Page 9 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

We walk like that for a few steps before I cover her hand with mine. My palm settles over her fingers.

The purr starts.

This one rises through my chest and travels through my arm and into her hand, and I notice the moment she feels it. Her fingers tighten, her stride shortens, her breathing goes shallow.

We stop walking. The fog wraps the road and the trees and the streetlamp thirty feet behind us, the others have disappeared ahead, their voices fading into the gray.

She looks up. I look down. Seven feet of minotaur and the fog between us dissolving, and her face turned toward mine, scared and certain and not willing to look away.

My thumb traces her knuckles. I feel each one under the pad of my thumb, and the purr deepens until my whole chest vibrates with it, until the sound reaches the air between us.

She tilts her face up. I tilt mine down. The distance narrows to inches, close enough that my glasses fog from her breath, the left lens going opaque, her face dissolving into copper and warmth.

Headlights sweep the road.

A truck, passing on the coast highway. The beams cut through the fog and throw our shadows sideways across the gravel. I drop her hand. She steps back. The space opens between us and the purr stops.

She stands on the gravel with her arms crossed against the cold, unreadable. I stand on the opposite side of the space with my hands at my sides and my pulse in my ears.

"Goodnight, Thomas."

"Goodnight, Isla."

She turns toward the compound. I watch her walk until the fog takes her.

Chapter 5

Isla

The ranger at Fish and Wildlife tells me they take my report seriously.

He tells me this for the fourth time in five days while I stand at the window of Tom's apartment with my phone pressed to my ear and my coffee going cold on the nightstand. He uses words like "active file" and "regional assessment" and "ongoing monitoring," but none of them mean anything because I've filed nine reports since January and not a single person from his office has walked my fence line.

"Ms. Mackenzie, I understand your frustration—"

"Do you have a timeline?"

Silence. The silence of a man searching his desk for the version of no that sounds like a yes.

"We're coordinating with the county sheriff's office on jurisdiction. These interagency processes—"

"You've been coordinating since January. In March there were snare lines in the state forest. In September there are gutted coyotes on my property and men in trucks telling me I won't own it much longer. That's not a jurisdictional question. That's a threat."

More silence. I hear him breathing. I hear the creak of a government-issue chair.

"I'll flag this for my supervisor."

I hang up. I set the phone on the nightstand beside the coffee and press both palms flat on the windowsill. Eight months. Nine reports. Fourteen snare lines pulled, six trail cameras destroyed, four dead coyotes arranged at my gate, two slashed tires, and one threat delivered through a truck window on my own land. And the best the regional office can manage is a flag for a supervisor who has done nothing since I started calling.

Downstairs, Colt has a table covered in paper.

He called me down twenty minutes after I hung up the phone. The common room table: a laptop, a stack of printed county records, and a map of the coastal ridge marked in red pen. Colt sits with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, two pens behind his left ear, dark circles under his eyes that say he started this before sunrise.

Knox stands at the head of the table. Tom stands behind Colt's chair, arms folded.

"Sit down," Knox says. A suggestion from a man who knows what's coming.

I sit.