Chapter 5

Declan's POV

I could hear too much.

That was the problem with holding a person down on a wooden floor in a room with the windows shut.

Every sound she made arrived separately, sorted, stacked. Her heart going like a rabbit that had already been caught and hadn't worked it out yet, knocking against the inside of her ribs so hard I could feel the shape of it through the boards.

Her breath, shallow, fast, cut off at the top of every inhale like she was afraid of taking too much of my air. The drag of her shirt against the floor. The small wet click in her throat every time she swallowed.

"There's one kind of person who walks into a stranger's home wearing an earpiece," I said, "talking to somebody the whole way in. Somebody on a job."

She twisted under my knee. "What job? I don't even know what you're talking about!"

I watched her face. I was good at this. Twenty-eight years old and I'd spent ten of them reading things before they moved. Her pupils were huge and they didn't settle. The pulse in her throat jumped with her heartbeat and not against it. When she fought me, she fought like a person who had never fought anything.

She doesn't know. Or she's the best I've ever seen.

Deep in the back of my skull, something stretched and woke up. Slow. Lazy. Like a dog on a warm porch deciding whether a noise was worth standing up for.

"Let me look," Bracken, my wolf spirit, said.

Then it leaned forward inside my head and used me. My ears. My nose. The skin across the backs of my hands. It took the girl on the floor and pulled her apart the way it pulled apart anything it was thinking about hunting, and I felt it happen, felt my senses sharpen and narrow until the rest of the room went flat and grey and she was the only thing in it.

"Heartbeat abnormal," it said. "Hormones abnormal. Cortisol and adrenaline together when she came close to you. In my experience of hunting, that is fear. Prey when it sees the predator."

"She's afraid of me," I thought back.

"No." It said it the way it said most things, flat as a man reading a sign. "She is afraid of being found out. She put on scent. Heavy scent, over her own. Humans do not do that. Only a thing that knows it carries a smell, and needs to hide it."

My breathing slowed by half a beat. Then it's true. Then she really was—

"And this," Bracken went on, surer now, warming to it. "She let you see. Deliberately. She showed you her body on purpose. She knocked on your door on purpose. Why would an ordinary girl try to pull a strange man down within an hour of meeting him?"

It paused, the way it did before it delivered a verdict.

"She is a beautiful killer. She uses her body for bait. She comes close to the target, and she waits for the moment he is careless."

Beautiful killer?

I didn't want to give it the satisfaction, and I gave it nothing, and it didn't matter, because every single thing it had said had already been in my head before it opened its mouth.

Because I am a werewolf.

Eighteen years old, the first time the wolf opened its eyes behind mine, and after that my hands and my teeth and my life stopped being entirely mine. First fighter of one of the strongest packs on the northwest coast.

Then I left, and the leaving was not something I was going to think about on a floor with a woman under my knee. What mattered was the price. My old pack called me traitor. The things I'd bitten and torn and put down on their orders — vampire families, hunter crews, worse than both — all of them had my name.

There was a price on it now. I'd cut every thread that tied me to the Veil, changed my name, and come to a town where the fog ate scent and the rain washed the ground twice a day, and I'd told everyone who asked that I was a soldier who came home with a bad back.

Finn had a club that wasn't open yet and no one to help him with the heavy work. It was as good a hole as a man could dig.

I'd thought the tail was gone.

If she was sent to kill me, the tail never came off at all.

"Declan." Bracken's voice went quiet and even. "Kill her."

I looked down at her. "You're sure?"

"Now. We have not been out long. She came alone. No backup. Nothing on her but the earpiece. Put her in the trees and we go back to being quiet. That is the clean way."

"That's a little hasty."

"You are hesitating. She is a good liar. She is trained. The crying, the begging, all of it can be trained." A pause. "And you have been alone too long. That makes a man stupid about women."

Under me, the girl went still. Not the still of somebody choosing it. The still of an animal that had just smelled the change in the air, and then the shaking started, small at first, and then all through her, and her voice came out in pieces. "Please. Please, I don't know anything. I don't know anything, I swear—"

And then she cried. Her face crumpled and the tears ran sideways off the corners of her eyes and dropped onto my floorboards, and her nose ran, and she didn't wipe it, and she didn't try to make it look any better.

Who do I believe.

I let go of her wrists. I got up, and my knee left her leg, and I stepped back twice, and I heard my own voice come out like a rusty hinge. "Sorry."

She stayed where she was, sat up halfway with one hand braced on the floor, and didn't move.

"I get bad sometimes," I said. "From the war. I don't always… I can't always tell what's in front of me. That wasn't your fault."

She sniffed once, hard, and said, very small, "Okay."

Then she got herself up on the wall, picked her phone off the floor, and backed toward the door. "I'm going to go home. If you still need help with the boxes, then, um. Another day. Another day."

The door opened and shut. Her feet went fast down the hall, and 2B's lock clicked into place, and I stood there listening to it.

"You will regret this," Bracken said.

I ignored it and bent to straighten the box I'd knocked crooked, walking it back against the wall with my knee.

"I am rarely this certain," it said. "She will come back. And you will remember what I told you today."

I stopped with my hands on the cardboard. Then I straightened up.

It loves to reason. It treats every guess like a hunt and it enjoys the part where it stalks. The trouble is, Bracken is bad at it.

"Bracken," I said. "Do you remember the last time you reasoned something out?"

It was quiet in a way that had a shape to it.

"Portland. The man outside the convenience store. Stood there twenty minutes. You said he was a hunter's spotter. You said the thing pushing out under his coat was a gun."

"The circumstances were very similar."

"He was a middle school teacher waiting for his girlfriend to finish her shift. The thing under his coat was a stack of homework he hadn't graded."

"Being wrong once is not—" It stopped, adjusted, stiff-legged. "This is different. This one smells different."

"We've been out of the pack a few months. We don't know much about people yet. There could be another explanation for all of it."

Hm. The sound it made was exactly the sound a kid who has lost an argument and decided to lose it loudly instead. Then we wait and see. She will come at you again. And then you will know I was right.