My Enemy in the Water

The memory of her mouth was still on mine when the alarm went off.

I had spent the evening in Carnmouth with a woman whose name I never learned, a visitor from Inverness with wind-burned cheeks and a laugh that carried across the harbor. She had pulled me into the shelter of the fish market's closed stalls, and for an hour I had forgotten the plant, the pack, the corrosion in the pipes. Her hands had been warm against the cold coming off the water. When she kissed the side of my throat I had felt the low growl start somewhere behind my ribs, and I had pressed my palm flat against the wooden post to keep from shifting right there among the crates of haddock.

Then her fingers found the mark beneath my collar, and she stopped.

"What is that?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said. "An old burn."

She had looked at me for a moment too long, and I had made some excuse about the night shift. I walked her to the guesthouse, kissed her once at the door, and left before she could ask anything else.

The alarm was still ringing when I reached the plant. The tide was out, the turbines running slow and patient in the dark, and the security panel above the main door flashed red for the lower intake hall. I had a torch in one hand and my radio in the other.

"Magnus," I said into it. "Intake hall. Someone's inside."

The radio hissed. "On my way. Do not go down there alone, Alasdair."

I went down alone.

The stairwell smelled of salt and wet iron. Water dripped somewhere behind the walls, a sound I knew as well as my own heartbeat, and the concrete steps were slick with the tide's leavings. Halfway down I caught it. A scent cutting through the salt, copper and rain and something green underneath, like crushed ferns after a storm.

My wolf woke. Not a growl, not a word, just a shift of weight behind my ribs, the way a sleeping animal lifts its head.

I had not felt that in four months.

I stopped on the landing and listened. Below me, metal scraped against metal. A valve turning. I took the last flight quietly, keeping to the wall, and came out into the intake hall with the torch off.

The lower hall was a cathedral of pipes and darkness. The intake grates stood open to the sea, and beyond them the low water lay flat as a sheet of pewter under the moon. In the middle of it all, on her knees beside the main corrosion valve, was a woman with copper-red hair tied back in a knot that had come half undone.

She had a wrench in her hand and a canvas bag at her feet. She was breaking my plant.

"Put it down," I said.

She did not startle. That was the first thing I noticed about her, the way she simply stopped, set the wrench on the floor, and turned her head to look at me over her shoulder. Her eyes were sea-green, and in the light from the intake grate they caught the moon and held it.

"You're the security chief," she said. "I thought you'd be taller."

"Hands where I can see them."

She raised them, slowly, and got to her feet. She was tall enough, and she moved like someone used to being found and never caught. "You have rust in this valve," she said. "More than rust. Something's eating it from inside. Has been for years."

"I know what's in my plant."

"You don't. That's the trouble." She nodded at the valve. "Look at it."

I looked. The valve housing was crusted orange and flaking, and the pipe below it had gone the color of old blood. I had signed off on that pipe three weeks ago, and it had been sound then. I stepped closer, and my boot came down on something that crunched, and I saw the floor was dusted with rust that had not been there when I locked up.

"Whatever's in the water is getting worse," she said. "I slow it down. That's all I do."

"You break my equipment."

"I break the parts that are already dead. It buys time." She tilted her head. "You're not listening to me. You're looking at my hands."

I was. Her right hand was bare, and there was a ring of pale skin on her wrist where a cuff had been, and I wanted very badly to know why I could smell her from six feet away when the hall smelled of nothing but salt.

"Who sent you?" I asked.

"Nobody you'd want to meet." She smiled, and it was not a friendly smile, though it was not cruel either. "I'm going to walk out of that door now, and you're going to let me, because if I don't come back at the next low tide, this pipe will split before the weekend and the reservoir will take the taste of iron into every tap in Carnmouth. Then you'll have more than a saboteur to explain to your Alpha."

I moved to block the door.

She sighed. "You're one of those."

"One of what?"

"One of those wolves who thinks standing in a doorway solves a problem."

The word landed like a slap. I had not told her what I was. No human in Carnmouth knew what walked among them, and the pack had kept it that way for three generations. I took a step toward her, and she took one toward me, and we met in the middle of the hall under the moon with our boots in the rust.

"Say that again," I said.

"You heard me." She looked up at me, and her face was close enough that I could see the small scar in her left eyebrow. "You have the mark on your throat. Your eyes are the wrong color for a human in this light. And your scent is doing something to mine that I don't like."

I reached for her wrist. I told myself I was arresting her, and my fingers closed around the warm skin above her cuff, and the hall went quiet.

The rust beneath her boot receded. I saw it happen, the orange crust thinning along the pipe, the metal beneath going grey and clean as the corrosion pulled back from her the way the tide pulls back from the sand. My wolf rose up inside me with a sound I had not heard in four months, a long, shaking howl that rattled through my skull and out into the hall.

She felt it. Her eyes went wide, and her breath caught, and her free hand came up and pressed flat against my chest.

"No," she said. "No, not you."

The radio on my hip crackled. "Alasdair. I'm at the top of the stairs. What's happening down there?"

Her hand was still on my chest. I could feel her heartbeat through her palm, fast and strong, and mine had gone slow and heavy the way it does before a shift.

"Nothing," I said into the radio, and my voice came out strange. "A valve blew. I have it."

"You have it," she repeated quietly, and pulled her wrist free of my hand.

Then she stepped back, and the rust began to spread again along the pipe behind her, crawling over the clean metal like frost forming on a window, and she was already moving toward the intake grate, and I was still standing there with the ghost of her heartbeat in my palm.

"You can't go out that way," I said. "The tide's coming in."

"I know," she said, and pulled the grate open, and the cold sea air came rushing into the hall and took her scent with it.

Magnus's boots sounded on the stairs behind me.

I closed my fist around nothing.

"Alasdair," Magnus said from the doorway, and I heard the question in it before he asked it. "Why is the main valve clean?"

I turned around. The rust was creeping back along the pipe, slow and patient, and I could still feel my wolf where it had woken, pacing and circling and wanting something I was not going to give it.

"Logically," I said, and the word tasted like a lie, "it was the pressure change."