Page 116 of Dead Drop

He catches me watching.

"You're awake," he says. Not a question.

"You didn't wake me."

"You needed sleep." He turns back to the fire. The meat sizzles. "You always need sleep. You don't always take it."

"I was on a patrol."

"You were on my cock. That's not a patrol."

I laugh. The sound startles Maren. She twitches, makes a sound, settles. His tail tightens around her briefly. His hand resumes the gentle pat.

"How long was I out?" I ask.

"Four hours. She ate twice."

Four hours. Two feedings. He managed both. He managed everything.

I used to think competence looked like a gate watch rotation executed clean. Fourteen fighters moving in sync. The wall held for another night. That was my metric for a long time.

Now competence looks like a nine-foot Nethershade juggling a gourd of breast milk, a spit of venison, and a sleeping infant without dropping any of them. The bar moved. I moved with it.

I get up. My body is warm, loose, the well-used feeling that follows a knotting. The cum has done its work. I can feel it in my muscles, in the ease of my joints, in the way my breasts feel full without the aching pressure that builds when she's overdue.

After every knotting the fatigue lifts. The soreness fades. The persistent ache in my lower back—the one the pregnancy left—quiets. What he is remade me for carrying her. What he is is putting me back together, one knotting at a time. The symmetry of that is almost funny.

I cross to the fire. He shifts to make room—the massive body adjusting, his wings tucking tighter. I sit beside him. My shoulder against his ribcage. The top of my head doesn't reach his shoulder.

Maren is asleep in his arm. Her face is calm. One hand still holding his finger. Her skin is warm brown—darker than my tan, nowhere near the deep crimson of his, something perfectly in between. Her hair is dark red like his, thick and already curling at the temples.

The horns are what people stare at. Small, white, rising from her crown like polished bone—nothing like his massive dark ridges. Something new. Something no Shade has ever had. They curve gently back from her forehead, no larger than my thumb, smooth to the touch. I run my finger over one sometimes while she nurses. She doesn't flinch. They're part of her the way my scars were part of me.

Her tail brushes the ground when she stands, which she can't do yet. It's short, pale-furred at the tip, and it curls around my wrist when I hold her the way his curls around my waist. She can't control it. It moves with her moods—tight when she's hungry, loose when she sleeps, searching when she wants to be held.

Her eyes are mine. Blue. My father's blue. The color that marks her as something with human blood running through it.

"The boundary markers held," I say.

"I checked."

"The stream crossing needs reinforcement on the east side. The snowmelt is undermining the stones."

"Tomorrow."

"And I want to extend the patrol route past the old highway. Petra sent word—Ordained activity two territories south."

"We'll go together."

I lean into him. His warmth against my side. The fire between us and the falling dark.

He passes me the first piece of meat. Cooked through, sliced thin, laid on a broad leaf he uses as a plate. I eat. The deer is good—gamey, rich, with the mineral edge that comes from canopy-fed animals.

He eats beside me faster, less delicately, tearing strips with his claws and his teeth. Some things the mutation didn't change. Some things it made more efficient.

The canopy closes overhead. The leaves rustle. The stream murmurs far below. The nightbird starts its two-note song—the sound I've been falling asleep to for months, the sound that meansthe territory is quiet, nothing is coming, you can rest.

Somewhere out there, the world is what it is. The Ordained, the Cages, the Stained. Brother Lief and his silver smile. The wasteland stretches in every direction, with its ruins and its hunger.