Chapter 60

The house breathed differently in the days that followed. Not that anything changed in some grand, visible way. The furniture still stood where it always had, the floors still creaked in the same places, and the winter light still drained the color from the wallpapered walls. But Dad was inside it now. He had been back in the house only for a couple of days, and already the space seemed to have rearranged around him.

I stood by the kitchen window and watched snow gather along the porch railing in little white ridges. Beyond the glass, the yard lay cold and pale beneath a tin-colored sky. The barn sat farther back under its cap of snow, like an empty shell. My shoulder no longer screamed every time I moved. My temple had stopped hurting and was only itching now. I hadn't gone back to school yet. That was supposed to happen soon, although the idea of walking those hallways again made me both excited and uncomfortable.

Nell had kept me informed in her short, efficient way, telling me that everything was in order. And Ethan, despite explicit instructions from his father and whatever fragile scraps of common sense remained in either of us, had kept writing too. Sometimes only a couple of words, sometimes more. Enough that his messages had become like a second heartbeat.

The bathroom door upstairs opened with a soft moan. A second later, Elise's voice drifted down the hall, patient and low. "Gabriel, hold still. If you move, you'll end up with one side shorter than the other."

Dad muttered something I couldn't catch. In the living room, Hailey giggled at something on the TV. A small smile touched my mouth before I could stop it. Dad had insisted on a haircut and a shave. He had decided that if he was going to be back in the house, he was going to get himself back to a presentable state, which included Elise standing over him with scissors and a comb while he sat in the upstairs bathroom trying, and mostly failing, not to flinch every time she touched his hair. Both Hailey and I knew better than to interfere with that.

I was so deep in thought I hadn't heard footsteps approaching.

"Kelsey."

I turned. Jack stood in the hall by the front door, one hand resting on the latch. His voice was calm and quiet.

"Come outside with me for a minute."

I blinked at him. "Now?"

His gaze flicked once toward the ceiling, where the muffled sound of Elise moving around the bathroom still carried faintly down through the floorboards.

"Yes."

So I pulled on my boots and coat and followed him onto the porch. The cold immediately bit inside my nose. The air around us was nearly absent of sound, and the earth was wrapped in whiteness. My gaze quickly fell on a lonely snowman standing near the tire swing, Hailey's and my project from yesterday. Two buttons had fallen from its belly and one coal eye sat crooked, but it was still there. Somewhere in the distance a crow made a single harsh sound that echoed lonely and loud in the silence.

I folded my hands into my sleeves and watched my breath leave in white clouds. I looked at him sideways. "You wanted to talk?"

He didn't answer immediately. He pushed the snow off the porch railing, leaned both forearms on it, and looked out toward the tree line. He let another few moments pass before he said, "How much do you understand about your father? About his condition."

It took a moment for the words to settle.

"I'm not naive," I said grimly. "I know that he isn't cured. That the dangerous part of him is still there."

Jack said nothing. I went on anyway.

"I know that the thing he'd become, the thing he'd been all that time in the barn, didn't come out of nowhere. That it has always been part of him. That it's a part of all of you. You all just have it leashed, most of the time." I took in a breath. "So did he. Before, when Mom was alive." I swallowed. "When she died, the leash broke. And now..." I hesitated, searching for words. "Now he's holding it by the throat." My fingers tightened inside my sleeves. "For Hailey and me. For you and Elise." I paused, then let out the truth. "I don't know about anyone else."

The wind softly swept snow dust off the porch roof. Beside me, Jack finally turned his head enough to really look at me. Something unreadable moved across his face, something between surprise and approval.

"You came to that understanding fast," he said after a moment. "For a..."

He stopped. The unfinished word hung there between us.

I let out a small, bitter laugh. "A facsimile?"

Jack's expression changed by so little another person might have missed it, but I didn't. A tiny recoil. A flicker. Then, almost immediately, he corrected it.

"Human," he said.

The word fell into the cold air with more weight than it should have had. I looked away from him and out across the yard toward the trees.

