Somebody cut his coat.
Daniel heard the scissors before he understood why. A small, repeated sound close to his chest. He tried to lift a hand to stop it and was told to stay still.
The line was no longer pulling. It lay beside him in the grass, dark where the water had soaked it. He couldn't remember being freed from it.
Leah was near his head.
He knew her boots. Mud on the toes, one lace coming loose. He stared at them because they were easier to understand than the people bending over him.
“Where—”
His voice didn't work properly.
She crouched.
“They're looking.”
He hadn't said the name, but she'd heard enough.
A light moved farther along the bank. Another crossed the water. Daniel tried to follow it and couldn't hold his eyes steady.
The cold seemed to be coming from inside him now. The things placed over him didn't reach it. His body shook, then became strangely heavy. He wanted to sleep.
Someone kept saying his name.
He was moved. Hands beneath him, something hard enough to support his back. The hurt arm was handled carefully and still hurt so much that he cried out.
Leah walked beside him until she couldn't.
Then he was somewhere bright, with voices asking questions he'd already answered or thought he had. His date of birth. What had happened. How long he'd been in the water.
“I don't know.”
That answer came often.
He could tell them about the old hand. He tried to make it clear before anybody decided the fingers had stopped working tonight. The thigh too. Old wounds. New bite. The shoulder hurt because he'd struck stone.
There was no place to put any of it.
He told someone that and saw the look pass between two people above him.
Leah arrived later. He didn't see her enter. One moment she wasn't there; the next she was sitting beside him with her coat on and a cup between her hands.
He tried to smile.
Her face broke a little.
“Don't,” she said.
He stopped.
Time passed in pieces. He was awake for a question, asleep for something else, awake because the arm hurt. He heard the word wound and knew they meant his own. They cleaned and examined and covered it. They listened to his chest. Nobody said he was fine because he was warm now.
When he could keep a whole conversation, he asked about Silas.
Leah set down the cup.
“They found him.”
Daniel looked at her.
“Alive?”
She shook her head.
There was a silence which had shape, which he would remember later.
“Human,” she said. “They brought him out farther down.”
He watched her hands.
She had washed them, but there was dirt at the edges of two nails.
“He's dead.”
“Yes.”
“Did they try—”
“Yes.”
She said it firmly, so he wouldn't make her describe what she hadn't seen or turn an ordinary effort into a possibility he could keep feeding.
Daniel looked towards the window. The light outside was grey. Morning had come while people were still doing things to his body.
He tried to feel something different.
No pull, no release. His left hand still hurt. The bite in the right arm burned beneath the dressing. He didn't know how to make death visible inside himself.
Leah leaned back.
“I heard him.”
Daniel turned.
“When he said my name.”
“I heard.”
Her eyes filled.
“He knew I was there.”
Daniel couldn't answer.
“I could see where you were. I could get the line towards you. I couldn't—”
She stopped.
He waited.
“I didn't,” she said.
It wasn't a claim that there had been no choice. It was the truth she could bear to say.
Daniel reached with his left hand by mistake.
It wouldn't go where he wanted. He stopped, then used the right, moving the injured arm slowly enough not to tear at the wound.
Leah took his fingers before he had to reach farther.
“I pushed him,” Daniel said.
“I know.”
“I meant to.”
She shut her eyes.
“I know.”
He held her hand, poorly, with the fingers which still worked.
There were people to tell. The questions would go on. He'd brought Silas to the river because he wanted him dead, and the fact that he'd been attacked didn't make that disappear. He had no version which could leave out Jonas, or giving the wolf back, or Leah on the bank.
He was too tired to imagine what any of it would become.
“Cass?”
“Outside. She's gone to get something to eat.”
“She came down.”
“I called her when you went onto the ledge.”
He remembered the torch, the hands at Leah's coat.
“She stayed on land.”
“So did I.”
He looked at her.
She wanted him to remember that she had kept one thing she'd said. Or perhaps she wanted to remember it herself. He couldn't know.
He squeezed her fingers.
A person came to ask Leah something. She let go and went with them. Daniel watched her leave through the door, her coat creased where Cass had held it, one cuff dark with river mud.
He lay with the hand open on the sheet.
There was no fresh wound arriving on it. There would be no man coming back before sunrise to make his pain disappear or replace it with something else.
Silas had died.
The one power had died with him. Daniel knew the rule, had known it before he ever became the wolf. The world hadn't made a sound to mark its ending.
He could still remember the woods.
He could remember them too well.
Later, someone brought a cup of water. He held it awkwardly, watched the surface tremble and managed three small mouthfuls.
The water had almost no taste.