Bound by silver (1/4)
Title: Bound by silver
Pairing: Jon/Brendon
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Character death prior to the beginning of the story, dubious consent.
Disclaimer: This is a complete work of fiction, no disrespect intended.
Notes: This is and has always been for maleyka. Thanks to cupiscent, disarm_d, softlyforgotten, and emilyray for their editing and input.
Summary: “You’ve brought…” Ryan begins, mouth too dry to articulate the word pounding in his skull. Werewolf.
PART ONE
It’s past dusk by the time Ryan hears the creaking gate swing open, late enough that his belly is starting to rumble.
“Spencer,” he calls, sticking a shred of old paper into his book to mark his place and unfolding from the musty armchair in the living room, wandering over to open the back door. “Did you find something? Because if not we still have those leftover…”
And then he stops, because what Spencer’s brought home from hunting isn’t dinner at all. It’s a boy.
“Put some water on,” Spencer orders. His arm is under the boy’s shoulders, supporting him, and they’re not making very good time. The boy is stumbling with every other step, and Spencer looks more weary than he usually does at the end of a day spent hunting, energy flagging. Ryan can’t make out much beyond their silhouettes in the evening gloom; metal glinting off of the rifle strapped onto Spencer’s back and the last rays of the sun highlighting dark hair.
Ryan’s stunned into immobility for a few drawn-out seconds. Spencer pushes past him and Ryan inhales the scent of forest, of earth and cold evening air, before he snaps out of it and goes to hang the water pot over the fire.
“He’s hurt,” Spencer says, unnecessarily because now that they’re inside, Ryan can see the dark blood staining the boy’s shirt at the shoulder, his shirt hanging in ragged strips off of a body that hasn’t seen enough meals lately, to judge by how many of his ribs Ryan can see revealed beneath frayed chunks of linen. “Do we have bandages?”
Ryan unfreezes at that, shock giving way to motion as his brain settles on something concrete to do. He pulls the tin down from the mantel over the fireplace, sorting through snatches of cloth until he finds strips of cotton long enough to serve as bandages. There aren’t enough; he can tell already that there’s more skin torn than he has cloth to cover. He has more strips in his room, though, salvaged from the scrap tin to serve as scarves. Those will be long enough. The boy’s shirt won’t work at all; it’s stiff with rusted stains, and filthy with dirt besides.
Spencer’s gotten the boy’s shirt off, setting him down close by the fire to help calm the shivering that’s making his shoulders quake. There’s dirt caked over the wounds, blood gone tacky and smeared across his skin, but Ryan can still make out the long tracks of broken skin raking across his ribs, and the sluggishly-bleeding hole cut deep into his shoulder.
“Wolves?” Ryan asks. He and Spencer live at the edge of the forest, closer than anyone else in the village. He knows well what’s out there, howling at night. Those marks could easily have been made by claws. He hopes it was only wolves, if that’s the case. There are also worse things than mere wolves in the forest, with a bite far more fatal. It’s three days after the full moon, though, so it’s not likely. These wounds are too fresh to be from that long ago.
The boy shakes his head. “Tree branches,” he says, and his voice is a little faint, breathy with swallowed pain, but he’s coherent enough. “I fell. I…”
He trails off, eyes closing; still awake but focused inwards now, muscles tense although the shivering has mostly abated. Spencer wets one of the smaller rags in the water, now hot enough to let loose steady curls of steam, and wrings it out before carrying it over to where the boy is waiting. He touches the cloth carefully to the worst of the wounds, pressing in with steady hands, and the boy hisses softly in pain.
“Clean through,” Spencer says after a moment, swiping gently at the other side of the boy’s shoulder. “You got lucky.”
There’s a little choked-off laugh, breaking the tense silence of cloth-on-skin and three people hardly breathing. “Lucky,” the boy says, with a twisted smile that makes him look older, more cynical. He’s probably closer to their age than Ryan had first guessed; it’s just the weariness and lack of weight that makes him look younger.
Ryan’s attention snags, caught by Spencer’s words and the wound he can see more clearly now, without the matted layer of dirt. “You were shot?” he asks, shocked even though he knows that these things happen, sometimes. It’s impossible to avoid accidents with so many people out hunting in the forest, for their dinners and worse.
“Not by me,” Spencer states immediately. His hands are still careful on the boy’s shoulders, fingertips barely grazing skin. Ryan would never have accused him, but even so, his shoulders relax somewhat. He wonders what the boy was doing out there in the forest in the first place, and if he knows about how dangerous it is. There are hunters out there every day, and there are the other kinds of hunters, the ones not looking for deer or rabbits, but patrolling the outskirts of the village, making sure it stays safe. The ones who don’t carry ordinary bullets in their guns, because they know what lives out there in the dark.
The boy makes a little sound of pain when Spencer starts probing the shoulder wound, cleaning it out. Spencer’s hand hovers, reassuring, but doesn’t touch. Firelight glints off of the metal of his rings, one on each finger, protection of some small sort in the forest against things that Spencer doesn’t hunt. Ryan wears them too, on every finger of both hands. They all do.
For the first time, he realizes what’s wrong with the boy sitting in front of their hearth.
“Spencer,” he says. Low-voiced, warning. A question. He can’t imagine that Spencer didn’t notice, that it wasn’t the first thing Spencer looked for when he found someone wandering alone in the forest, injured and too-thin. It’s still better to believe that Spencer didn’t notice, rather than that he brought this here deliberately into their home after he did.
There are no rings on the boy’s hands. Basic protection, what marks them as human and keeps what lives in the forest at bay. Silver encircling each finger to prove that you’re one of us, and not one of them. The boy has none. He has no rings, no necklace, not even an earring, as the latest fashion dictates among those growing awkwardly out of adolescence. No silver anywhere on his body.
Spencer’s ignoring him. Ryan’s fists clench, his muscles suddenly tight with warring instincts. Spencer keeps at his work, while the boy who has no silver turns progressively paler with every swipe of the cloth, until he finally opens his mouth to whisper, “I think…” and keels over in the direction of the fire.
Ryan moves without thinking, catching the boy’s wrist with one hand to pull him back upright and out of danger. When he does, though, the boy cries out in pain; the low, broken noise of a wounded animal, and Ryan is startled into letting go again. When he does, he sees the five perfectly-shaped crescents burned into the boy’s skin, the same shape and width of the rings on Ryan’s fingers.
“Spencer,” he says again, with more urgency this time. His brain is panicking, even though there’s not much the thing can do to them right now, barely conscious and weakened by blood loss. There’s still a danger. There’s always a danger.
