Page 23 of A Wolf's Revenge

Amy already had Noah’s hoodie unzipped.

The receiver that Francis had carried — the small black brick he’d held over my family for three days like a man holding a lit match over a fuse — was in my jacket pocket now, dead and dark, and I had spent every minute since then telling myself that taking it had broken the link, that the vests were inert, that what was strapped to my wife and son was now just wire, dead weight, and fear. Telling myself a thing and believing it down where your hands live are two different countries. My hands did not believe it yet.

“Talk me through it,” Amy said. Doctor’s voice. The calm built for exactly this. “You know wiring. I know bodies. Between us we can do this without waiting for someone with a robot and a blast blanket, and I’d rather not sit in a van wearing this for one more minute than I have to. So talk me through it, we’ll go slow, and we’ll go together.”

So we went slow, and we went together. I worked Noah’s first, because there was no version of the next ten minutes where I did anything before I got the thing off my son. I had him lie still across the bench seat with his head in Amy’s lap, and I told him we were playing the quietest game in the world, the holding-still game, world champions only. He held still, my brave exhausted boy, and Amy stroked his hair, murmured the low even music, and watched my hands with her own steady eyes, ready to tell me if his pulse did anything she didn’t like.

I traced the harness by feel. I followed each lead to its source. I confirmed, and reconfirmed, and confirmed a third time, what the dead receiver in my pocket had already promised — that the arming circuit was orphaned, that nothing was listening anymore, that the only thing holding the device together now was the strapping and my own terror. And then I cut the first strap, and nothing happened, which is the most beautiful nothing in the world.I cut the second, and the third, and I lifted the panels of gray weight away from my sleeping son’s small chest and set them on the floor of the van as gently as if they were still live, because some respect, once learned, never leaves your hands.

For a moment, I just looked at the place on his hoodie where the thing had been. At the ordinary cotton. At the small fast heartbeat now beating against nothing but air.

Then I did Amy’s.

Hers took longer, because hers was the better-made of the two — they’d given the man’s-share of the engineering to the adult, to the wolf, to the one they were most afraid could fight her way free — and because my hands, having gotten Noah free, finally let themselves shake the way they hadn’t dared while a six-year-old was wearing the other one. Amy held still and held my eyes and did not once tell me to hurry. When the last strap parted and the weight came away from her, she let out a breath that she had, I realized, been holding in some form for three days, and she put her hand flat over the place on her own chest where it had been, as if checking that her heart was still hers.

“There,” she said. Just that.

We rolled the windows down a crack and let the night air move through the van, and somewhere in the next few miles I caught the first thread of it — the green medicinal bitterness of the wolfsbane starting, finally, to leave her. It comes back slow, the wolf, after they’ve poisoned it down; it doesn’t switch on like a light. It comes back the way feeling comes back to a limb you’ve slept on wrong, a deep painful tingling, a presence reasserting itself cell by cell. I watched it happen on Amy’s face over the next half hour — the moment her eyes sharpened, the moment her scent stopped being the flat dosed nothing they’d reduced her to and started, faintly, to be her again, my wife, the wolf I’d married, reassembling herself in the back of a stranger’s van.

“It’s coming back,” she said, wonder and fury mixed even in a whisper. “I can feel it. Down at the bottom. Like a hand growing back.” She closed her eyes. “Don’t let me shift in here. I want to so badly I could scream, just to prove I can. Don’t let me. Noah’s asleep, the man’s driving, and it’s the wrong time.”

“It’s the wrong time,” I agreed. “There’ll be a right one.” And I believed it, which surprised me, because for thirty-four years, I had not believed in right times for much of anything.

Noah woke once, near the end of the hour, and looked up at his mother, then around the dark van, then at me, and he said, in the small clear voice of a child taking inventory of the world after a bad dream, “Is the vest off?”

“It’s off, buddy,” I said. “It’s all the way off. It’s never going back on. That part’s done.”

He thought about that with the seriousness six-year-olds bring to load-bearing facts. Then he said, “Okay,” put his head back down, and was asleep again in under a minute, the bottomless instant sleep of a child who has decided, on the authority of his father’s voice, that he is allowed to stop being brave for a while.

I sat in the dark with my family breathing around me, free of the wire, and I let myself have exactly sixty seconds of the relief, on the old timer, the way I rationed everything.

Because I already knew the truth the night was driving us toward, the truth Marr’s man had handed me with you’re clear for about an hour. Getting them out of the building had never been the war. It had only been the first move of it. Somewhere behind us a beaten Alpha was already deciding what came next, a girl was still dead in 1989, the thing that had reached into my life and put a bomb on my son had a long memory and a longer reach, and a hotel room in Midtown was not safety. It was just the place I’d get to read the folder and find out how far I was going to have to walk to make safety real.

When the sixty seconds were up, I stopped, and I started, again, to plan.

14

Marr’s man drove us to a hotel in Midtown — clean, anonymous, the kind of place that asked no questions if you paid in cash, which he had. He left an envelope at the desk: money, a burner phone, a key card. No note. No instructions. Just the resources of a man who had been preparing for this moment for some time and wanted me to understand the preparation.

I took Amy and Noah up, locked the door, and stood in the middle of the room doing math I didn’t like the answer to.

Amy was checking Noah over for the third time, the focused methodical calm she applied to everything that frightened her. Noah sat on the bed working through the vending-machine haul I’d bought in the lobby, pretending very hard to be fine, which was so completely Amy’s son that it kept catching me in the chest. The room was warm. The door was locked. By every measure a human would use, we were safe.

We were not safe.

I went to the window, looked down at 52nd Street, and made myself name the problem instead of feeling it. A pack could track a wolf the way a current carries a scent downstream — not perfectly, not through a city’s worth of noise, but enough. Amy and Noah had spent three days in a Conti building. Their scent was known now, cataloged, held in the noses of men who had been paid to remember it. The moment Edoardo Conti realized his leverage had walked out a service door in the dark, he would put that scent in the air, and every wolf who owed him a favor or feared him a little would start sorting the city for it.

A hotel would hold against men with photographs. It would not hold against men with noses.

“Stop doing that,” Amy said, without looking up.

“Doing what.”

“Standing at the window deciding how unsafe we are.” She finished with Noah’s wrist, smoothed his hair, and stood. She crossed to me, and even now, even here, the bond I’d spent eleven years refusing to trust pulled quietly toward her, the wolf in me lifting its head the way it had started doing two nights ago and hadn’t stopped. “I can smell you thinking. We can’t stay here.”

“No.”

“How long?”