Page 112 of Dead Drop

He looks at me.

He looks at me the way he's been looking at me since the rut—the absolute attention that means I am the only thing in his field of vision. But it's different now. It changed when she was born. The look has a second frequency, a lower register, something that takes in both of us at once. Me and the bundle against my chest. The two things his entire world is built around.

"Southern boundary?" I say.

"Clear. No tracks for six days."

"Eastern?"

"One set. Old. Moving away."

Good. Quiet territory. The kind of morning where the patrol is maintenance, not defense. I like these mornings. They mean the work we've done on the boundaries is holding.

"I'll take the ridge path," I say. "Meet at the stream crossing."

He tilts his head. The considering angle. His tail does a single slow sweep behind him. His cock shifts beneath the loincloth—the prehensile flex that happens when he's looking at me and his body has opinions about what it sees.

I know that flex. I know what follows it. His body has opinions. They're usually good ones.

"The ridge path is steep," he says.

"I've run it forty times."

"Not with her."

He has a point. I concede it with a nod—one of the small tactical concessions that are the currency of our partnership. Not submission. Collaboration. He knows the difference. I made sure of it.

"Lower canopy route. I'll check the new markers on the way."

He holds out his hand. The claws tucked inward, the palm up. An offer.

I step into it.

He lifts us—me and Maren—against his chest. One arm under my thighs, the other across my back, the way he's carried me a hundred times. But the geometry has changed. Maren is between us. Her small body pressed between my chest and the wall of his, the sling holding her secure. She makes the huff again. Then she goes quiet. His heartbeat is under her ear now. The slow, deep rhythm she's been hearing since before she was born.

His wings open.

We drop.

The fall is the part that still gets me. The lurch in my stomach, the canopy rushing up, the specific terror of freefall that my body has never fully accepted despite months of this. His wings catch the air. The descent smooths. We're gliding through the mid-canopy, the branches blurring past, the morning light falling through the leaves in shifting gold patterns.

Maren sleeps. She always sleeps when we fly. The rhythm of his wingbeats, the warmth between our bodies, the heartbeat—she's out before we clear the upper branches.

I check the markers as we pass. His claw gouges in the bark, deep, fresh—he re-marks every two weeks. My additions beside them: smaller cuts, lower, human-height, the dual signature that tells anything entering this territory that it belongs to both of us.

The stream crossing is clear. He sets me down on the bank.

I check the water line, the tracks in the mud, the placement of the stones I repositioned last month to create a better defensive position. The stream is loud with snowmelt. The stones are holding.

Maren wakes. She makes the sound that means hungry—a thin, sharp demand that cuts through the stream noise. I settle onto a flat rock, loosen the sling, open the jacket. She latches with the fierce determination of something that knows exactly what it wants.

Corvin crouches beside us. The mass of him folding down, nine feet compressed into a crouch, his wings settling behind him. He watches.

He always watches when I nurse.

Not with hunger. Not with the rut's urgency. Something else. The total stillness of something witnessing what his body made inside mine. His amber eyes move from Maren's face to mine. His tail rests on my knee. The tip makes its idle circuit—knee, calf, back to knee.

"She's bigger," he says.