Page 11 of Fated, Allegedly

"Whatever happens next, you keep running west. You don't stop. You don't come back for me."

"That's not a deal I'm making."

"Erin…"

"You've had three weeks to be truthful, but you keep hiding it." I turn my face toward his and our mouths are an inch apart and I just stare at his lips. "I don't take orders from you. I take evidence."

Something in him gives. I feel it go, all through his chest.

"Then you're about to get some," he says.

The dogs lose their minds. Not barking, screaming, the sound animals make when the world violates a rule. Up on the bank there's shouting, boots scattering, a man yelling a range that is far too short. Nash's arm comes off me and he's gone out of the undercut in one motion, and I lunge up after him with mud in my mouth.

Through the alder screen there's a gray wolf in the clearing. It is no bigger than a Shetland pony. Its shoulder is higher, and I see the standing man drive into the ground. It's not fast, it's tactical, cutting the line between the shooters and the trail. Nash is ten feet from it with a man's rifle in his hands, wrenching it away by the barrel, and neither so much as glance at the others. They move like they've done this a thousand times. They move as though they know.

Every measurement I have ever taken in my life stands up and walks out of the room. Then Nash has my arm and we're going, hard, west into the deep timber with the light gone flat and something with a rotor beating up behind us over the ridge.

"Don't," he says, when I open my mouth.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to say a number."

"Ninety kilos," I pant. "Minimum. There is no wolf…"

"I know." He hauls me over a deadfall without breaking stride, and there's a helicopter turning behind us, and his face is grim and strangely, terribly relieved. "Run now. Ask me at the top of the ridge. I'll answer. I'm done lying to you."

8

NASH

We make four hundred yards up the ridge before the helicopter finds the gap in the canopy and puts a spotlight down through it, and I know we're not going to outwalk this.

Caleb's still working the clearing behind us, I can hear him by the shape of the shouting, the men breaking left when he wants them left. Wyatt's somewhere on the north flank moving them like cattle. But there's a second team coming up the drainage on our right, disciplined and quiet, and they've got the high side of the ridge, and Erin is running on a bruised ribcage with her lungs tearing. She stumbles on a root and I get her under the arm before she's down.

"I'm fine…"

"You're not." I put her behind a granite shoulder and crouch so she can hear me over the rotor wash. "Listen. They're going to push us onto the bald in about thirty seconds. There's no cover up there. Somebody has to break their line."

"Then we go back down the…"

"Erin." I take her face in both hands, mud and all, because I need her eyes and I'm never going to get another chance to do this well. Her breath saws. Behind me a light sweeps across the rock and moves on.

"You said you were done lying."

"I am. So here it is, and I'm sorry it's like this." My hands are shaking, which is new. "The wolf in that clearing is my deputy. Caleb. That's not a wolf, that's a man who can be one, and everyone in this county who's ever pulled you out of a ditch or handed you a cup of coffee at my station is the same thing." I make myself say the last part plainly. "So am I."

She doesn't scream, or back up. She looks at me with those green eyes going wide and hard at once, the same face she had over the core sample, refusing to look away from an impossible object.

"Prove it," she says.

"I'm about to. Don't run when I do."

I stand and walk five steps out of cover, and I take my hands off the last twenty years, and I let go.

It doesn't hurt. That's the thing nobody outside believes. It hurts to hold it. Letting go is the relief of finally setting down something you've been carrying.

The world drops and widens. Color goes flat and everything else goes huge, twelve men on the slope by scent alone, the oil on their weapons, the dog handler's fear coming off him like smoke, and behind me, Erin. Sweat and pine pitch and blood from her split wrist and her, the note under everything, the one that's been walking around in my chest since I met her weeks ago.