Page 96 of Bought for Blood

“I’ve been busy, mademoiselle.” He has a cloth in his hand.

“There’s nothing near this door that needs cleaning. You’re checking that I’m in the house.”

Yves stops walking. He folds the cloth over twice before he looks up.

“Yes,” he says. “I am.”

“Why?”

“Because he asked me to.”

I go out to the yew hedge at three, because sitting doing nothing is worse than moving.

The cold is clean after a night of stale study air. I walk the gravel path with my arms folded, and my wolf comes up the moment my boots hit the ground. She wants to run down the drive. She wants to go out the gate at the bottom of it, and past the gate she wants to get on the road. Her nose is pointed down the hill in exactly the direction the weight is pulling.

No. He’s coming back up that road, not down it.

She doesn’t argue. She pushes.

It isn’t like the ward, where she’d stir and settle because there wasn’t anything left in her. She’s fed now. She’s strong. She leans into the front of my chest with her whole weight, and my next step lands crooked, and the step after that isn’t mine.

“Wait,” I say out loud, to nobody. “Wait—”

She doesn’t wait.

The shift takes me down onto the grass. It’s fast, and there’s no pain in it—there never has been—just my hands gone before I finish falling, the ground swinging up close, my clothes tearing somewhere behind my shoulders because nobody asked me toundress. The world arrives through my nose all at once. Frost. Woodsmoke. Diesel off the men on the wall.

She runs.

We’re across the lawn before I catch up to what’s happening, past the fountain, down the slope with the gravel drive unwinding on our left. The gate stands at the bottom, iron and floodlit, and there’s a man there turning toward us with his hand going inside his coat, and she doesn’t care. She’s not going to stop. She’s going to go through him, or over him, and then she’s going to run north until her feet give out or she finds what’s pulling us.

Stop.

She doesn’t.

STOP. They’ll catch you. Lock you up. And then nobody goes to him at all.

That reaches her. Not the danger—she has never cared about the danger—but the last part. Nobody goes to him.

She breaks off the drive and pulls up in the wet grass, sides heaving, forty feet short of the gate. The man by the gate stays very still with his hand inside his coat. Smart. We stand there looking down the road where it curves away into the trees, and everything in her is pointed along it. I make us turn around.

It takes three tries.

I walk back up the hill on four feet, slowly, past the fountain, and she gives me the body back at the garden door, unhappy about it, one piece at a time. I come up off the grass on two legs with my breath steaming and nothing on.

Yves is standing at the door with a coat over his arm.

He holds it open for me and looks at the hedge while I put it on, as if the hedge is what he came out to see.

“The gate man will want an explanation,” I say.

“He’s had one, mademoiselle. Before you were down the first slope.” He closes the door behind us. “Come in by the fire.”

“Yves. She’s never done that before. Taken over.”

“No,” he says, and doesn’t ask who I mean. “It’s been that kind of day.”

The sun drops off the ridge at four. The floodlights on the wall come on, and the men under them stay where they are. There are more of them tonight than there were last night.