The Elder Who Smiled

"Mine," you say.

It's the only true thing you can give him without giving him everything.

Caius's jaw locks. For one long second he looks at you, and you can see the question still in his eyes, enormous, burning. Then Wilder makes a small sound against your chest, a whimper with no words in it, and the Alpha in Caius wins over the man.

"The moon lodge," he says. "Now. He won't make it two hours to Sallow Creek."

"I'm not going back there."

"Then he dies in your car." He says it flat, without cruelty, the way you'd tell a patient's family the truth. "You know I'm right. You knew it before I got out of the car."

You hate him for it. You hate him more because he is.

Your son is burning in your arms. And nothing, not your pride, not five years of nightmares, not the memory of a hundred wolves watching you break, matters more than that.

"I drive my own car," you say. "I carry him. You don't touch him unless I say."

Something moves across Caius's face. "Done."

You haven't driven this road in five years, but your hands remember every curve.

Past the river. Through the gates of old cedar with the Thornvale wolf carved into the crossbeam. Up the long gravel drive under the firs, Caius's SUV ahead of you the whole way, Van at the wheel and Caius in the passenger seat turned around backward, watching your windshield like he's afraid you'll vanish if he blinks.

Wilder lies across the back seat with his head on your folded sweater, still swimming in Caius's coat. You keep reaching back to touch his cheek at every straight stretch. Hotter. Hotter.

The moon lodge sits in a clearing below the main hall, a round cedar building with a smoke hole in the roof, steam curling out of it into the evening rain. You remember it smelling of wet stone and sage. You remember being sixteen and holding Calla's lantern while she helped a girl through her first shift in the warm water.

Caius is out of the SUV before it stops. He holds the lodge door. You carry Wilder past him without a glance.

Inside, it's dim and warm, firelight on the walls, the round spring in the center giving off steam that smells of minerals and moss. You kneel at the edge and lower your son into the water in his borrowed coat, holding his head.

"It's not enough," you whisper. You can feel it. He's still climbing. "Calla's notes said the Alpha—"

"I know what they said."

Caius kneels across the spring from you. Then, without asking, he starts taking off his shoes.

"What are you doing?"

"What has to be done." He steps into the spring in his jeans and sweater and sinks down into it until the water is at his chest, a few feet from your son. He doesn't reach for him. He just sits there, huge and still, and looks at you. "You said I don't touch him unless you say. So say, Ava."

Your throat closes.

Every Alpha carries something in his blood that a pup's wolf answers to. You know that. You've watched old Alpha Redmayne do this for children when you were a girl, sitting in the spring all night with a feverish pup on his chest. It's not magic. It's older than magic. It's a small wolf hearing the biggest wolf in the territory say I'm here, you're safe, you can stop fighting.

And your son, God help you, is a Redmayne.

"Hold him," you say. "Hold him and don't let go."

Caius lifts Wilder from your arms as if he's made of glass. He settles the boy against his chest, one huge hand spread across the small back, and he starts that low rumble again, the one from the parking lot.

Wilder's eyelids flutter. His fists unclench.

You don't leave. You sit at the edge of the spring with your feet in the water and your hand on your son's ankle, and you watch the man who broke you hold your child through the longest night of your life.

At some point you must sleep, because you wake up curled on the warm stone with someone's flannel shirt over you.

The fire has burned low. The steam has thinned. And in the spring, Caius is still exactly where he was, still holding Wilder. The boy is fast asleep with his cheek squashed against Caius's chest, mouth open, drooling a little on his sweater. His face isn't scarlet anymore. It's just pink. Just a sleeping little boy.

Caius is humming.

It's very quiet. You almost don't hear it. An old lullaby, the one every Thornvale mother sings, about the moon going down to the lake to drink.

You lie still and listen, and something in your chest that has been clenched for five years aches so badly you have to press your hand there.

He looks up. He knows you're awake. Of course he does.

"Fever broke an hour ago," he says softly. "He told me triceratops is the best dinosaur. I've been informed I'm wrong about everything else."

You don't laugh. You want to. You don't.

When you finally get Wilder out of the water and dried and tucked into a nest of blankets by the fire, Caius climbs out of the spring, dripping, his wet sweater clinging to every hard line of his chest and shoulders in a way you refuse to notice. He goes to the door, comes back with something from the SUV, and holds it out.

A phone. Plain, black, new.

"My number's in it," he says. "So I can reach you about him. Only about him, if that's what you want."

You stare at it.

"You don't have to answer," he says. "Just keep it on."

You take it. You don't thank him.

The council arrives at nine in the morning, in three long grey cars that crunch down the gravel drive like a funeral procession.

You see them through the open lodge door. You stand up so fast the blanket falls off your shoulders. Six elders in grey wool coats, their faces older, harder, otherwise exactly as they were in your nightmares. And at their head, leaning on a silver-topped cane, tall and elegant and silver-haired, is Elder Cornelius Vantrell.

The man Caius was looking at, five years ago, just before he said the words.

"Stay inside," Caius says quietly behind you.

But Wilder is awake. Wilder is four, and curious, and wearing an enormous flannel shirt as a dress, and before you can grab him he's slipped past your legs and out into the bright cold morning to see who came in the big cars.

"Wilder!"

Cornelius Vantrell stops walking.

He looks down at your son. At the silver-blond hair. At the amber eyes, glinting in the sun. Slowly, the old man lowers himself onto one knee on the gravel, both hands folded on top of his cane, until his face is level with Wilder's.

Then Cornelius Vantrell smiles.

It's a warm smile. A grandfather's smile. It turns your blood to ice.

"Well, now," he says gently. "Look at you. He has his grandmother's chin, doesn't he, Ava?"