Chapter 9 You Should Mark Her

Julius

The morning feels different when I leave the estate.

I slept better last night than I have in weeks, better than any night I've spent on the office couch. The reason is not difficult to identify. Patricia's scent, her steady shewolf warmth beside me, did what no pharmaceutical compound the witch has managed to synthesize could replicate.

Which is precisely why I go to see the witch before I go anywhere else.

"The long-term suppressant," she answers. "It's not coming together the way I'd hoped. The molecular structure keeps destabilizing under simulation."

"Then give me a timeline."

"I can't."

"You can't?"

"I can't give you a number I don't have." She sets down the vial she's been holding. "You said the shewolf's scent is working. That it calmed the heat."

"Effectively, yes."

"Then don't experiment with other shewolves." Her voice carries the flat authority of someone who has seen what she's warning against. "If you introduce competing scents now, the bond chemistry will destabilize. The heat won't just return, it'll become unpredictable."

Other shewolves. The idea hadn't seriously occurred to me. Caesar stirs at the edge of my awareness, restless and irritable, and before I can stop him he pushes me to ask: "What about Gloria?"

The witch casts me a glance. "Her reject broke the bond. It's been long enough now, and you haven't attempted to repair it. Even if you went to her, her scent would read as foreign to your system. The shewolf you have now..." She pauses, choosing her words. "Patricia would provide more stability than Gloria could at this point."

Caesar goes very quiet.

Then he detonates.

"This is your fault! All your stalling! We had a mate and you let her walk, and now we can't even use her to fix what she broke! And now we're dependent on a werewolf who doesn't even want to be here!"

"Caesar..."

"I'm done talking to you!"

He closes off.

I've experienced Caesar's silences before. They never last.

The witch is watching me. "Whatever you're doing, it's working. More contact would help more than anything I can synthesize. If you're consistent about it, you might not need the suppressant at all."

I should find this inconvenient. I should receive it as a complication, one more variable in an already overcrowded equation.

Instead, something in my chest does a thing I don't immediately have a word for. A loosening. A quiet and entirely unwelcome relief.

More contact. More evenings at the estate... More of her in the space beside me...

I press the feeling flat before it can develop further. Patricia is a stabilizing variable. That is the correct framing. The only framing that makes sense.

I decide to go home that evening.

The Phantom pulls into the estate's front drive just before seven. I step into the mudroom and change my shoes while I notice...

Her white sneakers are not there.

She said she was resting today.

I move into the house and find Helen in the kitchen. She tells me Patricia sent a message in the afternoon. Something came up at the lab. Don't hold dinner.

I nod.

I eat the dinner Helen has prepared. I tell her to take the rest of the evening. She thanks me and leaves.

I change out of my suit upstairs, and on my way through the bedroom I stop at the entrance to the walk-in closet. Despite not living here often, my things occupy most of it, dark suits ranked by weight, shelves of shirts organized by shade. Patricia's section is at the far end, nearest the window. Four, maybe five pieces of clothing.

I stand there for a moment longer than I need to.

My sister Nicole's closet is an entire room. She calls it insufficient. Every month before the full moon gathering, she can be heard announcing that she has nothing to wear. Patricia, by contrast, has brought so little into this space that the empty hangers outnumber the occupied ones.

Is this a werewolf habit, or just hers?

Shaking away the thought, I go downstairs and open my briefcase.

The documents take longer than they should. I finish the last set of projections, set the pen down, and check the time.

Past nine.

She should be back by now.

I pick up my phone and dial.

Hi, you've reached Patricia Greyson. Leave a message and I'll get back to you.

I try again. The same voice, the same brightness.

I call once more, and this time I leave a message. My voice comes out more clipped than I intend: “Why aren't you at home?”

I hang up and sit with that for a moment.

The phrasing is too sharp. She'll hear the edge in it and read it as a demand, or worse, as the opening move of the kind of controlling behavior she made clear she would not tolerate. I had said nothing unreasonable in my tone, technically, but tone and content are separate problems, and I know which one I've just mishandled.

I give it ten minutes. She doesn't call back.

I pick up my jacket and my keys.

According to Helen, she should still be at the lab.

I pull into the street in front of Arcadia Institute and cut the engine. She's still not answering.

Then my phone rings.

"I just finished." Her voice is composed, the kind of composed that comes from a long day rather than a calm one. "I was about to head home."

"I'm outside."

A pause. Not a long one. "I'll come down."

She walks out through the main entrance two minutes later. She has her bag over one shoulder and her coat not quite fully buttoned, and she stops when she sees the Phantom. She gets in without ceremony.

"Did you," she begins, carefully, "have something specific you needed to... you two nights in a row is..."

"You said you'd be home today."

"There was an emergency at the lab." She settles the bag at her feet. "I told Helen."

"So Helen left early."

"Oh." A beat. "Right."

"You haven't eaten."

It isn't a question. She doesn't try to make it one by arguing. "No."

"I'll make something when we get back." I pull the car out into the street. "You should take tomorrow morning off. The late hours are accumulating."

"Actually," she says, "we have tomorrow off. The lab is shutting down for a full inspection after tonight's incident."

"Good."

Behind the wheel, I run through what I have in the kitchen. My culinary range is not extensive. It is, in fact, deliberately narrow. But I can make three things reliably well. One of them requires ingredients I'm not certain I have.

Then, without preamble, without any of the sulking energy he'd carried all day, Caesar speaks. "I change my mind. I take Patricia as our mate. You should mark her."