Page 30 of Blood & Bone

“Yes.”

She nodded once. The nod carried the same economy as his answer. Acknowledgment without elaboration, the transaction of information between two people who treated words as tools rather than ornaments. She turned to go. Her boots found the gravel, already oriented toward the path that would take her back to Main Street.

Marcus said, “Your name.”

She stopped. Half-turned. The morning light caught the dark of her curls and did nothing with it.

“Delphine Marchetti.”

He reached into his coat pocket. Found the pen he carried. Ballpoint, cheap, the kind doctors had been carrying since ballpoints were invented. He wrote her name on the paper bag in his handwriting, which was blocky, utilitarian, the kind that belonged on a prescription pad. The ink sank into the paper. Her name sat there, his below it, the transaction recorded in the most basic terms available.

She watched him write. Said nothing. When the pen went back into his pocket, she resumed her walk down the gravel path. Her footsteps faded. The sound of boots on stone gave way to the sound of wind in the trees beyond the Victorian, and then to nothing at all.

Marcus went inside. Closed the door. The latch caught with a soft click that echoed in the quiet room. He checked Briggs’s pulse again. Two fingers at the wrist. Fifty-six. Steady. The kid’s sleep had deepened. His face had relaxed into something that resembled peace, or the closest approximation of peace available to a body that had spent the night fighting something that should have killed it.

The bag sat on the side table. Delphine Marchetti. His handwriting. The three jars inside, glass against paper, their wax seals pale and still cold from the walk over. Wormwood. Black salt. Yarrow. Components for a working he hadn’t described to the woman who delivered them because she hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t offered. The space between those two absences was where trust lived in Ashton Grove: in what was carried without being named, never in what was said.

By the following week, four wolves who had been on that sidewalk outside Mario’s had quietly revised their position on the nest. Not publicly. Not with any announcement or formal recalibration. They revised as people revised when the evidence stopped cooperating with the story they’d been telling themselves. Incrementally, privately, in the specific silence of men who had watched something happen that their anger couldn’t explain and their grief couldn’t justify.

Briggs was one of them. He woke Saturday afternoon. Sat up on the cot. Looked at the IV in his arm and the handkerchief on Marcus’s forearm and the closed door of the carriage house where Luca had been standing twelve hours earlier and wasn’t standing now. He didn’t ask what had happened. Didn’t apologize to Marcus or to Luca. Didn’t need to. The absence said everything the presence would have struggled to articulate; he stopped being somewhere they were. In Ashton Grove, where geography was narrative and narrative was fate, that was its own kind of statement.

He took the ring off before he left. Set it on the side table beside the bag of components. The stone was dark. The silver band caught the gray light from the windows and threw it back dull, and nobody in the carriage house mentioned it again.

CHAPTER 12

June’s phone rang while she was still sitting in the clinic parking lot with the engine dead and the keys in her hand. The screen said Emma. She answered.

“It’s Jasmine.” Emma’s voice came fast, tight at the edges. “Terrell’s sister. They found her under the hardware store awning. Main and Caldwell.”

June’s hand closed around the keys. “When?”

“Twenty minutes ago. Ramsey’s there. Sheriff’s tape is up.” A pause. Emma’s breathing was shallow. “It’s the same thing, June.”

“I’m coming.”

She hung up without asking for details. Didn’t need them. The clinic parking lot gravel crunched under her boots as she walked back to the truck. The boarders were inside, unaware. Six dogs, three cats, the evening feeding still two hours out. She got in, started the engine, and pulled onto Cedar without checking her mirrors.

Main Street looked the same until it didn’t. The hardware store sat at the corner of Main and Caldwell, its metal awning stretching over the sidewalk where Terrell Oakes had been unloading lumber three weeks ago. Now the awning threw a long rectangle of shadow that didn’t match the sunlight. Yellow tape crossed the sidewalk in two directions, tied to parking meters and the awning’s support post. A deputy stood at the east end with his arms crossed, watching the crowd.

The crowd was small. Six people, maybe seven. They stood in a loose half-circle at the edge of the tape, far enough back to be respectful, close enough to see. The florist from across the street was there. Middle-aged woman, dark hair, arms wrapped around herself, holding something in. Her shop’s door stood open behind her, the bell still swinging.

Ramsey was inside the tape. He stood with his back to the storefront, facing the street, arms at his sides. Not crossed. Just hanging. His weight was on both feet. His face was set in lines that June had seen before on men who had run out of places to put their anger and were standing in the empty space that remained. Harper wasn’t with him. That registered. Ramsey without Harper meant something had happened fast.

June slowed the truck. Twenty miles an hour. The speed limit. She drove past the scene without stopping because stopping was what people did when they needed to look, and June didn’t need to look. She could see enough from the driver’s window.

Jasmine lay on her back under the awning’s farthest edge. Twenty-three. Dark hair. Jeans and a gray sweater. Her throat was open from ear to ear in a line so clean it looked drawn rather than cut. The wound was dry. No arterial spray on the awning’s metal underside. No fan pattern on the concrete. The ground around her was clean in a way that crime scenes weren’t supposed to be clean. No pooling, no spatter, just the dark stain concentrated at her collar and along her jawline where gravity had pulled what was left after the fact.

Same signature. Same hand. The clinical precision of someone who had done this before and had gotten better at it each time.

The difference was the location. County Road 12 had been isolated. The feed store’s loading dock had been dark. This was Main Street at half past seven, under a lit awning, with people on the sidewalk and cars passing and the florist’s bell still swinging on its hinge. Someone had cut a woman’s throat in the center of town and left almost no blood on the ground, and the crowd standing behind the yellow tape had been close enough to hear it if she’d made a sound.

June kept driving. Her hands stayed at ten and two. The hardware store receded in the rearview, its awning shrinking to a gray rectangle, then a line, then nothing. The streetlamp at the corner was on. Early, the sensor triggered by the cloud cover. And its sodium glow threw the crowd’s shadows long across the asphalt. Nobody was leaving. They stood where they were, watching the deputies move in their yellow jackets, and the wrongness of the scene built itself in layers that June could read without trying: too clean, too precise, too public for the amount of blood that should have been there.

Jasmine was Terrell’s family. Younger sister. Ocelot shifter. June had met her once at a pack gathering two summers back. Quiet woman with Terrell’s eyes and none of his loudness, standing at the edge of the firelight with a beer she wasn’t drinking. They hadn’t spoken. There had been no reason to. Now there was a body under a hardware store awning with a cut throat and dry concrete; the wrongness of it struck June’s chest with a force that had nothing to do with professional distance.

Her jaw set. The truck’s tires whispered over the asphalt where Main Street curved north toward the county highway. She turned off at Cedar, then again at the service road that would take her behind the feed store and eventually to the ridge. The clinic was behind her. The boarders would wait. The wrongness she’d been carrying since Deacon’s ditch had a new shape now, and it had Jasmine’s face, Terrell’s eyes and a throat cut in daylight on Main Street where everyone could see.

The road climbed. Gravel under tires. Trees pressed close on both sides, their branches meeting overhead in the places where the county hadn’t trimmed. June drove with both hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road ahead where the Victorian waited on its rotting foundation and whatever conversation was happening inside those walls had just acquired a body count that the pack could no longer explain away.