“Wait!” A woman’s voice outside. Not so flat and expressionless now. Screaming. “You don’t—”
A roar cuts it short, and the door bursts in. It doesn’t open. It leaves the wall, frame and hinges and all, and is simply gone, punched out of the opening and shattering into splinters. A sheet of dust comes down off the ceiling.
Something rolls in through the empty doorway, low along the floor, and stops up against the base of the far wall.
I stare down at it, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. Gray-brown hair, matted dark. Dark-framed reading glasses. Blank stare. And that’s when it lands…that it’s the handler’s head, and nothing else of her is attached to it.
I clamp a hand to my mouth.
Then the doorway goes dark, because something huge is filling it.
Bear.
Up close, he’s bigger than my mind wants to allow. He has to drop his head and turn his shoulders to fit through, and even folded down like that, the brickwork bursts free around him. Brown fur soaked black to the shoulders, dark and dripping, plastered flat with blood.
His head is enormous, the muzzle long and wet, and when it swings toward me, I see the brown eyes in all that mess fix on my face and go still. Everything about him is built to end things, and every inch of it just walked through a building of armed men to stand in this doorway.
A normal person would be backing into the wall. I’m not. The wolf leans toward him, hard, and I go where she goes. She knew it was him rooms ago, when the rest of me was still trying to name a sound. Under the blood-stink there’s mountain air and fir, the smell that’s been at every door of my life for weeks now.
My bear.
He came through all of it to get to me.
The room won’t hold still, but he does. He’s the one fixed thing in it. He crosses the space in two lumbering strides andstops right in front of me, so near his breath stirs the hair at my temple, and he lowers his head and draws in the air along me—my throat, my shoulder, down one arm to the other. At the tape inside my elbow he stops, and a sound rolls out of his chest, low enough that I feel it come up through the floor into my feet.
“Decker,” I choke.
He starts to change back, and there’s nothing gentle about it. The shift moves through him in hard jerks. The great shoulders drop and narrow. The fur pulls back off skin. The long muzzle shortens into a face, teeth going blunt, and all that bulk folds down and in until it’s a man swaying in front of me—bloodied to the elbows, chest heaving, but a man.
From back in the wreck of the hallway a voice reaches us, still a good way off.
“Decker!” Jericho. “Talk to me!”
He turns his head toward it, not his body. When he answers, his voice is so full of gravel it hasn’t finished being a bear’s.
“They’re here.”
The word catches on the way through the fog in my head.They.
“No.” My mouth is slow, the words coming from somewhere far back. “She’s gone. They took her— She’s not—” It won’t line up into a sentence. I swallow a sob.
If he hears me, it doesn’t reach him. He’s already turning back, already reaching for me, hands where the paws were a breath ago. Whatever the wolf has been using to keep me upright runs out the second his fingers close on my arms.
My legs stop holding. I start to drop, and the floor never gets to me, because he does first. His arms come around me and pull me in against blood and warmth, and the cold-mountain smell of him, and there’s no fear anywhere in me—not here, not with him, not in the middle of all this.
The dark rises up to take me, and the last thing in it is him.
Chapter 44
Decker
The chair is as close to the bed as the frame allows. I know because I tried for closer.
She’s under a gray blanket with a line taped into the back of her hand, and the bag on the stand drips slow. Her face has no color. Eleven breaths a minute. I count them. The healer says the count will come up as the drip solution goes in. Until it does, I’ll do the counting.
The blood on me has gone dark and tight in the creases of my knuckles. Somebody said the wordshowerat me in the hallway. It didn’t stick. The bear came back down when I did, but he didn’t go far. He’s lying just under the surface with his eyes open, and every set of feet that passes the door, his head comes up, and mine turns with it.
I’m not fighting him on it. She goes no farther from me than the length of this room. That’s not a decision I made. It’s just the fact I’m living in.