“I know,” Spencer says tightly, as if he can hear the words Ryan hasn’t said out loud. “I know.” He keeps cleaning, though, eyes fixed on the bloody flesh in front of him and not Ryan’s shocked, horrified eyes. There’s another set of burn marks just below where the blood has dried, five more perfect crescents set into the skin covering whipcord muscle. Ryan doesn’t even have to look twice to know that they’re Spencer’s.
It will kill them. Ryan knows as well as anyone that it’s not just children’s tales and nightmares; that these things are dangerous no matter what phase the moon is in. Hunted, exiled from every settlement, driven to starvation and madness by the animal lurking under the skin, they will kill whoever helps them and steal whatever they can, anything that will help them survive. The fact that this one currently looks like a harmless, injured young man means nothing. If they leave it here, there’s every chance that they’ll never wake up in the morning.
“You’ve brought…” Ryan begins, mouth too dry to articulate the word pounding in his skull. Werewolf.
“Brendon,” the thing bleeding out on Ryan’s wooden floor says. “My name’s Brendon.”
* * *
There’s a werewolf in front of their fireplace. Ryan’s brain can’t seem to get past that one stuttering thought, even when he tries to spur himself into some sort of action. Spencer had given him that look, the one that promises we’ll talk about this later, just not right now, and Ryan’s mouth had shut automatically like a clam over a pearl. It hadn’t mattered at that point anyway; Brendon had lasted maybe another three minutes before the blood loss combined with the pain and he’d passed out on the hearth.
Spencer doesn’t stop working, getting dirt out of the cuts before they can fester and stopping the bleeding as much as he can. He pauses as he starts trying to wrap the bandages over the broken skin, unable to support the dead weight and bind at the same time. Ryan sees the problem immediately, but he can’t bring himself to move until Spencer looks up and says, “Ryan, can you…?” and looks back down before Ryan can take the coward’s way out and shake his head.
He props Brendon more-or-less upright, touching gingerly while Spencer places the bandages. He stops again, just before wrapping the first one, frowning at the wound still slowly leaking blood onto the surrounding skin. Ryan opens his mouth to ask the question, but before he can, Spencer sets down the bandage and slides the rings off of his fingers. Ryan’s intake of breath is louder than anything else in the room, heard clearly over the muted crackling of the fire.
“I can’t get them on without touching him,” Spencer argues, always so reasonable even though Ryan can see the tension in his arms, and knows that Spencer must be just as terrified as Ryan is, even if he’s doing a better job of hiding it.
Rationally, Ryan knows that there’s not much Brendon can do to them right now. Not only is he unconscious, he’s also in human form, bound to it for another three weeks. And while in that form, his bite isn’t any more dangerous than any other human’s.
It’s the irrational part of him that keeps his heart pounding against his chest every second that he spends this close, close enough to count Brendon’s dark eyelashes and feel the breath coming softly against Ryan’s exposed chest over the V-neck of his shirt. It’s the part of him that grew up hearing stories about werewolves, the part that’s seen the carcasses slung over Jon’s shoulders when he returns home after a full moon, weary and soaked with blood. The part that remembers a night two years ago, when there had been a strange man in their yard ripping up hunks of grass from the earth with his bare hands, one that had snarled when Ryan froze in the open doorway, saliva dripping from its open mouth, and only disappeared when Spencer had appeared at Ryan’s side and cocked the rifle.
Right now, Brendon doesn’t seem so much like that one, but he is. They’re all the same, under the skin. And if anyone catches them helping this one, with winter closing in only a few months away and the danger of losing flocks or family to werewolves a danger that threatens more with every degree the temperature drops, they’ll be in more trouble than Spencer will be able to get them out of. They’ll go to the stocks at best; at worst, they’ll end up shot by the same rifle that will undoubtedly aim for Brendon first.
Ryan watches Spencer’s hands deftly wrapping and tying the bandages, and wonders if anything could possibly be worth losing his best friend. He can’t say it out loud, though, struck mute by Spencer’s silent plea. All he can do is hold the thin boy’s body steady between them, and watch Spencer’s naked hands pressed flat against pale, chilled skin.
When Spencer finally finishes, when they’ve put away the excess cloth and washed the blood from their hands, they sit at the table to talk. Ryan gets out what’s left of the turnip stew from last night and they eat it cold, without bothering to hang the pot over the fire. Ryan doesn’t want to disturb the lump curled in front of the hearth, and Spencer, it seems, is just too hungry and tired to wait.
“You can’t leave him here,” is the first thing that Ryan says, fingers strained taut over the rag he’s using as a napkin. “He’ll kill us in our sleep.”
Spencer chews slowly, eyes shrewd and thoughtful. “I don’t think he will,” he says after he swallows. “He doesn’t have anywhere to go, anyway. If he tries to run, he’ll just die in the forest.”
Ryan looks sideways at the shape pretending to be a boy. He’s backlit by the fire, hair and skin touched with gold and red, human hues. It’s harder to think of killing him when he looks like he could have been one of them. He had been, once. Before he’d been bitten. Not anymore.
“We could lock him in the cellar,” Ryan hears himself suggest slowly. Their food is down there, but Ryan doesn’t think Brendon will risk spoiling it just for the sake of destruction, not when they’re all he has. It’s a safer alternative than leaving him inside the house, unconscious or not. They don’t know how long he’ll stay that way.
“He’ll freeze down there tonight,” Spencer argues. Ryan gives him a look that probably shows how much he doesn’t care, that he thinks it would probably be best for all of them if Brendon simply died in his sleep and never woke up. Spencer doesn’t argue, exactly, but his eyes get that stubborn glint to them that Ryan knows means he won’t back down.
They end up compromising. Spencer ties Brendon’s hands with thick rope, and his feet as well. They leave him in front of the fireplace, but Ryan clears out everything - knives, rifle, poker for the fire - that could be used against them. He puts it all in the room they use for sleeping, and shifts the heavy board from its place against the wall, ready to bar the door.
“I should sleep out here,” Spencer says after a moment, eyes on the ragged figure by the fire. “In case he wakes.”
Ryan stares hard at Brendon, and then at Spencer. He’s been out in the forest all day hunting, and there are circles under his eyes, spine slumped.
“Go to sleep,” he orders, taking up position in the chair closest to the fire. “I’ll take the first watch.”
