Page 18 of Property of Prophet

I feel the difference before I can name it. The first one, weeks back, had weight to it, a curiosity, but this doesn’t. This has already made up its mind. It moves through the dark beyond the glass with a kind of patience that’s got nothing curious left in it at all, a hand closing slowly around something it already means to keep.

Bear is up before I am. Hackles up. The sound coming out of him isn’t the high, anxious whine from before. It’s low and goes on for a long time without a break. It’s the sound of something that’s stopped warning and started waiting.

I stand, and the chair scrapes. Lily’s hand is already moving for the rifle on its pegs by the door, reflex faster than thought.

“Stay here,” I tell her.

Her hand closes around the rifle. “Not happening.”

I look at her. “You don’t know what’s out there.”

“Neither do you.”

Fair point.

I cross the room toward the door, every part of me gone still in a way I don’t remember learning but recognize all the same.

The moon catches the window at exactly the wrong moment, or exactly the right one, throwing a bar of cold light straight across my face as I pass it. For one breath, I feel something in me answer that light the way iron answers a struck match—a quick, full brightening that’s got nothing to do with the moon. I don’t see it happen. I feel the air around my face go strange for a second, feel something looking out of me that isn’t entirely the man Lily found in the snow. Then it’s gone, fast as it came, and there’s just the cold and my hand on the latch.

I stand at the door a long while after I open it, watching a tree line that’s gone quiet again, waiting to see if whatever was out there only stepped back instead of really leaving. Behind me, Bear’s growl tapers off. The pressure beyond the glass lifts slowly, the way cold finally lifts from a room once the stove has won its long argument with the night.

I don’t say anything about my eyes. Can’t tell, in the dark, with my back to her, whether she saw. There’s a kind of mercy in not asking, in letting a thing that scares her stay unconfirmed a little longer, if it can. Five weeks in, and I’ve already learned the exact weight of the things I choose not to hand her.

So, I close the door, slide the bar, and tell her, when or if she asks, that it’s gone for now. I don’t say the rest of it, the part I’m only just working out myself.

Whatever stood at the edge of her clearing tonight didn’t come to look at something it didn’t recognize.

It came to look at something it already knew.

Chapter Seven

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Lily

There’s no moon tonight, and at thirty below, that matters more than it should. Moonlight at least gives the snow something to throw back. Without it, the dark past the window is total, the kind that swallows the porch light three feet past the glass. The only thing still working overhead is the stars, hard, white, and close, doing absolutely nothing to help anybody see.

I’ve loaded the stove low for the night. Prophet sits across the table from me, cleaning the rifle I never asked him to clean. It’s become its own quiet thing between us, him finding the chores I haven’t gotten to and doing them before I notice they’re not done. His hands move over the barrel with a care that no man who’s never held a gun should have. I watch his fingers work the cloth down the metal. He makes so little sense, and I have stopped trying to make him make sense at all.

“You’re staring,” he says, without looking up.

“I’m assessing.”

“That what you call it?”

There’s no bite in it. There rarely is, which should be a relief, except it leaves nothing for me to push against. I reach across the table for the oil rag he’s already used, and our hands find the same six inches of space at the same time, and neither of us pulls back from it the way we should.

His hand is warm. It’s always warm, warmer than a body running this much cold has any right to be, and I tell myself that’s the only reason I don’t move mine first. His thumb slowly runs once along the side of my wrist, testing, as if he’s not sure he’s allowed it. I should say something clinical, but the words don’t come, and instead, I find myself looking up at him and finding him already looking at me.

He leans in. Not fast. Nothing about him is ever fast, apparently.

My chest is doing something erratic, and entirely outside my control. I let him close the distance because some honest, traitorous part of me has been waiting weeks for him to do exactly this and has stopped pretending otherwise. His breath is warm against my mouth.

Bear loses his mind.

Not the low growl from before or the patient, watching stillness he gave the thing at the tree line weeks ago. Full bark, high and frantic, the kind I’ve heard out of him exactly twice in five years, and both times it meant something was already inside the wire. He’s at the door in two strides, claws scrambling against the wood, throwing his whole weight at it like he means to put himself through it.

Prophet is already up. Whatever was happening between us half a second ago is gone, folded away like it never started. I’m moving, too, the rifle in my hands quickly, because five years out here teaches your body to do that action faster than your head can follow.