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"That's not a number."

"It's not that kind of cost." He takes the second mug out of my hand like he's been waiting for permission to do it. "In our pack nobody will challenge me. That's not how this pack works. We moved away from that decades ago. Others do things differently in their packs but we like to think we are more civilized. First, it just gets quiet. Fewer calls. Fewer people at the runs. Then something happens one night and I’ll turn around and there's nobody behind me to back me up."

The taillights of Cass's truck are already gone off the end of the street. Cold comes up through my socks and into my ankles. I don't move.

"How long does that take?"

"Tobin says about a month."

"How long have you been doing it?"

He looks at the tree line instead of me.

"Since Monday," he says.

Four days. Forty people and their kids, and a clock that started ticking on Monday, and he stood in my kitchen this morning and made me coffee.

"You should've told me."

"You had a necklace try to strangle you on Monday."

"That's not a reason."

His jaw does the thing. I've learned to read it the way sailors read weather, and right now it says he agrees with me and would rather chew glass than say so.

I take my mug back. It's gone cold.

"Teach me," I say.

"Teach you what?"

"I'm not asking you to hand me a spell book. I don't want to be the reason any child gets hurt." My voice comes out steadier than I expected. "This morning I opened your refrigerator hard enough to dent a countertop. I need to learn how to control it."

He studies me for a long moment. Something in him settles, the way a door settles when it finally sits right in its frame.

"Put boots on," he says.

The salt ring is still burned into the dirt behind his house, black and perfect, from where my pillow turned up blue.

Gage crouches at the fire pit and builds a nest of kindling without lighting it. The sky over the trees has turned pink. Somewhere down the block a neighbor's inflatable ghost inflates itself with a groan, and the sound scrapes across my nerves like a fingernail.

"Fire," he says. "It's the easiest one."

"That is a wildly irresponsible thing to say to a woman who works in a building full of dry lace."

"It's easiest because it wants to." He sits back on his heels. "The rest of them you have to make happen. Fire's already moving. You just have to stop being in its way."

"That's very poetic for a man who communicates mainly in grunts."

"Try it."

So I try it.

I stare at the kindling until my eyes water. I think warm thoughts. I think angry thoughts. I picture the flame the way you're supposed to picture things in the meditation app I deleted.

Nothing.

I try it eleven more times. My hands cramp. The cold works its way into my teeth. A moth blunders past my face and I flinch hard enough that Gage almost smiles, which is worse than laughing.