Page 7 of Blood & Bone

“Emergency services are en route, Ms. Callahan. Please remain at the location.”

“I will.”

The line clicked dead. June lowered the phone and looked at the screen. The time read 6:22. The battery was at sixty-eight percent. The signal bars showed three out of four. None of this mattered. She scrolled to her contacts and found the number she’d saved five years ago and never used, not once, not for anything.

The pack channel rang twice. Someone picked up. She didn’t wait to hear who.

“Deacon’s dead. County Road 12, north of Calloway’s fence line. I’ve called dispatch already. They’re on their way.”

Silence on the line. Then a voice (male, low, not one she recognized immediately) said, “Copy.”

She ended the call. The phone went back into her pocket. The ditch was quiet. The blackbirds had moved on. Deacon lay where she’d found him, boots to the sky, and the dew on his collar was starting to dry at the edges where the sun hit it.

June stayed crouched. She knew the order was right. Dispatch first, pack second. That was how the world of licenses, paperwork and official records worked. How it worked when the body in the ditch belonged to a man with a human wife, a human granddaughter and a life that existed on paper in ways the pack’s did not.

She also knew it would cost her. Not with dispatch. With the pack. With the men who would pull up in trucks with cracked mirrors, work gloves still on their hands and find her standing over Deacon’s body having called the county before she called them. There was a hierarchy in moments like this, and she had just stepped outside it. Deliberately. With both eyes open.

The gravel on the road stayed empty. The fence line held its silence. June waited.

Ramsey’s truck came up the road with its suspension complaining on every rut. Black Chevy. Cracked side mirror on the passenger side, the kind of damage that happened when you parked too close to a fence post and didn’t bother to fix it because it still worked. He pulled in behind her clinic truck and killed the engine. Four minutes before anyone else. The pack’s parallel channel had fumbled the relay, or Ramsey had been close enough that he’d heard it on instinct and had come without waiting for confirmation.

June heard his boots hit the gravel. Heavy. Deliberate. The unmistakable cadence of a man walking toward something he already knew and didn’t want to see.

She stood up.

It was a choice. She could have stayed crouched by the body, could have let him find her there with her fingers still warm from Deacon’s neck, could have given him the image of her as witness first and messenger second. She didn’t. She stood before he reached the fence line, because Ramsey Tucker needed to see her face when she said it, and she needed to say it standing.

He stopped three feet short. Looked at her. Not at the ditch. Not at the body. At her face, her eyes, the set of her mouth. Reading her with the same directness, unhurried, giving the moment exactly the attention it deserved.

“Deacon’s dead,” June said. No lead-in. No softening. The words came out flat, the same flatness Deacon’s had carried when he’d stood in her clinic doorway and told her about vampires. “I found him here twenty minutes ago. I’ve already called dispatch. They’re on their way.”

Ramsey’s jaw set. Not a clench. A settling, the give of a shelf taking new strain without breaking. His eyes held hers for one beat. Two. Then he looked past her, at the ditch, at the body lying in the grass with its boots pointed at the sky.

He looked for a long time. June stopped counting after thirty seconds. The silence between them was dense. Not the empty kind, the kind that was full of things neither of them was saying. Deacon’s chest didn’t move. The dew had dried off most of his collar now, leaving a dark ring where the fabric had soaked through. His beard caught the light differently dead than it had alive. Less warmth in it. More shadow.

Ramsey studied his friend as if he were a closed door. Assessing. Measuring the distance. Then he looked back at June, and his voice came out level. Not raised. Not cracked. Level in a way that was worse than either.

“Was it the vampires.”

Not a question. Not quite. The way he said it. Flat, declarative, the cadence of a man stating a fact he’d already arrived at. Left no room for the upward inflection that would have made it a question. It sat between them, solid, physical. An accusation wrapped in three words.

June held his gaze. She could have said yes. She could have said no. She could have offered the comfort of certainty one way or the other, could have given him a target for his grief. She didn’t.

“I don’t know.”

The words hung between them. Honest. Unadorned. The kind of honesty that cost more than comfort would have.

Ramsey’s chin dipped once. A single nod, barely there, the kind of acknowledgment that wasn’t acknowledgment at all but acceptance. Of her answer, of what he’d heard in it, of the thing she hadn’t said but he’d heard anyway. He heard it as yes. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, in how his hands hung at his sides, loose and ready and utterly still.

He didn’t argue. Didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t demand details or timetables or the kind of vengeance men like Ramsey carried in their back pockets for moments like this. He just turned back toward the ditch and stood there, and the stillness of him was the most frightening thing June had seen all morning.

Not the rage. The control. A man measuring exactly how much force the moment demanded and finding it larger than the space allowed.

The space between them held. Morning light caught the fence barbs and turned them to wire-thin lines of gold. The Calloway pasture stretched beyond the fence line, green and rolling, and somewhere in the middle distance a goat bleated, a thin, reedy sound that carried across the empty air and hung there, absurd and ordinary and entirely out of place. The grass in the ditch moved slightly in a breeze that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Deacon’s shirt cuff stirred. Just once. Then settled.

June stood where she was. Ramsey stood where he was. Ten feet of gravel and grass between them, and in that ten feet lay everything that hadn’t been said and everything that would need saying later, when the body was gone, the ditch was empty and the official record had been written in the flat language of county forms and witness statements.

A second engine came up the road. Slower than Ramsey’s had been. Heavier. The heavy rumble of a truck built like old iron, earned, unhurried.