“YOU SHOULD TELL HIM,” PIERCE SUGGESTS, NUDGing Lydia in the ribs as they trudge up to the ranch house.
Her packmate’s tone catches her by surprise, lower and softer than she’s grown accustomed to from him, so she nods. The wooden, weather-worn welcome sign on the door ahead knocks in the wind. Though she sees it daily, and has for the better part of a year, she hasn’t noticed it until now—how the dark knots look like bullet holes from this distance, even with her keen vision; how the bark along the edges has flaked where the warp in the wood forces contact with the door on windy nights like this; how many rings in the slice of trunk, each indicating another year of weather, of disappointment, of mistakes, of surviving. Somehow the paint has endured, faded of course, but still legible, in the handwriting of someone likely long since dead.
“Wait . . . ” She shakes her head, her voice catching in her throat so she clears it. “Why me?”
“Victor likes you better,” he offers, opening the door for her.
As she passes him, her arm brushes his chest. He grabs her roughly and pulls her against him in a tight hug. She tenses a moment, then wraps her arms around him. A tear slips down her cheek before being absorbed by his shirt. The hug lasts only a fraction of a minute but it feels as if it could be years before Pierce’s hands move to her shoulders and he pushes her away from him to look at her. He wipes a rogue tear from her skin.
“Don’t cry in front of them,” he warns as a father might. “Bite it back. I’ll wait up for you in our quarters and you can weep until sunrise, if that is how you choose to mourn.”
She nods, both surprised by his understanding and not, such illustrating the delicate balance between competitor and caretaker that living as a pack requires.
“And the Rite of Mourning?”
“Soon. Neither of us will feel up to hosting the rite until we’ve had a chance to mourn privately—Victor will understand this.”
“ . . . and the girl?”
“Well, that’s where you work your magic, Little One,” he says with a sigh, falling back on a nickname he gave her when they first packed. Though it started as condescending and derisive, it fell out of use for a while before becoming a term of endearment he only used with her in private, out of earshot of even Johnny. “He may well choose to bring us to the tanks after we’ve mourned for failing our mission—in which case, tonight might be our last night together.”
“Got it,” she says with a sharp nod of acceptance.
She barely makes it completely in the doorway when Victor spots her and waves, giving an expectant smile. She glances behind her but Pierce has slipped back out into the night to avoid him.
“Lydia! I’m glad you’re back, I was getting worried. Where are the others?” He looks around for emphasis, not asking the question burning in his throat like bile: Where is the girl, the fifth descendant of Ismae the Bloody?
“Pierce slipped out for a minute,” she starts. And there she stops, unsure of how to continue. “Victor . . . Johnny didn’t . . . ”
“What is it, Lydia?” His brow furrows as he studies her, arms crossing over his chest.
“The girl got away,” she starts again, this time focusing on a different narrative.
“Got away?”
“There was another woman there, one of the Everlasting—she fought like a Praedari . . . ”
“What do you mean ‘she fought like a Praedari’?”
“I mean she wasn’t a Praedari but she fought like one,” she tries to explain, finding it much easier to focus on that woman and the lost girl than on the loss her pack must now endure. So she babbles, unable to stop herself for several minutes as she recounts the night, every detail she can recall in case something they thought inconsequential ignites a spark of recognition in their leader—but his expression remains a non-expression, unreadable.
“And Johnny?” he asks as she pauses, having reached in her account of the night the very thing she subconsciously sought to avoid mentioning, as if by not mentioning it to an outsider she and Pierce could forget, could resurrect their fallen packmate.
She shakes her head no, looking down at her bloodstained Converse. Do not cry, she repeats in her head several times, filling the silence between them such that she cannot move nor speak aloud.
“I’m not angry,” he states.
“You’re not?” She looks up at him, mouth hanging slightly agape in disbelief.
“Well, I am . . . ” he admits. “But the girl is unharmed?”
Lydia nods.
“And you didn’t go after them?”
She hesitates only a moment before shaking her head.
“Good. If the Keepers are on to us they may have led you to an ambush.”
He reaches out and squeezes her shoulder.
“You look as though I’m going to turn into a giant snake and swallow you,” he says with an unconvincing tight-lipped smile. While that exact thought hadn’t crossed her mind, now she can’t erase the image. “We learn from failure. In this case, we’ve learned we’re on the Keepers’ radar—probably someone poking around for information about Ezekiel Winter’s involvement, or his death. We don’t know how much they know, but we know they know something.”
“But the other pack—” but she is silenced by Victor holding up a hand to cut her off.
“The other pack were idiots and almost killed their intended target. Their entire pack was almost brought down by a little girl and a crazy old farmer. You,” he pauses for emphasis and squeezes her shoulder again before letting his arm fall to his side. “You did nothing wrong. You exercised good judgment and should not be punished for that.”
“We could go after her again,” she offers, but he shakes his head.
“If the Keepers are on to us, it’s only a matter of time before they put the pieces together. You’d either be walking into an ambush or forcing their hand—which might compromise the girl’s life. They won’t kill her when they can hold her up for us to drool over. No, this moves up our timeline—but it’s not a crisis.”
“Do you need her to awaken Ismae?”
He shrugs. “I don’t think so—the blood of the four should establish a strong enough connection to this plane to bring her out of her Slumber to the waking world.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
He considers this a moment. “First things first: go rest. If it doesn’t work, I might need you and Pierce again. I would join you in mourning, but I promised one of the kids a tour,” he adds with a sigh.
As she retreats down the hall to the quarters shared by her pack to rejoin Pierce, a familiar tightness wells up in her chest, blooming to her extremities which now tingle. She balls her fists. How dare he send them after some girl he might not even need? How dare he send them to do his errands like hired help, like they’re expendable? Is this what Johnny lost his life over, a maybe? A shaft of wood through his heart because of a misstep by Victor? Victor, whom they follow without question, whose ambition to raise the mother of the Praedari has blinded him to the movements of their enemy. Too distracted, unable to see the forest for the trees. Now Johnny would never again see the forest nor the trees, nor the fruit of their toil here at the ranch, would never see the Praedari take their rightful place as predators, stamping out the Keepers’ antiquated notion of nobility—and for what?
She wheels around but Victor has gone. A guttural sound builds in her stomach and surges from her throat, turning to a scream that fills the now-empty hallway as the predator within climbs up and threatens to follow the path of her voice out. She turns to the wall and puts her fist through some paneling with a sickening crack of the bones in her hand as they fracture, sending sharp tendrils of pain up her forearm. The tears that stream down her cheek stream not because of the pain, but in an attempt to drown out the rage that summons her Beast within.
Don’t let them see you cry.