* * *
Spencer takes over for Ryan in the early hours of the morning, so he sleeps in late, waking well past dawn with the birds outside already singing. He washes his face, scrubbing crumbling sleep-dust from his eyes, and then remembers why he’s slept in so late.
Spencer’s still keeping watch, but from the bubbling pot over the fire, it looks like he’s managed to split that duty with making breakfast. The werewolf is still asleep, although Ryan notes uneasily that his legs are untied.
Spencer, as usual, reads his mind and the direction of his gaze. “He woke up a few hours after you went to bed and needed to use the chamber pot. I gave him some water as well.”
Ryan understands, logically, the need for it, but it still leaves him feeling edgy. “He’s back asleep now,” he points out, and holds Spencer’s gaze stubbornly, willing him to disagree.
Spencer sighs, but doesn’t protest. He picks up the rope from the floor a few feet away and tugs Brendon’s ankles together, binding them securely. Brendon kicks a little in his sleep, Ryan notes, but it’s not really a fight. They’ll need more than this, though, if he wakes up again, stronger. Ryan doesn’t know whether mere rope can hold a determined werewolf.
Spencer takes advantage of his proximity to check the bandages, peeling up one corner of the cloth gingerly to look beneath. Ryan remembers the shape Brendon was in last night, and is amazed at how much healthier he looks already, with the sun coming through the windows to give him some color and banish the ashy pallor from his skin. He looks even more human when taken out of the moonlight.
“He’s lucky,” Ryan murmurs. If it had been anyone other than Spencer who found him; if the bullet had gone further to the left; if it had been a day later, even, before he got aid. Perhaps werewolves led charmed lives.
“Luckier than we first thought,” Spencer says grimly. Ryan’s eyes snap up, but Spencer isn’t looking at him; he’s still examining the gunshot wound beneath the bandages. “Come look at this,” Spencer invites, and Ryan isn’t comfortable being that close, even with their prisoner bound hand and foot, but he goes anyway because it’s Spencer who’s asking.
At first he doesn’t see what Spencer’s talking about. The wound is cleaner than most, perhaps, but Spencer does a good job at that sort of thing. It’s starting to close a little, but there’s still a clear hole in the front where the bullet first punctured, before it tore through the muscle and out the other side. Ryan can see, a little, the inside of the wound where the bullet passed.
Then he realizes what he’s looking at. “It’s…”
“Cauterized,” Spencer says. “Burned. Like someone stabbed through with a fire poker.”
Ryan’s hands have gone strangely cold at his sides. “You said it was a bullet,” he clarifies. He already knows what that means, of course, but he needs for Spencer to be the one to say it. He wipes the clamminess from his hands onto his pants and waits.
“It was a bullet,” Spencer says. “A bullet that can burn flesh. Werewolf flesh.”
Ryan’s eyes are drawn to the crescents on Brendon’s arms where Ryan touched him last night. Spencer, he notes unhappily, still isn’t wearing his rings. Maybe he took them off again when Brendon woke up and needed help to reach the chamber pot. It’s entirely too easy for Ryan to imagine Spencer assisting Brendon across the floor and suddenly being choked, strangled by an arm around his throat just before sharp teeth move in close for a bite. He wonders if Spencer had been thinking the same thing, or if he’d just seen it as his duty to help.
“He wasn’t shot by just any hunter,” Spencer finishes. “Somewhere out there is a werewolf hunter who knows he exists. That he’s wounded but alive. And nearby.”
There are only two hunters in their village, but there are others close by, and it’s easy to overlap in the forest. It doesn’t mean anything specific. Brendon could have come from anywhere, and who knows how far he traveled after the bullet hit, or where Spencer found him. There’s nothing concrete to lead a hunter here.
Brendon stirs. Ryan recoils automatically, but Spencer’s hands just tighten, a warning that Brendon heeds by going still immediately, roused instantly to waking. Ryan can see the pulse in his throat jumping madly, inches from Spencer’s fingers. Spencer can probably feel it in his hands.
“Don’t try anything,” Spencer warns. His grip eases after a moment, but only slightly. Ryan’s whole body is tensed, waiting.
Brendon opens his eyes, slowly starts to shift and hisses in pain when the movement tugs at his shoulder. “There’s not a lot I could do, really,” he points out, with amazing coherence. “I’m tied to the floor.”
Ryan frowns, but Spencer is the one to correct, “You’re not. We just tied your hands and feet.”
“Oh.” Ryan sees Brendon try to move again, and fall pitifully motionless after only the smallest of twitches. “It feels like it. Could you…could I sit up, please?”
Ryan gives him a look making it clear that if Brendon tries anything, anything with Spencer, Ryan will gut him with the nearest hunting knife. Brendon looks appropriately meek while Spencer slides an arm around his waist and helps him upright. Ryan isn’t fooled.
“Please…” Brendon says hopefully, and Spencer seems to know what he means, fetching the dipper hanging next to the water pail and pouring a small amount into a dish. He holds it up to Brendon’s lips and Brendon slurps greedily, decorum forgotten at the first taste. Ryan’s lips curl, watching him. The wolf shows now, although it’s almost more like a dog, lapping desperately at the water. There’s some trickling down his chin.
It’s an uncharitable thought to have, some reluctant part of him admits. If Ryan had been shot, lost a considerable amount of blood, wandered in the forest for an indeterminate length of time and then spent a night unconscious, he’d probably be thirsty as well. And Brendon can’t exactly sip daintily with both hands tied. Ryan’s seen other werewolves, the kind that slaver and growl and snuffle with dirt on their faces and their own filth streaking their legs. Brendon’s about as far from that as one could possibly get.
That doesn’t mean much, Ryan knows, but that he hasn’t had the chance to go feral yet. Spencer must be thinking the same thing, because the next thing he asks is, “How long?”
Brendon licks water awkwardly from his lips, turning his head to wipe the rest from his chin and halting mid-motion, wincing when the movement pulls at his shoulder. He doesn’t play innocent or misinterpret, just swallows and answers finally, “Five weeks.”
He was their age when he was bitten, then, and not out on his own for long. Ryan doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse. “What happened?” he asks. He’s curious, and he loves stories, follows them like the scent of something delicious cooking on the hearth, or the sound of laughter. He doesn’t find many new ones in their village, but Brendon has one.
Brendon shrugs, and at first Ryan doesn’t think he’s going to answer. “I got bitten,” he says eventually. “My family knew; my brother saw it happen. My family cast me out.” He looks up then, expression earnest. “There was nothing else they could have done,” he says, and Ryan wonders who he’s really trying to convince. “My parents lead the services, someone would have noticed I was missing. Even if they tied me up, even if they tried. They didn’t have a choice.” He swallows, and then says in a very small voice, “At least they didn’t kill me.”
