Page 64 of Property of Prophet

Outside, my brothers hold the line.

Whatever Heaven took from me, it didn’t take them.

Chapter Seventeen

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Prophet

Outside, the wind moves through the spruce. Snow ticks against the north-facing window, too cold to stick. The temperature has dropped another three degrees in the last hour. Bear knows it before the thermometer does. He shifts at Lily’s feet, tucks his nose tighter under his tail, and goes still again.

I sit with what my brothers have told me.

It takes longer than I expect.

Not because the details are hard to follow. I remember enough now, fragments that have surfaced in the weeks since I fell, that their account fills in spaces I already knew were empty. I remember the cold certainty of the ritual, how it felt from the inside. The light that came for me was not unkind. What happened to me was not punishment. Heaven’s mercy has always been precise, and what fell through me in that moment was still, underneath the force of it, mercy.

What costs me is hearing what happened after.

Blade goes first, elbows braced on his knees, and gives it plain. He doesn’t hedge or shape it for effect. The facts arrive in the order they happened, each one set down and left alone. When he reaches the ritual, his voice stays level, but his thumb finds his opposite wrist and presses there.

Fury takes the fight. His hands carve shapes in the firelight while he talks, mapping where the Devoted came from and how the ground froze ahead of them. The cold arrived wrong, he says, nothing to do with the weather. It moved as though it wanted something. The Devoted came with it, one body wearing forty faces, and describing them pulls his shoulders tight.

Vex takes what came after. He lays each piece beside the next until the pattern stands in the open. The texts he once shelved as too obscure to matter now sit at the center of it, along with every reference he noticed over the centuries and chose not to name. His voice carries no apology. His hands go still on his knees while he says it, and stillness from Vex is its own confession.

He’s as annoyed about being wrong as Vex is capable of appearing, which isn’t much, but I know what to look for.

They tell it completely, every significant beat. The seal site first, and the moment the words changed in my mouth. Kyler, our prospect, was carried home strapped across a ruined bike. The three weeks afterward, when I filed my reports and said nothing about what Heaven’s silence meant. Then, the morning I flew out over the ridge and never came back.

“The night before we rode to the seal site, during church, I saw something at your shoulder.” His voice stays level. “A smear of shadow, too solid to be firelight. It pulsed once, the way a living thing pulses. I blinked, and it was gone.”

“You never said,” Blade says.

“We were twelve hours from the Khorvath. Every man in the room was seeing threats in corners by then.” A muscle shifts along his jaw. “I told myself it was stress, and I believed myself, because believing was easier. Then Prophet fell out of the sky three weeks later, and I stopped believing.”

He looks at me across the fire. “The Khorvath wanted Tessa. The thing at your shoulder had no interest in her. It stood in a room full of us and only wanted you.” His voice does not change, which is how I know what this costs him. “I went through my texts afterward. The references pointed to a Reclaimant. Something was circling you before you ever broke a rule, waiting for what you’d become.”

The fire pops, and nobody interrupts him.

They searched for me after. Ranger ran the high country in wolf form until his pads split. Scout flew grid patterns over the ranges while Vex read until the ink blurred. They found nothing. No tracks, no scorch mark in the snow. Heaven offered nothing, and its silence told them more than they wanted to know. Then a phone rang in Crystal Creek. My voice came down the line from a wilderness none of them could have guessed at, asking for help, remembering almost none of them.

Their account ends where mine begins. The dying light over the ridge, the crater in the snow, the woman who came looking for the cause of it. Those belong to this side of the story, and they are not mine alone to tell.

Then Blade looks at me across the low-burning fire and says, “You knew it was coming. We didn’t figure that out until after. But you knew. And you went ahead.”

“Yeah.”

He holds the acknowledgment for a moment. It isn’t a question, so there’s nothing more to say. He slowly nods once, the way he does when he’s reconciling something he already suspected with the confirmation that it’s true. “And you’d do it again.”

“Yeah.”

The fire settles. A log shifts and sends a small shower of sparks against the grate.

Nobody moves.

Blade says, “Good.”

The word lands quietly. It isn’t absolution. Blade doesn’t deal in that shit. It’s something closer to recognition. He would have made the same choice if the positions were reversed, and he expects nothing less from the men who ride with him.