Page 83 of Dead Drop

He takes me.

We go down through the canopy on the branch path—his path, carved and maintained, the handholds scaled for something with nine-foot reach and claws that grip bark like iron. I use the climbing hooks he made for me. The metal is warm from his hands.

They bite into the wood with a satisfying thunk, holding my weight while I swing to the next branch. The rhythm becomes meditation: hook, swing, grip, release. The pattern hypnotic.

He matches my pace. This means he walks like something enormous being very patient, his massive body folding itself into the narrow spaces between trunks, his wings tucked tight against his back.

His tail sweeps the path behind us, a reflexive check for anything following. Old habit. Soldier's habit.

The fur on his shoulders is still damp from the morning at the aerie pool. His scent climbs into my mouth—mineral, layered with something green from the canopy, something purely him.

The territory spreads below the canopy in layers. I read it the way I read any landscape: sight lines first, then water, then choke points.

The stream marks the southern boundary—wide enough to slow a ground approach, shallow enough to cross at three points I identify in the first hour. The eastern ridge is exposed. I don't like the eastern ridge.

I tell him.

He listens. Not the way Dov listened—politely, already deciding. The way a soldier listens to another soldier.

His head tilts. His tail tip taps against his calf, the thinking rhythm.

"The ridge is high ground," he says.

"High ground with no cover. A Stained patrol could come over the ridgeline and be at the aerie approach in four minutes. You've got boundary markers but no secondary observation point. No early warning system that works if you're away from the aerie."

"I hear them."

"You hear them when you're here. You're not always here. You hunt. You patrol. You—" I stop. He's looking at me with that expression again. The one that says her without the word. "What?"

"You're giving me a tactical briefing."

"I'm identifying a vulnerability in your perimeter. The ridge is a breach point."

"Is there," he says—not a question, more like he's testing the words. The dry amusement in his voice is deliberate. He's playing.

"Don't be smug about this."

"Too late."

The officer's drawl sits strange in his monster's mouth, but he's learning to use it. Post-rut Corvin has sentences. Has humor. Has a voice that sits somewhere between the officer he was and the creature he became.

Sometimes the officer surfaces with such clarity that I forget for a moment what I'm looking at. The amber in his eyes flickers. For a second I see the male he was underneath.

Then I look up. Nine feet of crimson muscle, crown horns throwing shadows in the canopy light, claws that could open me sternum to pelvis. The officer lives inside the monster.

The monster doesn't apologize for existing.

I find the boundary markers as we move deeper. His claw gouges, deep in the bark of the oldest canopy trees, higher than I can reach even with the climbing hooks.

The gouges are layered—some fresh, the wood still weeping sap, some scarred over with years of bark regrowth. He's been marking this territory for a very long time. Before me.

Before the rut that brought me here. Before the Ordained hunting him into the wilderness.

Years of solitary patrols. Maintaining the perimeter of a place no one else was coming home to.

I trace one old marker with my fingertips. The bark is smooth where the wound healed, the scar tissue pale against the dark wood.

That must be five, six years old. Maybe longer. Each season, the tree growing around his claw marks like they were meant to be there all along.