He tries to move, awkwardly, to make himself more comfortable. Spencer moves in to help him, getting a hand on his arm to steady him. Brendon looks startled, but doesn’t flinch away. “Who shot you?” Spencer asks, as Brendon settles again. “We know it was a hunter, the bullet was silver.”
Brendon winces. If he’s noticed the lack of silver on Spencer’s body right now, he doesn’t say anything, or betray the fact with a glance. “A man,” he says. Ryan waits for a moment, for more, but nothing seems forthcoming. His expression must give away his incredulousness, because Brendon argues defensively, “It was dark, and I didn’t…I wasn’t myself. I don’t know any more. It was a man with a gun.”
Spencer rolls his eyes, but Ryan’s curiosity is piqued. He’s never known what it was like to change, and he never wants to, but there’s still a part of him that wonders. It would have been Brendon’s first change, a few days ago, the first time his skin stretched into another shape and stole away his humanity. Ryan wonders if he remembers it, and if so, what it felt like.
Something in Brendon’s eyes keeps him from asking, and Spencer’s warning glare finishes the job. “You’re lucky it went through,” Spencer comments instead, over top of Ryan’s silence. “It would have killed you, otherwise.”
Ryan can see Brendon’s eyes echo lucky, with more sarcasm than he would have expected. Then Brendon’s expression sobers, and he asks, “Are you going to? Kill me?”
Spencer doesn’t even look at Ryan. “Not yet,” he says. The porridge above the fire bubble and spits. Spencer takes it off the hook and asks, “Are you hungry?”
* * *
They leave the question of what to do alone for the day, although Ryan can see it in Spencer’s eyes every time they look at each other, and knows Spencer can see it in his as well. Brendon doesn’t ask, and Ryan doesn’t have as much practice reading his expressions, but from the way he holds himself, he can’t be thinking of anything else.
Brendon is still tied, although Spencer has fashioned a sling to keep his shoulder comfortable so that he can sit upright. They’d had a brief argument, with Brendon pretending not to be looking on interestedly between them, and finally ended up tethering Brendon by his ankles to the iron ring used to hold the fireplace poker upright. The poker itself is still in the other room, of course. Brendon doesn’t protest the additional precautionary measures, although it does make his hobbling trip to the chamber pot even more awkward.
When the sun starts to go down, Ryan can’t pretend anymore. He gives Spencer a look, and Spencer sighs and sits down. Brendon had been dozing in the warmth of the fire, but he stirs when they both sit down, as if sensing the decision is about to be made.
“We can’t keep him here,” Ryan says flat out, because that’s the most important thing. “It’s not safe.”
“He’s hardly a danger right now,” Spencer points out, but he’s chewing his lip, so Ryan knows he agrees.
“Not just him,” Ryan argues. “Someone shot him. Someone’s looking for him.”
“There’s no reason for them to come here,” Spencer says, but again, it’s not really an argument. They both know that anyone could, at any time. And the consequences of being caught with a werewolf are higher than either of them can really afford to pay.
“We could put him in the cellar,” Ryan suggests, even though they’d ruled that out last night. Brendon is healthier today, and with a blanket, it might not be too bad.
“For how long?” Spencer asks immediately, and he’s right. Ryan’s thinking of short-term solutions, what to do now, because asking himself what they’re going to do with a pet werewolf for the foreseeable future is more than his mind can grasp. “It’s going to get colder,” Spencer continues.
“Until he heals,” Ryan offers, but even that’s not really a viable solution. A gunshot wound could take weeks to heal. Months. And then what, they turn him out into the forest and wish him good luck surviving? If someone did that to Ryan, he’d sneak back in, kill them and take whatever he could. He wouldn’t doubt that Brendon might do the same.
Then again, there’s really nothing stopping him from doing it right now, if they turn him out. Ryan doesn’t think either of them are ready to hold the rifle to Brendon’s head. Which means turning him over to Jon, because Jon can.
“I’m good at doing dishes,” Brendon says suddenly, interrupting the silent discussion winding down between Ryan and Spencer’s eyes. “And gardening. I always used to garden, back when…before. And I can clean and skin things. My father hunted.”
“With one arm?” Spencer asks skeptically. Brendon flushes, but his chin stays up. He’s by far the most articulate and persuasive werewolf Ryan has ever heard of. It’s more than a little unsettling.
“Spencer hunts,” Ryan puts in. If Brendon thinks they’re handing him a rifle and letting him loose in the forest, he must be delirious. “He already knows all of that.”
Spencer leans back, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Why?” he asks, and Brendon blinks for a moment before he either realizes the question is directed at him or comes up with an answer.
“Where else am I going to go?” he asks rhetorically, and there’s enough beaten-down anguish in his voice that Ryan believes him. It’s either stay here or go back out into the forest, where there are hunters and animals and unforgiving tree roots to sleep on at night, with winter coming on.
“We’d have to hide him,” Ryan says, and he’s surprised at how certain his voice sounds, like he’s already made up his mind when he hadn’t been aware of doing any such thing. “If anyone knows he’s here…”
“We can’t hide him forever,” Spencer argues, not even batting an eyelash at Ryan’s sudden decisiveness. “Someone will notice.”
“Not if he has rings,” Ryan says. “You’re a smith; you could make some out of some other metal, no one would ever know.”
“He’d miss services,” Spencer says flatly, cutting Ryan off mid-plan. “There’s no way he could be at full moon services, and people would notice. People would talk.”
Of course they would, it’s why they have full moon services to begin with. To keep the werewolves out, to make sure that every human is present and accounted for, safe in the company of others on the most dangerous night of each month. The only people who don’t attend are the hunters, and they’re above suspicion. They come home carrying too many lycanthropic corpses.
“It’s risky,” Ryan says finally. “I don’t like it.”
Spencer favors him with a small smile, like he knows that no matter what they came up with, Ryan’s answer would be the same. It probably would. “Do you have a better alternative?”
Ryan mulls it over, but Brendon has been here for too long now, murmuring thank you to Spencer for wrapping his arm in a sling and complimenting Ryan’s potato-leek soup and forgetting himself for long enough to crack a joke about Spencer’s inability to herd chickens. Ryan can’t think of him as anything other than one of them. “No,” he says finally.
There’s silence for a few moments, and then Brendon asks tentatively, “Does this mean I’m staying?”
