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“You are not a failure,” I told him softly.
“Neither are you.”
I told him, dully, about the conversation with Spring, the confusion over BlizzardFall, and how everything we’d surmised had been true. That the current SilverPaw leadership knew nothing, that the FrostFur didn’t know about GranitePaw, didn’t know about AmberHowl. And I told him about the parcel that Spring had kept for my mother. About how Jerron wasn’t in league with Demetrius. How Daniel knew nothing. How SilverPaw was nothing, but they didn’t know it.
His thumb brushed the back of my fingers. “So AmberHowl is on our side. Or GranitePaw’s. And what is this about your mother’s dream journals. Why did she leave those to you?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t looked at them.” I wanted to sleep, and forget for a while, but I wanted to hear his voice too.
The flight attendant set a light salad down in front of each of us.
Sterling recaptured my hand. “My beautiful harrier, whatever plans the AmberHowl, GranitePaw, FrostFur, SilverPaw or any other pack had, they are destroyed now. With Jerron dead, and Alan on notice, no one is in control. It has been dismantled. The hunt was a success.”
But the price was going to be his life.
He gripped my hand before releasing it.
I choked down a few leaves of lettuce from my salad before giving up.
A plate of golden chicken was set before each of us.
My soul liquified and slid out through all the cracks in my body.
Sterling watched. Without a word, he pulled my plate towards him and carved several very small pieces from the bone before returning the plate to me.
The blackness outside the plane was all-engulfing.
My plate of food blurred and shimmered, and I realized I was crying.
And I couldn’t stop.
Gaia's Wheel
My world was a huge lake. I stood at the center and cracks ran in every direction.
Like Sterling in the shaft of moonlight, that brackish water trying to attack the puppy—
I turned towards the sunlight and focused on the thin ribbon of ocean shining on the horizon. Sterling’s Palm Beach condo had a view of the ocean, in the sense you could spot the ocean in the distance.
We weren’t going back to Manhattan until the scent of silver was off my skin. The GranitePaw wouldn’t be the first to find out Jerron was dead, or Sterling had killed him, so no point prompting them to ask questions. They’d told us to get out of the city.
Well, we were out of the city.
I’d missed my exams and Solstice with the pack. We’d missed four parties, including the big New Year’s Eve to-do that the Art Aficionado version of me had been supposed to attend. Sterling had been pretending to be me on my phone to make nice with Gazelle and Mint, and I was sort of ready to stop flopping around Palm Beach like an invalid. Which was good, because in a few days we were headed up to the Mortcombe estate in New York for a belated Solstice get together, then he and I would head to Seattle while the pack returned to the city.
I forced my fingers to touch the ridged scab. FrostFur’s sigil crudely carved into my skin. It still hurt in that don’t touch it sort of way. I’d have bounced back a lot faster if I’d had prompt medical care.
A knock on the door.
It was surreal to just have delivery brought to the door. No Hamid lurking, no security, no keys and passcards. Hamid had gone home to tend to his orchids and eat a large amount of food, and read from a script my (apparently high-ranking ex-military super-agent) father-in-law had written to trigger the fewest number of questions. As far as he knew, Sterling had just dropped my brother with an excellent liver shot. Garrett reassured me that the helicopter pilots knew nothing except more or less the same story I’d given Hamid, and they could be trusted to never, ever breathe a word of it to anyone.
“Thanks,” I told the delivery guy, who gave me a look that said I must still look like gaunt death. I closed the door, inhaled, and glanced around to make sure Sterling didn’t manifest out of somewhere and fuss about salty, greasy takeout.
Sterling took his nursemaiding very seriously. Not that I wasn’t grateful for his and Jun’s combined efforts to determine the exact nutrition profile to support recovery and weight gain. But I’d reached the point where I couldn’t take another kale-chicken shake.
Sterling could do laundry. And despite prior evidence to the contrary, did know how to cook.
Sort of. Very… sort of.