"But am I?" I asked quietly. "Truly."

Jack didn't answer.

I looked past him, to the trees. The snow made everything look cleaner than it was, even the forest.

"How can I call myself human when part of me belongs to this valley?" I went on. "When it calls to things other people don't even know exist?" I gave a humorless little huff. "It kind of sucks, honestly, being this ."

Still no answer. I kept going because if I stopped, the thing in my throat would turn into something embarrassing.

"I mean, if you're going to be a miracle birth in a family full of supernatural murder-wolves, you would think you would at least get something useful out of it. Quicker healing. Super-strength. Night vision. Better smell. Something vaguely cool." I stared harder at the snow. "Instead I get to be a problem. A walking, breathing hazard. Amazing. Love that for me."

Jack let me say it all. He didn't interrupt to tell me I was being melodramatic, or technically inaccurate, or unfair. He knew I was venting. Knew I was exaggerating on purpose because the real thing underneath it was harder to swallow.

Only when the silence came back did he speak.

"What you are is less important than who you are," he said.

I turned toward him then. His face had gone still again, but not distant.

"You ought to remember that," he said. Then, after the briefest pause, "And perhaps, in time, others will learn to remember it too."

A small, unwilling smile tugged at my mouth. "Speaking for yourself?"

His green eyes grazed me for a moment. "Perhaps."

I held his gaze. "You didn't drag me out into the snow just to tell me that."

One corner of his mouth moved, not enough to really count as a smile, but enough that I saw it. Then it vanished. He straightened a little and looked back toward the woods. For a while he said nothing at all. The porch groaned softly under our weight. Somewhere inside the house, Hailey laughed at something the cartoon had done, a high childish sound muffled by walls.

Then Jack asked, "Do you know how Cold Creek got its name?"

I blinked. The question was so unexpected it took me a second to switch gears.

"The stream," I said slowly. "The one north of town. That's what they told us in history. The early settlement took water from it."

Jack nodded once. "And did they tell you the spring that feeds it marks the boundary between the Blackwell and Greystone sections of the joint territory?"

I stared at him. "No."

"They wouldn't." His tone made it sound like an old irritation, not a fresh one. "They don't teach that sort of thing in classrooms."

He rubbed one thumb along the porch railing, his eyes narrowed on something I couldn't see yet.

"Half a mile around the source is closed to running and hunting all year," he said. "No patrol routes cut through it unless there is cause. No challenges. No boys proving themselves. It's one of the few places in these woods where the old rules hold more value than the younger males' urge to piss on everything they see."

I listened without understanding where he was going with it.

"In spring," he said, "it's the prettiest part of the valley. Snowmelt runs clear there before the roads turn to mud. The whole place greens earlier than the rest. Most of the year it sits empty." He finally looked at me. "The road is close enough for safety. Territory there is respected by everyone because no one wants trouble at the source."

My heart gave one hard, stupid beat. I said nothing. Jack held my gaze just long enough to make sure I understood that he knew I was not stupid. Then I looked away first. The woods beyond the porch remained silent and white. And yet suddenly they did not feel as ominous in the same way they had before.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

Jack's face did not soften. If anything, it grew more set. He braced his hands on the railing and looked out into the snow again.

"I'm not the kind of man who makes the same mistake twice," he said.

The words entered me slowly. I thought of Mom and Dad. Of everything that had happened long before I was even born. When I looked at him again, he was still staring at the forest like an old, tired sentinel.

My mind was racing. A place neither side ran through. A place near the road. A place he had just handed to me without handing it to me.

When I looked up again, Jack had already pushed away from the railing, then opened the front door and held it for me.

"Kelsey."

I stopped on the threshold. He looked at me with that same hard steadiness that had once frightened me and now, in some difficult new way, steadied me too.

"Whatever road you choose from here," he said, "walk it with your eyes open."

I held his gaze. "I do now."

He nodded once. Then we went back inside, carrying the winter air with us.