* * *
Two
Pairing: Jon/Brendon
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Character death prior to the beginning of the story, dubious consent.
Disclaimer: This is a complete work of fiction, no disrespect intended.
Notes: This is and has always been for maleyka. Thanks to cupiscent, disarm_d, softlyforgotten, and emilyray for their editing and input.
Summary: “You’ve brought…” Ryan begins, mouth too dry to articulate the word pounding in his skull. Werewolf.
PART ONE
It’s past dusk by the time Ryan hears the creaking gate swing open, late enough that his belly is starting to rumble.
“Spencer,” he calls, sticking a shred of old paper into his book to mark his place and unfolding from the musty armchair in the living room, wandering over to open the back door. “Did you find something? Because if not we still have those leftover…”
And then he stops, because what Spencer’s brought home from hunting isn’t dinner at all. It’s a boy.
“Put some water on,” Spencer orders. His arm is under the boy’s shoulders, supporting him, and they’re not making very good time. The boy is stumbling with every other step, and Spencer looks more weary than he usually does at the end of a day spent hunting, energy flagging. Ryan can’t make out much beyond their silhouettes in the evening gloom; metal glinting off of the rifle strapped onto Spencer’s back and the last rays of the sun highlighting dark hair.
Ryan’s stunned into immobility for a few drawn-out seconds. Spencer pushes past him and Ryan inhales the scent of forest, of earth and cold evening air, before he snaps out of it and goes to hang the water pot over the fire.
“He’s hurt,” Spencer says, unnecessarily because now that they’re inside, Ryan can see the dark blood staining the boy’s shirt at the shoulder, his shirt hanging in ragged strips off of a body that hasn’t seen enough meals lately, to judge by how many of his ribs Ryan can see revealed beneath frayed chunks of linen. “Do we have bandages?”
Ryan unfreezes at that, shock giving way to motion as his brain settles on something concrete to do. He pulls the tin down from the mantel over the fireplace, sorting through snatches of cloth until he finds strips of cotton long enough to serve as bandages. There aren’t enough; he can tell already that there’s more skin torn than he has cloth to cover. He has more strips in his room, though, salvaged from the scrap tin to serve as scarves. Those will be long enough. The boy’s shirt won’t work at all; it’s stiff with rusted stains, and filthy with dirt besides.
Spencer’s gotten the boy’s shirt off, setting him down close by the fire to help calm the shivering that’s making his shoulders quake. There’s dirt caked over the wounds, blood gone tacky and smeared across his skin, but Ryan can still make out the long tracks of broken skin raking across his ribs, and the sluggishly-bleeding hole cut deep into his shoulder.
“Wolves?” Ryan asks. He and Spencer live at the edge of the forest, closer than anyone else in the village. He knows well what’s out there, howling at night. Those marks could easily have been made by claws. He hopes it was only wolves, if that’s the case. There are also worse things than mere wolves in the forest, with a bite far more fatal. It’s three days after the full moon, though, so it’s not likely. These wounds are too fresh to be from that long ago.
The boy shakes his head. “Tree branches,” he says, and his voice is a little faint, breathy with swallowed pain, but he’s coherent enough. “I fell. I…”
He trails off, eyes closing; still awake but focused inwards now, muscles tense although the shivering has mostly abated. Spencer wets one of the smaller rags in the water, now hot enough to let loose steady curls of steam, and wrings it out before carrying it over to where the boy is waiting. He touches the cloth carefully to the worst of the wounds, pressing in with steady hands, and the boy hisses softly in pain.
“Clean through,” Spencer says after a moment, swiping gently at the other side of the boy’s shoulder. “You got lucky.”
There’s a little choked-off laugh, breaking the tense silence of cloth-on-skin and three people hardly breathing. “Lucky,” the boy says, with a twisted smile that makes him look older, more cynical. He’s probably closer to their age than Ryan had first guessed; it’s just the weariness and lack of weight that makes him look younger.
Ryan’s attention snags, caught by Spencer’s words and the wound he can see more clearly now, without the matted layer of dirt. “You were shot?” he asks, shocked even though he knows that these things happen, sometimes. It’s impossible to avoid accidents with so many people out hunting in the forest, for their dinners and worse.
“Not by me,” Spencer states immediately. His hands are still careful on the boy’s shoulders, fingertips barely grazing skin. Ryan would never have accused him, but even so, his shoulders relax somewhat. He wonders what the boy was doing out there in the forest in the first place, and if he knows about how dangerous it is. There are hunters out there every day, and there are the other kinds of hunters, the ones not looking for deer or rabbits, but patrolling the outskirts of the village, making sure it stays safe. The ones who don’t carry ordinary bullets in their guns, because they know what lives out there in the dark.
The boy makes a little sound of pain when Spencer starts probing the shoulder wound, cleaning it out. Spencer’s hand hovers, reassuring, but doesn’t touch. Firelight glints off of the metal of his rings, one on each finger, protection of some small sort in the forest against things that Spencer doesn’t hunt. Ryan wears them too, on every finger of both hands. They all do.
For the first time, he realizes what’s wrong with the boy sitting in front of their hearth.
“Spencer,” he says. Low-voiced, warning. A question. He can’t imagine that Spencer didn’t notice, that it wasn’t the first thing Spencer looked for when he found someone wandering alone in the forest, injured and too-thin. It’s still better to believe that Spencer didn’t notice, rather than that he brought this here deliberately into their home after he did.
There are no rings on the boy’s hands. Basic protection, what marks them as human and keeps what lives in the forest at bay. Silver encircling each finger to prove that you’re one of us, and not one of them. The boy has none. He has no rings, no necklace, not even an earring, as the latest fashion dictates among those growing awkwardly out of adolescence. No silver anywhere on his body.
Spencer’s ignoring him. Ryan’s fists clench, his muscles suddenly tight with warring instincts. Spencer keeps at his work, while the boy who has no silver turns progressively paler with every swipe of the cloth, until he finally opens his mouth to whisper, “I think…” and keels over in the direction of the fire.
Ryan moves without thinking, catching the boy’s wrist with one hand to pull him back upright and out of danger. When he does, though, the boy cries out in pain; the low, broken noise of a wounded animal, and Ryan is startled into letting go again. When he does, he sees the five perfectly-shaped crescents burned into the boy’s skin, the same shape and width of the rings on Ryan’s fingers.
“Spencer,” he says again, with more urgency this time. His brain is panicking, even though there’s not much the thing can do to them right now, barely conscious and weakened by blood loss. There’s still a danger. There’s always a danger.
