Eden Riverwallow's Arc

Chapter 17 of 18

Eden walked back through the trees with the taste of her own choice still in her mouth. She had left him a piece of her shirt and a cracked moon of his own hair, and she had called it enough. It was not enough. She knew the shape of his hands and the shape of his silence. She did not know a single name he had once answered to. She could not love a hole in the woods. She turned around before she reached the moss line. The split in the stone was where she had left it. She did not call. She stepped through. He was sitting on the floor by the bed, her folded shirt across his knee. He looked up and did not stand. "You came back." "I forgot something." She sat down across from him, close enough to touch, and did not touch. "I don't know anything about you." "You know enough." "I know what you do. I don't know what happened to you." She kept her voice level. "Tell me one true thing. Then another. I'll stay until you run out or you tell me to go." His jaw set. "Eden." "One thing." He looked at the shirt on his knee for a long time. His thumb moved across the hem. "There were seven of us," he said. "A pack. I was the youngest." She waited. "Something came through the trees when I was nineteen. Not the old vampire. Something older. It took them one at a time. I was the last one standing because I was the smallest and I hid." His mouth tightened. "I've been hiding since." "What were their names." He flinched. She had guessed right, that this was the cost. He said six names. He said them slowly, the way a person sets down glass. He did not say the seventh, which was his own. When he was done, his hands were shaking on her shirt. "That's why you watch the trees," she said. "That's why I watch you." He met her eyes. "I wasn't fast enough for them. I'm going to be fast enough for you." She reached across and put her hand over his. He did not pull back. His fingers were cold through the cloth. "I can love you now," she said. "I couldn't before. I was loving a shadow." He closed his eyes. "Don't say that yet." "I'm saying it. You don't have to answer." He didn't. But his hand turned under hers and held. She stayed until the light thinned. When she stood to go, he stood with her. At the stone split he stopped her with one word. "Eden. The thing that took them. It never left the woods." She walked home carrying six names and a seventh problem, and knew she had bought her bond at the price of knowing what still hunted him.