Page 51 of Untamed

One of the pups climbs into Reverie's lap right in the middle of that and shoves his head under her hand until she scratches behind his ear. She keeps listening with one hand buried in fox fur, and something in my chest eases before I can get annoyed at it. The Collective can call us lines and outcomes and whatever other clean words make this easier for them. The kid doesn't give a shit. Reverie's here, her hand works for scratching, and that's enough for him.

By the time people start gathering papers and shoving chairs back into place, the agreement's made. Arlo waits until I look at him before his hand comes to the small of my back, and I lean into it because I want the pressure there. Outside, the cold gets through my socks before I make it three steps off the porch. Arlo turns around, disappears back inside, and comes out carrying my boots with his mouth already threatening a smile.

“You're enjoying this too much,” I tell him while I take them. His smile gets worse, which answers me well enough.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Arlo

The boots hit the floor before the front door's fully shut. Orion kicks them toward the wall, gets three steps into the living room, and starts fighting with his cuffs like the fabric personally offended him on the walk home. I ask whether the boots were really that bad, and the look he gives me from beneath his curls answers before he even hooks a finger under one heel to work the bunched sock loose.

“Right,” I say, dropping my keys on the counter. “Stupid question.”

We eat at the kitchen counter because neither of us feels like cooking after spending half the day at Kael's. Cold bread, cheese, yesterday's roast. Orion barely speaks, but there's nothing wrong with the silence. I've learned the difference between him pulling away because something's wrong and him simply being done with people for the day. Tonight he's done with people, done with shoes, and about thirty seconds away from being done with the rest of his clothes too.

The shirt comes off while I'm wrapping the leftover roast. The jeans make it until the plates are empty, then Orion shifts beside the couch without warning me first. A few months ago, the crack and pull of bone would've put every muscle in my body on alert. Now I move my papers before one enormous paw lands on them and sit down in time for several hundred pounds of bear to settle across my feet.

“You know I still need both legs,” I tell him, looking down at the massive head beside my knee. One ear flicks before his eyes close, and apparently that's all the consideration my circulation is getting. I put one hand in the fur at his neck and reopen Kael's notes with the other because I'm not winning this argument and both of us know it.

The house has changed around Orion slowly enough that I stopped noticing most of it. The coffee table lives against the wall now because there isn't room for it where it used to sit when he's in bear form. The blue rug disappeared upstairs weeks ago along with one of my pillows and two shirts I still see buried in the den. Claw marks cross the hallway from the first month he lived here, and there's a dent beside the kitchen doorway from the time he forgot how wide his shoulders were after shifting. I used to notice every new mark. Now I mostly notice when something is missing because Orion stole it.

I'm halfway through Malik's notes when the ear under my thumb twitches. I keep reading until it happens again, sharper this time, and Orion lifts his head toward the rear of the house. He doesn't growl or tense the way he does when a guard gets too close to the property. He just listens for several seconds, then pushes himself up and moves into the hallway with both ears angled toward the back wall.

I set the notes down while Orion stands there listening. “What are you hearing?”

The sound he gives me is low and uncertain, softer than I'd expect from something that pulled him off the couch. He shifts human in the hallway and reaches for the shirt I left over the back of a chair. “The woods are full of pipes, wind, guards, animals. I know what all of that sounds like. This isn't any of it.”

I wait. If I keep filling the silence, he'll spend more time reacting to me than listening to whatever dragged him off the couch in the first place.

“It's a hum,” he says after a few seconds, still looking toward the wall. “I thought it was the house the first time, but I've heard it before tonight. Not constantly. Just enough that I know it isn't the pipes.”

I get up and stand beside him even though I already know I'm unlikely to hear what he does. The refrigerator hums behind us. Old plumbing knocks once somewhere upstairs. A patrol vehicle grinds along the road beyond the front windows, then fades. Nothing comes from the back wall that I can separate from the rest of Wolfscorge.

“Does it hurt, or is it more like pressure?”

Orion rubs one hand over the center of his chest while he thinks about it. “It doesn't hurt, and I'm not scared of it. It just pisses me off because I can't tell what it is. Every time I think it stopped, I hear it again, and it's always coming from the same direction.”

Pissed off I can work with. Fear coming through the bond would've been something else. “Then we tell Kael in the morning and go look with people who know where we're going. If it's another Collective trap, I'd rather have enough backup that neither of us has to improvise our way out of it.”

His eyes cut toward me. “I wasn't planning to run into the woods alone.”

“I know.” The bond's already tightening with irritation, so I don't turn it into a lecture he didn't ask for. “I'm saying we wait until morning, bring Kael, and then go find out what you've been hearing.”

Orion looks toward the back wall again. Not knowing has always been harder on him than a threat he can put his hands on, and I can feel the part of him that wants to solve this now pushing against the decision to wait. He finally exhales and lets some of the tension out of his shoulders. “Fine. But if it's still there tomorrow, we're not pretending I imagined it because nobody else can hear it.”

“We won't.”

Chapter Thirty

Orion

Kael brings Slate and Malik with us in the morning, which is enough people for Arlo to stop arguing about whether I should be anywhere near the reservoir. It isn't enough to make him stop watching me. His arm brushes mine twice before we leave the last residential path behind, and the bond carries the same tight concern he's been trying not to turn into instructions since breakfast. Slate walks on my other side while Kael and Malik argue quietly over an old service map. I barely look at it because the pressure at the base of my skull has been getting stronger since we left Kael's house.

Arlo touches the back of my hand, light enough that it doesn't slow me down. “Still the same direction?”

“Yeah. It's stronger now.” I point toward the pines, where the cleared path gives way to ground nobody's bothered maintaining in years.

We leave the residential sector behind. Briars catch at my jeans, and faded numbers show through the bark on some of the trees, almost grown over. Somewhere behind us somebody's cooking breakfast, and I can still smell smoke and meat for another hundred yards before wet earth and standing water take over. The farther we go, the less Wolfscorge smells like anybody lives here.