Page 15 of Blood & Ash

June’s jaw set. The muscle along her cheekbone tightened. Luca stood beside her, still as stone, his hand now resting at the small of her back. It rested there without steering her, and the weight of it was warm through her jacket.

“The pack is fine,” she said.

“Good to hear.” The man set the pen down. “Real good to hear. Because a man gets to wondering, you know? When wolves start getting sick, and the person who treats them stops coming to town, a man wonders who benefits from that.”

The words sat between them, heavy and final. The man from the barbecue aisle had gone very still, one hinge held between his fingers, his breathing audible in the quiet store.

Luca said nothing. His hand stayed at June’s back. His dark eyes moved to the hardware man and held there. The look was flat and considered, from someone who had learned in two centuries exactly how long a man could hold a stare before he broke.

The hardware man broke first. He reached for the receipts and shuffled them into a stack. “Well. You folks have a good day. Let me know if you need anything.”

They didn’t need anything. June turned and walked to the door. Luca followed, his hand still at her back, and the bell above the door rang as they stepped out onto the sidewalk.

The street was different. The same delivery truck idled. The same two men crossed at the intersection. But the air had changed. The question nobody said out loud had been said, finally, in a hardware store by a man who sold garden hose, and now it lived between the buildings, under the awnings and in the eyes of every person who watched June Callahan walk down Main Street with a vampire’s hand at her back.

Who benefits from sick wolves?

The pack’s medic. The woman who treated them. The woman who’d stopped coming to town.

June kept walking. Her jaw was set. Her hands were loose at her sides. Luca matched her pace without speaking. His hand stayed where it was, warm and steady, and she didn’t flinch away from it because flinching would mean she’d heard the question, she had, and she was carrying it with her down the street toward the lodge where the pack was waiting, and the weight of it was something she would have to set down before she walked through that door.

The lodge’s back room smelled of coffee gone cold and wood smoke from the stone fireplace that hadn’t been lit in weeks. A long table dominated the center, scarred oak, with mismatched chairs pulled up on all sides. Two mugs sat abandoned near the head. Someone had left a half-eaten sandwich on a napkin.

June and Luca walked in together. The argument was already running.

Ramsey Tucker stood on the far side of the table, one fist flat on the wood hard enough to rattle the cups. He was fifty-six, built like he’d been carved from the same tree as the table, his black and silver hair wild from running his hands through it. His voice filled the room without trying.

“Costing us wolves, Gabriel. Cole can’t stand for more than ten minutes. Petra’s worse. Two more this week that Marcus won’t talk about, and you’re sitting there telling me the truce stays.” His fist pressed harder. The wood creaked. “I’ve got patrols half-strength. I’ve got men asking me why we’re honoring an agreement with people who might be putting something in our blood.”

Gabriel Andrews sat at the head of the table. He hadn’t moved. His blue eyes were flat. His jaw was set along the line of the hellforged scar that ran from his temple to his collar. The scar would never heal. Neither would the one on his arm or his thigh, reminders of the demon war that had taken his first mate and his children and nearly broken the pack in two. He let Ramsey finish. The room held Ramsey’s words. Then Gabriel spoke.

“We’re not ending it.”

He said it in one sentence, without raising his voice, and nobody answered.

Ramsey’s head came up. His fist stayed on the table. “Then give me a reason I can use, Gabriel. Because I’ve got men asking me why we’re protecting the people who might be killing us.”

The silence after that filled the room and didn’t let up. Gabriel looked at Ramsey and said nothing. He offered no reason and no explanation Ramsey could take back to the patrol and repeat around a campfire. He just sat there, scarred and still.

Two other wolves sat at the table. A woman with close-cropped hair watched her hands. A man June didn’t recognize kept his eyes on the sandwich. Nobody moved.

Luca moved first.

He stepped between Ramsey’s side of the table and Gabriel’s end, placing himself in the sightline of both men without blocking or standing in anyone’s path, his body a neutral thing in a room that had chosen sides. He didn’t speak, and his presence was enough: the vampire, the one mated to the pack’s medic, standing between the alpha and his second. He’d watched worse arguments end in worse ways. It showed.

June went to Ramsey’s left. She moved close enough that he’d have to go through her to reach the door with any momentum. She didn’t touch him. She stood where she was, her boots planted on the plank floor and said his name.

“Ramsey.”

Her voice went flat, the register she used when she wasn’t really asking.

Ramsey turned. His fist was still on the table. His eyes found hers: the clinic logo on her jacket, the scratches on her forearms from last week’s patrol work, the mud still dried on her boot tread from the ridge climb she’d done instead of coming to town. He knew what those scratches meant. He’d been on patrol with her for five years running. He’d watched her set a compound fracture in the field with nothing but a branch and her own two hands. He’d stood beside her at the barbecue last month with a beer in his hand and laughed at her stories about the clinic dog.

His fist uncurled finger by finger. The wood beneath his palm held the impression of his knuckles.

Gabriel watched all of it. His blue eyes moved from Ramsey to June to Luca and back to Ramsey. He said nothing. His hands rested on the table in front of him, scarred and still.

Ramsey dropped into his chair. The wood groaned. He ran both hands through his hair and left them there, elbows on the table, and stared at the grain between his forearms.