Page 13 of Wretched Thorns

His back was to Jasper.

Rowena’s hand had just been dropping away from the man’s jaw as Jasper entered the grove.

Jasper saw the end of the gesture before he had any context for the gesture itself. The way her fingers had been against the man’s face. The way they trailed once and let go. The way the man had not moved while she had touched him.

Then she was on her knees by Callum.

Jasper wasn’t sure what exactly he’d just witnessed.

His mother didn’t touch men. Not in his presence. Not ever. She had put her hand on this stranger’s face in a show of gratitude beyond anything Jasper had ever witnessed from her.

The man turned.

He hadn’t known Jasper was at the south edge of the grove. He knew now. The recognition landed in him without a head lift, without a posture change. Just a body adjusting one degree to take in a new piece of information. The kind of shift only an animal made.

Their eyes met.

Jasper’s wolf went somewhere it had rarely ever been.

It went still.

It went still, the way a wolf goes still when it hears a sound it knows from somewhere it can’t reach. A sound from before. From a long time ago. From an old memory that niggled at the edges of Jasper’s mind.

His wolf knew that man.

Jasper did not.

But his wolf was up against the inside of his skin, listening, head canted, the way a wolf listens to a wind too low for a man to hear. Under the listening was a tug at the edges of him. A memory with no face. Arms of a stranger. The press of a chest against his cheek when he’d been maybe five years old; just a tyke.

He was small. Smaller than he could remember being. His ankle was hurt, burning and bleeding. Wire bit into it. There was something in the wire that scared him in a way he hadn’t understood at the time. The woods were quiet, too quiet. Two men were coming through the ferns, and they were smiling. The smiling was the worst part.

Then the woods came apart.

A wolf came through. He couldn’t see all of it. The size. The dark fur of it. Silver at the tips of its ears, catching the afternoon light. The two men ran. The wolf didn’t chase. It turned and looked at him, and he looked back, and something went between them he didn’t have a word for then and didn’t have one for now.

A man knelt where the wolf had been. Hands worked the wire off his ankle. Careful. Impossibly careful. Picked him up. Carried him.

“Let’s get you home.”

Four words.

He’d been hearing those four words in his head most of his life. He’d stopped trying to find the voice they belonged to by the time he was twelve. The memory had gone where childhood things go. Back of a drawer. Dust on it. Faded enough to pass for something his mother had once told him.

Now the voice was in front of him.

Twenty feet across the grove. At the foot of the magnolia where Callum lay breathing. Pre-dawn light catching the silver at the temples the way afternoon light had once done. The same careful set to the hands.

His wolf had known the whole time.

Jasper’s vision blurred.

He blinked. Cleared. Did not look away.

His knees almost gave. He locked them before they could.

His head tilted.

A fraction. The smallest movement his neck would allow. He stared at the wolf, trying to remember.