“I know,” Spencer says tightly, as if he can hear the words Ryan hasn’t said out loud. “I know.” He keeps cleaning, though, eyes fixed on the bloody flesh in front of him and not Ryan’s shocked, horrified eyes. There’s another set of burn marks just below where the blood has dried, five more perfect crescents set into the skin covering whipcord muscle. Ryan doesn’t even have to look twice to know that they’re Spencer’s.
It will kill them. Ryan knows as well as anyone that it’s not just children’s tales and nightmares; that these things are dangerous no matter what phase the moon is in. Hunted, exiled from every settlement, driven to starvation and madness by the animal lurking under the skin, they will kill whoever helps them and steal whatever they can, anything that will help them survive. The fact that this one currently looks like a harmless, injured young man means nothing. If they leave it here, there’s every chance that they’ll never wake up in the morning.
“You’ve brought…” Ryan begins, mouth too dry to articulate the word pounding in his skull. Werewolf.
“Brendon,” the thing bleeding out on Ryan’s wooden floor says. “My name’s Brendon.”
* * *
There’s a werewolf in front of their fireplace. Ryan’s brain can’t seem to get past that one stuttering thought, even when he tries to spur himself into some sort of action. Spencer had given him that look, the one that promises we’ll talk about this later, just not right now, and Ryan’s mouth had shut automatically like a clam over a pearl. It hadn’t mattered at that point anyway; Brendon had lasted maybe another three minutes before the blood loss combined with the pain and he’d passed out on the hearth.
Spencer doesn’t stop working, getting dirt out of the cuts before they can fester and stopping the bleeding as much as he can. He pauses as he starts trying to wrap the bandages over the broken skin, unable to support the dead weight and bind at the same time. Ryan sees the problem immediately, but he can’t bring himself to move until Spencer looks up and says, “Ryan, can you…?” and looks back down before Ryan can take the coward’s way out and shake his head.
He props Brendon more-or-less upright, touching gingerly while Spencer places the bandages. He stops again, just before wrapping the first one, frowning at the wound still slowly leaking blood onto the surrounding skin. Ryan opens his mouth to ask the question, but before he can, Spencer sets down the bandage and slides the rings off of his fingers. Ryan’s intake of breath is louder than anything else in the room, heard clearly over the muted crackling of the fire.
“I can’t get them on without touching him,” Spencer argues, always so reasonable even though Ryan can see the tension in his arms, and knows that Spencer must be just as terrified as Ryan is, even if he’s doing a better job of hiding it.
Rationally, Ryan knows that there’s not much Brendon can do to them right now. Not only is he unconscious, he’s also in human form, bound to it for another three weeks. And while in that form, his bite isn’t any more dangerous than any other human’s.
It’s the irrational part of him that keeps his heart pounding against his chest every second that he spends this close, close enough to count Brendon’s dark eyelashes and feel the breath coming softly against Ryan’s exposed chest over the V-neck of his shirt. It’s the part of him that grew up hearing stories about werewolves, the part that’s seen the carcasses slung over Jon’s shoulders when he returns home after a full moon, weary and soaked with blood. The part that remembers a night two years ago, when there had been a strange man in their yard ripping up hunks of grass from the earth with his bare hands, one that had snarled when Ryan froze in the open doorway, saliva dripping from its open mouth, and only disappeared when Spencer had appeared at Ryan’s side and cocked the rifle.
Right now, Brendon doesn’t seem so much like that one, but he is. They’re all the same, under the skin. And if anyone catches them helping this one, with winter closing in only a few months away and the danger of losing flocks or family to werewolves a danger that threatens more with every degree the temperature drops, they’ll be in more trouble than Spencer will be able to get them out of. They’ll go to the stocks at best; at worst, they’ll end up shot by the same rifle that will undoubtedly aim for Brendon first.
Ryan watches Spencer’s hands deftly wrapping and tying the bandages, and wonders if anything could possibly be worth losing his best friend. He can’t say it out loud, though, struck mute by Spencer’s silent plea. All he can do is hold the thin boy’s body steady between them, and watch Spencer’s naked hands pressed flat against pale, chilled skin.
When Spencer finally finishes, when they’ve put away the excess cloth and washed the blood from their hands, they sit at the table to talk. Ryan gets out what’s left of the turnip stew from last night and they eat it cold, without bothering to hang the pot over the fire. Ryan doesn’t want to disturb the lump curled in front of the hearth, and Spencer, it seems, is just too hungry and tired to wait.
“You can’t leave him here,” is the first thing that Ryan says, fingers strained taut over the rag he’s using as a napkin. “He’ll kill us in our sleep.”
Spencer chews slowly, eyes shrewd and thoughtful. “I don’t think he will,” he says after he swallows. “He doesn’t have anywhere to go, anyway. If he tries to run, he’ll just die in the forest.”
Ryan looks sideways at the shape pretending to be a boy. He’s backlit by the fire, hair and skin touched with gold and red, human hues. It’s harder to think of killing him when he looks like he could have been one of them. He had been, once. Before he’d been bitten. Not anymore.
“We could lock him in the cellar,” Ryan hears himself suggest slowly. Their food is down there, but Ryan doesn’t think Brendon will risk spoiling it just for the sake of destruction, not when they’re all he has. It’s a safer alternative than leaving him inside the house, unconscious or not. They don’t know how long he’ll stay that way.
“He’ll freeze down there tonight,” Spencer argues. Ryan gives him a look that probably shows how much he doesn’t care, that he thinks it would probably be best for all of them if Brendon simply died in his sleep and never woke up. Spencer doesn’t argue, exactly, but his eyes get that stubborn glint to them that Ryan knows means he won’t back down.
They end up compromising. Spencer ties Brendon’s hands with thick rope, and his feet as well. They leave him in front of the fireplace, but Ryan clears out everything - knives, rifle, poker for the fire - that could be used against them. He puts it all in the room they use for sleeping, and shifts the heavy board from its place against the wall, ready to bar the door.
“I should sleep out here,” Spencer says after a moment, eyes on the ragged figure by the fire. “In case he wakes.”
Ryan stares hard at Brendon, and then at Spencer. He’s been out in the forest all day hunting, and there are circles under his eyes, spine slumped.
“Go to sleep,” he orders, taking up position in the chair closest to the fire. “I’ll take the first watch.”
* * *
Spencer takes over for Ryan in the early hours of the morning, so he sleeps in late, waking well past dawn with the birds outside already singing. He washes his face, scrubbing crumbling sleep-dust from his eyes, and then remembers why he’s slept in so late.
