Page 78 of Property of Prophet

Her pen finally stops, and she covers his hand on her thigh with hers. “I’m scared.” Prophet goes completely still. “Good,” she says. “Now you know I’m not being reckless. I’m terrified, I understand exactly what could happen, and I’m still doing it.”

He leans into her until his mouth is at her temple. “I know.”

“Then stop trying to save me from my own decisions.”

His eyes close. “I am trying.”

I leave them to it and head for the south line. Calix has forty-two people waiting in the snow and thinks that makes him powerful, but he’s made the same mistake monsters always make. He’s counted bodies and called them loyalty.

He hasn’t met ours yet.

Chapter Twenty

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Lily

Bear lifts his head at 4:07 a.m., and the mountain stops pretending to sleep.

No sound reaches me yet. There is only the dog, ears up, body gone from sleeping animal to instrument in under a second. Then the sound arrives, rolling up from the southern tree line, one long note in a register no wolf owns. Fury’s voice carries the way heat carries, felt before it is heard.

Once. Twice. A third time, longer.

They are coming from every direction at once.

My body is moving before the last note fades. Boots, parka, the fleece-lined mitts with the trigger finger cut free. The rifle comes off the rack already loaded, because a woman who counts her rounds twice does not spend the worst night of her life counting them a third time. Twenty-five rounds ride between the magazine and the box on my belt. The notebook rides in the inner pocket against my chest, every step of the ritual written in my own hand, warm as a second heartbeat.

Prophet is at the door, and there is no time, so we do not pretend there is. He does not tell me to be careful. Prophet learned my language months ago, and careful is a wish, and wishes are not load-bearing. His hand comes up instead, palm flat against my chest where the notebook sits, and for one second, his warmth goes all the way through paper, fleece, and bone.

“When the light changes,” he says.

“I move. I know my part.”

“You always do.” His mouth finds my temple, quick and sure. For the length of one breath, his forehead rests against mine. Last night moves between us without needing words, his warmth in my furs, the fact that he offered me instead of a promise. Whatever tomorrow costs, it will have to be collected from both of us now.

Bear shoulders between our legs and receives his orders, the one post he will accept, between the stove and everything trying to reach it. Then the door is open, the cold takes the cabin’s heat in a single swallow, and we are two professionals walking to work.

The ladder waits on the gable end where Blade rigged it two days ago. Rooster is already up there, crouched at the roofline with his coat off in the killing cold, bronze already prickling along his forearms. He hauls me over the eave without a word and points once, southeast, where the ground drops toward the creek. His night eyes have found the first of them.

Then he steps off my roof into the dark, and the explosion of him is silent until it isn’t. Wings the span of a small aircraft snap open a body length from my chimney, bronze feathers throwing back the starlight, and the shriek he releases splits the night from ridge to ridge. Somewhere below, forty-two hearts stumble on the same beat. Mine does, too, and I am on his side.

Flat on the roof mats, rifle bedded on the sandbag, I put my eye to the scope and go to work.

The dark is clear and moonless, thirty-five below and falling. Stars in numbers no city ever allowed. At the northern horizon, a green seam has opened low in the sky, faint still, the aurora clearing its throat. Every breath leaves me through the wool over my mouth in a slow, controlled bleed, because a fogged scope kills people, and tonight none of the people it kills will be me.

Below, the Kings of Anarchy come apart into their true shapes, and no amount of clinical detachment survives the sight whole.

Blade goes first, walking off the porch as a man and hitting the tree line as a Kodiak big enough to make the spruce look undersized. Ranger is already gone, a dark gray streak cutting through the brush, while Flint lets the dragon loose on the eastern line and steam boils off the snow beneath him.

Vex disappears from beneath my roofline and reappears two hundred yards away without disturbing enough snow to fill a teaspoon.

“Show off,” Hollywood mutters.

Scout rises past my position, trailing light, wings a blur of gossamer and frost, both hands already silver.

And to the south, Fury ignites the world.

A half-mile crescent of flame leaps out of dead ground, throwing enough heat against my face that I feel it from the roof. Behind it, Fury walks his line with flames rolling from his shoulders, and there is nothing subtle about the message. This door is closed.