Page 134 of Tracking Snow

One’s breath shudders out.

He drags himself closer. Every inch costs him. Blood smears beneath him, dark and glossy. He reaches Brexley first, grabs the wolf by the scruff with a shaking hand, and hauls him farther from the street. Then he gets to me.

His arms come under me with careful strength, and my body betrays me instantly, aching, reaching, melting into the familiar hold before I can stop it. I lean into him without thinking. His scent wraps around me, warm, sharp, achingly him, and I inhale it like I’ve been starving, like it’s the only thing keeping me tethered to the world.

"You’ll be safe here until the drug wears off," One says. "It won't be long."

"Don’t go." My tone is begging, and I mean it. After everything, I need him. I want him.

His mouth trembles.

He leans over me and presses his lips to my forehead.

Soft.

Tender.

And then he's gone.

Chapter 42

Don’t Bleed on the Tile

ONE

The smell of a rare, expensive dark roast reaches me halfway across the lawn.

Mother takes her breakfast on the terrace when the weather allows, coffee and a variety of pastries from the bakery on Charles Street arranged on a plate beside a bowl of fruit.

This morning she is already dressed. Navy suit, hair set, lipstick printed on the rim of her cup at seven in the morning. The paper is folded to thirds beside her saucer.

I’m mostly held together with duct tape.

Every breath pulls at the hole in my side, hot and wet beneath the bandage. My arm throbs from wrist to elbow where the wolf’s teeth sank in, the flesh swollen tight enough to make my fingers tingle. Six cleaned the bites as best he could, then wrapped everything until I looked less like a man and more like a badly labeled package.

We should have gone to a hospital.

But we don’t go to hospitals when we’re hurt. We can’t have records of who we are, of what we can do, because it would trace back to Queenie.

We’ve lost a lot of blood, Six points out again.

We’ve lost more than that, Three says.

The pain of losing Four is acute in a way the torn skin and bruised ribs are not. Instead of stinging, burning, tearing agony, the pain is a blank, dead space where a vital part of ourselves lived.

I keep expecting Four to shove his way forward with some filthy joke, some inappropriate observation. I brace for it after every thought. Wait for that familiar warmth to roll through us, reckless and indulgent and alive.

Nothing comes.

Four was never quiet. Even when he wasn’t speaking, he was pressure under the skin, a hand on the back of the neck, the part of us that leaned toward pleasure just because pleasure was there. He was want without apology. He made everything more dangerous, more vivid.

And now the places he filled are like a scraped-out chamber inside our shared mind where something keeps echoing because it expects an answer.

I can’t help remembering Snow’s description of Red’s power. How it is a violation, a stripping of a vital sense or a limb.

She was right, and it’s even more. It’s like discovering the body can survive after the soul has been cut into one fewer piece, and somehow that survival feels like betrayal.

Four, Five whispers, so small I almost miss it.