Spencer’s still keeping watch, but from the bubbling pot over the fire, it looks like he’s managed to split that duty with making breakfast. The werewolf is still asleep, although Ryan notes uneasily that his legs are untied.
Spencer, as usual, reads his mind and the direction of his gaze. “He woke up a few hours after you went to bed and needed to use the chamber pot. I gave him some water as well.”
Ryan understands, logically, the need for it, but it still leaves him feeling edgy. “He’s back asleep now,” he points out, and holds Spencer’s gaze stubbornly, willing him to disagree.
Spencer sighs, but doesn’t protest. He picks up the rope from the floor a few feet away and tugs Brendon’s ankles together, binding them securely. Brendon kicks a little in his sleep, Ryan notes, but it’s not really a fight. They’ll need more than this, though, if he wakes up again, stronger. Ryan doesn’t know whether mere rope can hold a determined werewolf.
Spencer takes advantage of his proximity to check the bandages, peeling up one corner of the cloth gingerly to look beneath. Ryan remembers the shape Brendon was in last night, and is amazed at how much healthier he looks already, with the sun coming through the windows to give him some color and banish the ashy pallor from his skin. He looks even more human when taken out of the moonlight.
“He’s lucky,” Ryan murmurs. If it had been anyone other than Spencer who found him; if the bullet had gone further to the left; if it had been a day later, even, before he got aid. Perhaps werewolves led charmed lives.
“Luckier than we first thought,” Spencer says grimly. Ryan’s eyes snap up, but Spencer isn’t looking at him; he’s still examining the gunshot wound beneath the bandages. “Come look at this,” Spencer invites, and Ryan isn’t comfortable being that close, even with their prisoner bound hand and foot, but he goes anyway because it’s Spencer who’s asking.
At first he doesn’t see what Spencer’s talking about. The wound is cleaner than most, perhaps, but Spencer does a good job at that sort of thing. It’s starting to close a little, but there’s still a clear hole in the front where the bullet first punctured, before it tore through the muscle and out the other side. Ryan can see, a little, the inside of the wound where the bullet passed.
Then he realizes what he’s looking at. “It’s…”
“Cauterized,” Spencer says. “Burned. Like someone stabbed through with a fire poker.”
Ryan’s hands have gone strangely cold at his sides. “You said it was a bullet,” he clarifies. He already knows what that means, of course, but he needs for Spencer to be the one to say it. He wipes the clamminess from his hands onto his pants and waits.
“It was a bullet,” Spencer says. “A bullet that can burn flesh. Werewolf flesh.”
Ryan’s eyes are drawn to the crescents on Brendon’s arms where Ryan touched him last night. Spencer, he notes unhappily, still isn’t wearing his rings. Maybe he took them off again when Brendon woke up and needed help to reach the chamber pot. It’s entirely too easy for Ryan to imagine Spencer assisting Brendon across the floor and suddenly being choked, strangled by an arm around his throat just before sharp teeth move in close for a bite. He wonders if Spencer had been thinking the same thing, or if he’d just seen it as his duty to help.
“He wasn’t shot by just any hunter,” Spencer finishes. “Somewhere out there is a werewolf hunter who knows he exists. That he’s wounded but alive. And nearby.”
There are only two hunters in their village, but there are others close by, and it’s easy to overlap in the forest. It doesn’t mean anything specific. Brendon could have come from anywhere, and who knows how far he traveled after the bullet hit, or where Spencer found him. There’s nothing concrete to lead a hunter here.
Brendon stirs. Ryan recoils automatically, but Spencer’s hands just tighten, a warning that Brendon heeds by going still immediately, roused instantly to waking. Ryan can see the pulse in his throat jumping madly, inches from Spencer’s fingers. Spencer can probably feel it in his hands.
“Don’t try anything,” Spencer warns. His grip eases after a moment, but only slightly. Ryan’s whole body is tensed, waiting.
Brendon opens his eyes, slowly starts to shift and hisses in pain when the movement tugs at his shoulder. “There’s not a lot I could do, really,” he points out, with amazing coherence. “I’m tied to the floor.”
Ryan frowns, but Spencer is the one to correct, “You’re not. We just tied your hands and feet.”
“Oh.” Ryan sees Brendon try to move again, and fall pitifully motionless after only the smallest of twitches. “It feels like it. Could you…could I sit up, please?”
Ryan gives him a look making it clear that if Brendon tries anything, anything with Spencer, Ryan will gut him with the nearest hunting knife. Brendon looks appropriately meek while Spencer slides an arm around his waist and helps him upright. Ryan isn’t fooled.
“Please…” Brendon says hopefully, and Spencer seems to know what he means, fetching the dipper hanging next to the water pail and pouring a small amount into a dish. He holds it up to Brendon’s lips and Brendon slurps greedily, decorum forgotten at the first taste. Ryan’s lips curl, watching him. The wolf shows now, although it’s almost more like a dog, lapping desperately at the water. There’s some trickling down his chin.
It’s an uncharitable thought to have, some reluctant part of him admits. If Ryan had been shot, lost a considerable amount of blood, wandered in the forest for an indeterminate length of time and then spent a night unconscious, he’d probably be thirsty as well. And Brendon can’t exactly sip daintily with both hands tied. Ryan’s seen other werewolves, the kind that slaver and growl and snuffle with dirt on their faces and their own filth streaking their legs. Brendon’s about as far from that as one could possibly get.
That doesn’t mean much, Ryan knows, but that he hasn’t had the chance to go feral yet. Spencer must be thinking the same thing, because the next thing he asks is, “How long?”
Brendon licks water awkwardly from his lips, turning his head to wipe the rest from his chin and halting mid-motion, wincing when the movement pulls at his shoulder. He doesn’t play innocent or misinterpret, just swallows and answers finally, “Five weeks.”
He was their age when he was bitten, then, and not out on his own for long. Ryan doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse. “What happened?” he asks. He’s curious, and he loves stories, follows them like the scent of something delicious cooking on the hearth, or the sound of laughter. He doesn’t find many new ones in their village, but Brendon has one.
Brendon shrugs, and at first Ryan doesn’t think he’s going to answer. “I got bitten,” he says eventually. “My family knew; my brother saw it happen. My family cast me out.” He looks up then, expression earnest. “There was nothing else they could have done,” he says, and Ryan wonders who he’s really trying to convince. “My parents lead the services, someone would have noticed I was missing. Even if they tied me up, even if they tried. They didn’t have a choice.” He swallows, and then says in a very small voice, “At least they didn’t kill me.”
