The North Line

Jory's truck sits at the north trailhead with the driver's door hanging open and the radio still murmuring a country song to nobody.

The blood on the seat is a smear, not a pool. You breathe in. Pine, gasoline, fear sweat, and under it, faint and bitter, something that makes the hair on your arms rise.

"He walked away from here," you say. "On his own feet. He was hurt, but he was moving."

"Which way?" Ansel asks.

You turn in a slow circle. The trail splits three ways into the pines. The scent is thin, scattered by wind.

"I can track him faster on four legs," Ansel says, already pulling his shirt over his head.

"Then go. Take the east fork. Tavish, the west." Kael doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to. The scouts scatter. Then he looks at you. "You and I take the middle."

"I work alone."

"Not in my woods. Not today."

There's no point arguing with the set of his jaw. You've seen it before, at nineteen, when he decided the river current was too fast for you and stood in it waist-deep for an hour so you could cross holding his arm.

You start walking. He falls in beside you.

He doesn't shift. You notice that. Ansel was on four legs in seconds, and the scouts too, but Kael walks the trail on human feet, and when you glance at him he's looking straight ahead with his jaw tight.

The middle trail climbs through old-growth cedar, trunks wide as cars, the light green and dim. Your boots sink into moss. Every fifty yards you crouch, find the thread of Jory's scent, and keep going.

"You've gotten good at that," Kael says.

"I had a lot of time to practice."

"Where?"

"Silverhold. Montana. A swamp in Louisiana where two packs were fighting over a crawfish farm." You step over a fallen log. "You'd be amazed what wolves will kill each other over."

"No," he says quietly. "I wouldn't."

You don't answer that. The trail drops toward a creek. You can hear it before you see it, rushing white over stones, and the sound hits you somewhere under the ribs.

It's the same creek. It feeds the river below, the deep bend where the water slows and turns green. Where you used to swim.

Kael stops walking.

You don't look at him. You don't have to. You can feel him remembering it, the same way you are: the summer you were nineteen, the hot rocks, your mother's old radio playing on the bank. The day the current took your feet out from under you and he dove in after you laughing and dragged you up onto the rocks, both of you gasping, his hand still around your wrist long after it needed to be.

You never kissed. You both wanted to. He was the Alpha's son and you were the healer's girl, and it was enough to sit on the rock with your shoulders touching and watch the stars come out.

"You used to hum," he says. "When you were reading. You hummed on the rock all summer and never noticed."

"I didn't hum."

"You did it in the hall yesterday. While you were reading the toxicology report." His voice is very low. "Same song."

Your throat closes. You crouch to the moss, mostly so he can't see your face.

"Don't," you say.

"I know."

"You don't get to remember things, Kael. You don't get to keep the river."

He's silent so long you think he's walked away. When you look up, he's standing at the edge of the creek with his hands in his jacket pockets, staring at the water like it owes him something.

"I never had it," he says. "That was the whole problem."

Then he lifts his head, and his nostrils flare, and every line of him goes sharp.

"Blood," he says. "Upstream."

You find Jory curled in the hollow of a rotten cedar thirty yards up the creek.

He's young and gangly, with a buzz cut and a scout's green jacket. His lips are gray. Black veins climb his throat in thin, branching lines, like cracks in ice, reaching for his jaw.

"Oh no," you whisper, already on your knees. "No, no. Jory. Jory, can you hear me?"

His eyes roll toward your voice. Unfocused.

Kael drops beside you. "Silverbane."

"Yes."

"Then he's dead. Nothing stops it. My father had the best doctors in three states."

"Your father had doctors," you say, ripping open Jory's jacket. "He didn't have my mother."

You don't think. You let your hands do what she taught them. Pulse: thready, racing. The veins haven't reached the jaw yet. There's still time, maybe minutes. You pull your satchel around and dump it in the moss. You never travel without it. Your mother's old kit, leather gone soft as skin.

"Charcoal," you mutter, unscrewing a jar. "Kael. Water. Now."

"Ava—"

"Now."

He doesn't argue. He's at the creek and back in seconds with his flask full. You mix the charcoal into a paste and get it between Jory's lips, tip his head, massage his throat until he swallows. Then the little brown bottle your mother made you memorize when you were twelve: milk thistle, nettle, and something she never wrote down, something that smells like lightning.

"What is that?" Kael asks.

"She called it moonwater. It doesn't cure silverbane. It slows it." Your hands are shaking. "She was working on a cure when they arrested her."

Jory chokes. Coughs black. You turn him on his side and hold his head while he heaves, rubbing slow circles between his shoulder blades the way your mother did for you when you had fevers.

"You're okay," you murmur. "You're okay, Jory. Breathe. I've got you."

You start humming. You don't decide to. It's the song from the rock, the one from your mother's radio. You hum it until his breathing evens out, until the black lines on his throat stop spreading and, very slowly, begin to fade at the edges.

When you finally sit back on your heels, your hands are black to the wrists and you're shaking all over.

Kael is staring at you.

Not at Jory. At you. Like you're the only fire in a cold room.

"Ava," he says, and that's all, just your name, rough and wondering, as if it's the first time he's said it in years. Maybe it is.

Jory's fingers grab your sleeve.

You bend close. His eyes are open, glassy, terrified.

"Wasn't Ashcrest," he whispers. His breath rattles. "I saw. At the river. It wasn't them."

"Who, Jory? Who was it?"

His fingers tighten until they hurt.

"One of ours," he breathes, and his eyes roll back, and he goes limp in your arms.