The Settling Song

He knocks at 2:04 a.m.

Not the front. The back. Three soft knocks on the screen door by the dumpsters, where the delivery trucks come, as if he's already learned the shape of your life.

Elke is limp and whimpering against your shoulder. The fever hasn't broken. You've tried the cool cloth, the children's medicine, the song your grandmother sang. Bodie is curled at the foot of her bed holding her ankle because it's the only part of her he can reach.

You carry her down the back stairs because you can't put her down.

Through the screen, in the yellow bulb over the door, Torben looks like he dressed in the dark. Jeans. Bare feet. He's breathing hard, as if he ran across Assay Street on four legs and changed back on the step.

"She's shifting," he says. "Her wolf is trying to come up and her body doesn't know how. It hurts like this the first time. It's worse when the pup's early." His eyes go to Elke's flushed face and something in his own breaks open. "Let me help, Ava."

"How?"

"There's a song." He swallows. "My mother sang it to me. Her mother to her. It's not magic. It's just... an alpha's voice. Their wolf hears it and knows it's safe to lie down." He holds up his hands, open, empty. "I won't come in if you say no. I'll do it from here. I'll do it from the street."

Elke whimpers. Her nails dig into your neck.

You unlatch the screen door.

"Upstairs," you say. "The hall. Not the room."

"The hall," he agrees.

He follows you up the narrow back stairs so carefully he doesn't make them creak, which for a man his size should be impossible. At the top you lay Elke back in her bed. Bodie stares at the giant in the hallway with enormous eyes.

"Hi," Torben says to him, very quietly, from the doorway. He sits down on the floor of the hall with his back against the wall so he is small. Smaller. "I'm going to sing to your sister. It's a dumb song. You can make fun of it later."

Bodie considers this. "Okay."

Torben closes his eyes and begins to hum.

It's low, so low you feel it in the floorboards more than hear it. No words, or none in any language you know. Three notes that rise and fall like a creek over stones, over and over, patient as weather. It fills the little room. It fills you. Your shoulders drop for the first time in six years and you didn't know they were up.

Elke's fingers unclench from the sheet.

Her breathing slows. The gold drains from her half-open eyes and leaves them gray. She sighs, turns on her side, and sleeps.

Bodie is asleep too, sprawled across the foot of her bed like a dropped coat.

Torben keeps humming for a while after. When he stops, the silence is enormous.

He looks at them for a long time. Then at you. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to.

In the kitchen you make coffee because your hands need something to do. He sits on an overturned milk crate by the walk-in like he's afraid the chairs belong to someone else.

"Tell me," he says. "All of it. Please."

So you do.

You tell him about the March night, the new moon, the week he was gone to the Greywold border to settle a fence-line dispute. About the test you took in the cabin bathroom, and the scan you drove to Kalispell for alone because you wanted to surprise him. Two heartbeats. You were going to tell him when he got home. You'd bought two tiny knit hats at the Crossing hardware store, of all places, and hidden them in the flour bin.

"Two," he says, and has to put his coffee down.

You tell him about the knock at nine that night. An elder at the door. Kind eyes. A voice like a hand on your head.

"He knew," you say. "He said elders can smell it, and he'd smelled two. He said the old faction on the council had smelled it too. That they'd never accepted a human luna and they'd never accept twin heirs. He said there was a law. The Sundering law."

Torben's face goes still and cold.

"He said that in the old days, if an alpha had twins, one was given to the river so the pack wouldn't split. He said they'd stopped saying it out loud, but they hadn't stopped believing it. That if I stayed, they'd take one of our babies the night it was born, and you'd go to war with your own council to stop them, and you'd die, or the pack would tear itself in half." Your voice cracks. "He said I had to go. Tonight. Before you got back. Because you'd never let me."

"No," Torben says. "I wouldn't have."

"He gave me money. A bus schedule. And a vial." You hold your thumb and finger apart. "Hush, he called it. He said if I drank it the bond would go quiet, and you wouldn't be able to follow me. That if you followed me, they'd follow you. He told me to drink it and wait until midnight and walk out by the bridge road, and someone would be waiting to drive me."

"And you did."

"I drank it. Around eleven." You stare into your mug. "I couldn't wait. The cabin smelled like you. Your coat was on the hook. I couldn't sit in it for an hour. So I left at a quarter past, on foot, by the lake trail up to the highway instead. I didn't want to pass the bridge." You can't look at him. "That's where you asked me."

He makes a sound like you hit him.

"From the ridge," you say, "I looked back. And it was burning. All of it. I thought they'd come for me. I thought he was right." Tears are running down your face now and you let them. "So I kept going."

For a long moment there's only the hum of the walk-in.

"Who," Torben says, very softly. "Who came to the door, Ava?"

You open your mouth.

You see kind eyes. A hand on your head. Never tell him it was me, child. They'd kill me for warning you. Six years of that promise. Six years of gratitude to the only person in the pack who tried to save you.

"I promised," you whisper.

He looks at you for a long time. Then he stands, takes the pen from behind your ear, and writes on the top sheet of the order pad by the register: ten digits, in hard square capitals.

"I'm across the street," he says. "I'm not leaving the Hollow. I'm not taking anything. I'm not going to make you do anything." He sets the pen down. "But I'm not going to lose you twice, baker."

Baker. Nobody has called you that in six years.

The screen door bangs softly behind him.

You stand in the kitchen with the order pad in your hand. You hear him cross the gravel. You hear the Prospector's office bell. You hear a truck door.

Your thumbs move before your head can stop them. You save the number under nothing, just a blank space. You type four words.

Is this really you?

You send it. You set the phone face down on the counter like it might bite.

It buzzes before you've let go of it.

it's me. don't block this.