He tries to move, awkwardly, to make himself more comfortable. Spencer moves in to help him, getting a hand on his arm to steady him. Brendon looks startled, but doesn’t flinch away. “Who shot you?” Spencer asks, as Brendon settles again. “We know it was a hunter, the bullet was silver.”
Brendon winces. If he’s noticed the lack of silver on Spencer’s body right now, he doesn’t say anything, or betray the fact with a glance. “A man,” he says. Ryan waits for a moment, for more, but nothing seems forthcoming. His expression must give away his incredulousness, because Brendon argues defensively, “It was dark, and I didn’t…I wasn’t myself. I don’t know any more. It was a man with a gun.”
Spencer rolls his eyes, but Ryan’s curiosity is piqued. He’s never known what it was like to change, and he never wants to, but there’s still a part of him that wonders. It would have been Brendon’s first change, a few days ago, the first time his skin stretched into another shape and stole away his humanity. Ryan wonders if he remembers it, and if so, what it felt like.
Something in Brendon’s eyes keeps him from asking, and Spencer’s warning glare finishes the job. “You’re lucky it went through,” Spencer comments instead, over top of Ryan’s silence. “It would have killed you, otherwise.”
Ryan can see Brendon’s eyes echo lucky, with more sarcasm than he would have expected. Then Brendon’s expression sobers, and he asks, “Are you going to? Kill me?”
Spencer doesn’t even look at Ryan. “Not yet,” he says. The porridge above the fire bubble and spits. Spencer takes it off the hook and asks, “Are you hungry?”
* * *
They leave the question of what to do alone for the day, although Ryan can see it in Spencer’s eyes every time they look at each other, and knows Spencer can see it in his as well. Brendon doesn’t ask, and Ryan doesn’t have as much practice reading his expressions, but from the way he holds himself, he can’t be thinking of anything else.
Brendon is still tied, although Spencer has fashioned a sling to keep his shoulder comfortable so that he can sit upright. They’d had a brief argument, with Brendon pretending not to be looking on interestedly between them, and finally ended up tethering Brendon by his ankles to the iron ring used to hold the fireplace poker upright. The poker itself is still in the other room, of course. Brendon doesn’t protest the additional precautionary measures, although it does make his hobbling trip to the chamber pot even more awkward.
When the sun starts to go down, Ryan can’t pretend anymore. He gives Spencer a look, and Spencer sighs and sits down. Brendon had been dozing in the warmth of the fire, but he stirs when they both sit down, as if sensing the decision is about to be made.
“We can’t keep him here,” Ryan says flat out, because that’s the most important thing. “It’s not safe.”
“He’s hardly a danger right now,” Spencer points out, but he’s chewing his lip, so Ryan knows he agrees.
“Not just him,” Ryan argues. “Someone shot him. Someone’s looking for him.”
“There’s no reason for them to come here,” Spencer says, but again, it’s not really an argument. They both know that anyone could, at any time. And the consequences of being caught with a werewolf are higher than either of them can really afford to pay.
“We could put him in the cellar,” Ryan suggests, even though they’d ruled that out last night. Brendon is healthier today, and with a blanket, it might not be too bad.
“For how long?” Spencer asks immediately, and he’s right. Ryan’s thinking of short-term solutions, what to do now, because asking himself what they’re going to do with a pet werewolf for the foreseeable future is more than his mind can grasp. “It’s going to get colder,” Spencer continues.
“Until he heals,” Ryan offers, but even that’s not really a viable solution. A gunshot wound could take weeks to heal. Months. And then what, they turn him out into the forest and wish him good luck surviving? If someone did that to Ryan, he’d sneak back in, kill them and take whatever he could. He wouldn’t doubt that Brendon might do the same.
Then again, there’s really nothing stopping him from doing it right now, if they turn him out. Ryan doesn’t think either of them are ready to hold the rifle to Brendon’s head. Which means turning him over to Jon, because Jon can.
“I’m good at doing dishes,” Brendon says suddenly, interrupting the silent discussion winding down between Ryan and Spencer’s eyes. “And gardening. I always used to garden, back when…before. And I can clean and skin things. My father hunted.”
“With one arm?” Spencer asks skeptically. Brendon flushes, but his chin stays up. He’s by far the most articulate and persuasive werewolf Ryan has ever heard of. It’s more than a little unsettling.
“Spencer hunts,” Ryan puts in. If Brendon thinks they’re handing him a rifle and letting him loose in the forest, he must be delirious. “He already knows all of that.”
Spencer leans back, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Why?” he asks, and Brendon blinks for a moment before he either realizes the question is directed at him or comes up with an answer.
“Where else am I going to go?” he asks rhetorically, and there’s enough beaten-down anguish in his voice that Ryan believes him. It’s either stay here or go back out into the forest, where there are hunters and animals and unforgiving tree roots to sleep on at night, with winter coming on.
“We’d have to hide him,” Ryan says, and he’s surprised at how certain his voice sounds, like he’s already made up his mind when he hadn’t been aware of doing any such thing. “If anyone knows he’s here…”
“We can’t hide him forever,” Spencer argues, not even batting an eyelash at Ryan’s sudden decisiveness. “Someone will notice.”
“Not if he has rings,” Ryan says. “You’re a smith; you could make some out of some other metal, no one would ever know.”
“He’d miss services,” Spencer says flatly, cutting Ryan off mid-plan. “There’s no way he could be at full moon services, and people would notice. People would talk.”
Of course they would, it’s why they have full moon services to begin with. To keep the werewolves out, to make sure that every human is present and accounted for, safe in the company of others on the most dangerous night of each month. The only people who don’t attend are the hunters, and they’re above suspicion. They come home carrying too many lycanthropic corpses.
“It’s risky,” Ryan says finally. “I don’t like it.”
Spencer favors him with a small smile, like he knows that no matter what they came up with, Ryan’s answer would be the same. It probably would. “Do you have a better alternative?”
Ryan mulls it over, but Brendon has been here for too long now, murmuring thank you to Spencer for wrapping his arm in a sling and complimenting Ryan’s potato-leek soup and forgetting himself for long enough to crack a joke about Spencer’s inability to herd chickens. Ryan can’t think of him as anything other than one of them. “No,” he says finally.
There’s silence for a few moments, and then Brendon asks tentatively, “Does this mean I’m staying?”
* * *
Two