Page 39 of Property of Prophet

The decision was made sometime in the dark, while he was still unconscious on the cabin floor, and I was watching the stove burn down.

By the time morning comes, there’s nothing left to decide.

There is only the doing of it.

He’s asleep on his back near the hearth, one arm across his stomach, the other loose at his side. Bear has relocated himself to the crook of Prophet’s knees at some point in the night, which is where Bear always ends up when something needs guarding, and he’s decided the floor is adequate.

The stove needs feeding. I feed it without making noise, crouch at the grate and work the wood in slowly, so the catch doesn’t wake him. I stay crouching longer than the task requires, my hands around the warmth of the open door.

He was gray last night. His hands shook for an hour after I got him inside, and Bear wouldn’t leave his side. I told myself I wasn’t watching his breathing, then watched it for the rest of the night anyway. The way I used to watch post-operative patients when the surgery had been long and the margins close. As if looking hard enough could keep the thing you’d saved from tipping back the other way.

He’s breathing fine now. The gray has eased. His hands are still, fingers open against the floor.

I stand up and cross to the chest.

It’s in the corner where it’s always been, under the window, two wool blankets folded on top and then the smaller things I don’t use in summer.

I open the lid, lift out the blankets, and set them on the floor. Beneath them, folded so the patches don’t show, is the cut.

Prophet has been here for weeks, probably close to three months.

I reach in and take it out.

The leather is soft in some places, worn smooth along the collar and down the front where hands have rested on it a thousand times. The back panel is stiff, the patches stitched firmly, colors faded at the edges in the way of something carried through a lot of weather. I turn it over. The skull with the crown. The words beneath it, precise and permanent.

Kings of Anarchy MC. Alaska Chapter.

And on the front, Prophet. Chaplain.

I’ve read those words before. I read them the night I found him in a crater with his blood all over my gloves. He wasn’t a ghost, a myth, or something the wilderness had conjured out of its own cold logic. He was a person. He had people. People who would, at some point, come looking.

That was the night I put it in the chest.

I carry it to the table and set it down between us. The sound it makes on the wood is quieter than it should be, given what it is. He doesn’t wake at first. I put the coffee on and stand at the stove with my back to the room, listening to him come up out of sleep—the gradual return of a man who has learned not to panic at waking somewhere unfamiliar.

The moment I know he’s seen it, the room goes different.

I turn around. He’s sitting up and looking at the cut on the table.

Prophet doesn’t touch it right away. He looks at it the way you look at something you thought you’d lost badly enough to stop expecting to find it. He seems almost wary of it. As if reaching too fast might make it less real, might change it on contact.

Bear lifts his head from Prophet’s knee, reads the room, and stays where he is.

“You’ve had this since the beginning,” Prophet says. His voice is quiet. Nothing accusatory in it, not yet, only a statement, a fact being turned over.

“Yes.”

His eyes lift to mine. “And you let me spend weeks wondering who the fuck I was?”

“You knew who you were.”

“Lily.”

“You knew the parts that mattered.”

His jaw shifts. “That wasn’t your call to make.”

“No.” I hold his gaze. “It wasn’t.”