my shoulder, then drops away.
“She’s mine, Jericho. She’s always been mine, and I lied to her, and she’s in a Syndicate vehicle right now because I fucked up.”
Neither of them says anything about the “mine.” Nobody needs it explained—not after the sound the whole wing heard, not with the animal still this close to my skin. Everyone knows now what she is to me. It cost nothing to say, and it fixes nothing.
“Wake Viktor,” Nadia says to Jericho, but Viktor’s already coming through the gate.
He takes it in fast—the mud, the boot prints, me—and I watch it settle behind his face.
“You were wrong,” I say to him. “She didn’t get over it.” It’s small of me. I don’t care.
