The Alpha Who Said Nothing

The wolfsbane paste went on cold behind my ears and along the pulse at my wrists, and it smelled like a wet dog rolled in tar.

I dabbed it carefully, the way my mother had taught me, then rubbed the last of it into the hollow of my throat where any wolf would look first. Three dabs, a smear across the collarbone, a wipe of the fingers on the rag I kept in my jacket pocket. The rag was gray with old stains and smelled of the same poison, and I had carried it since I was sixteen.

Below me, the dry riverbed ran north to south, a long pale scar in the desert with a line of cottonwoods crowding its banks. The September light was going soft and orange. On the far side, a Ford pickup sat at the top of the slope with its headlights off, and past the asphalt a water tower stood against the sky with RIO SECO painted on it in white letters that had been repainted so many times they looked fat.

I had counted the fence posts on my way down. Sixty-two of them, then the riverbed, then another forty-one on the other side before the gate. I counted things when my hands shook. It was a habit my brother had teased me about since we were children, and it had gotten worse in the last few months.

I had a suitcase in one hand and the other hand free. Inside were two changes of clothes, a hairbrush, a photograph of my mother, a box of letters, and a sealed envelope I had not opened since I was fourteen.

The desert did not say anything to me. The air smelled of dust and hot stone and the sweet resin of piñon pines up in the hills behind me, and underneath that, faint, the water from the station on the far side. It smelled clean and cold, and my mouth went dry at the thought of it.

I took a breath, and then I stepped down into the riverbed.

There was no ceremony to it. Just sand, loose and pale, and the dark line of old watermarks on the banks ten feet above my head. The river had been dry for two hundred years. It was dry in my mother's time, and in her mother's time, and in the time of the man who had signed the pact that had kept us from killing each other for most of those two hundred years. I thought about that a lot lately. How a whole war could be fought over a river that had not run since before anyone's grandmother was born.

I was halfway across when a shadow moved at the top of the far slope.

I stopped. My heart did something unpleasant, an uneven double beat, and I made myself breathe through it. He came down slowly, boots crunching in the sand, and he did not say a word until he was maybe twenty feet from me, and then he stopped too, and we looked at each other across the space between us.

I had seen him once before, from a distance, at a border meeting two years ago. I had not been close enough to notice much except that he was taller than my brother, and that he had stood very still while my father shouted at him.

He was taller up close. Cropped blond hair the color of dry wheat, gray eyes, a face softer than I expected from the stories. A small straight nose, full lips, a mouth that looked like it had forgotten how to smile. He wore a work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and boots that had seen real work, and his hands were loose at his sides.

"Marisol," he said. His voice was low and plain, and he said my name like he was reading it off a list.

"Alpha," I said.

Something moved behind his eyes when I said it. His jaw tightened, and his hands came up a little and then went back down, and for a moment he stood there with his head tilted like a man listening to something behind him. His nostrils flared once. Then his face closed up like a door.

"You're wearing wolfsbane," he said.

I did not answer right away. It was not a question, and I was tired, and my feet hurt. "It keeps the scent down," I said. "Your Beta wrote the terms. It was allowed."

"I know what it's for." He took a step closer. "I'm asking why."

"It's a long walk from the hills, Alpha. I didn't want to arrive smelling like the road."

"You didn't want to arrive smelling like a MesaLuna wolf."

I shrugged. The truth was more complicated, and none of it was his business. The wolfsbane did keep my scent down. It also kept my wolf quiet, which was the part I did not talk about. My wolf had been quiet for ten years, and I had gotten very good at pretending that was a choice.

"Say what you like," I said. "I'm here under the pact. One season, forty-two days, and then I go home. You won't have to look at me for longer than that."

His mouth opened slightly, then closed. He looked at the suitcase in my hand, and then at my face, and then, briefly, at my throat.

"Forty-two days," he said.

"Counted from tonight, if that's how the Council wants it."

"It is." He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. The gesture was tired and unexpectedly ordinary. "There's a room made up for you in the east wing of the pack house. Yusuf will bring you the pact text in the morning to sign. Priya arrives from the Council on Thursday, so you'll want to be seen doing whatever it is the Council expects by then."

"Whatever it is?" I said. "I thought the whole point of the ritual was that it's written down."

"Most of it is."

"And the rest?"

He did not answer.

I wanted to ask about the rest. I had been asking about the rest for three weeks, back home, and all I had gotten was my brother shouting and my mother's old friend telling me not to go and the elders shaking their heads. No one had told me what the marking ceremony actually required, or what happened to a borrowed Luna who failed it, or what had really happened to the last MesaLuna Luna who crossed this riverbed. The stories said she had died of grief. The stories also said a lot of things.

I put the suitcase down and flexed my fingers, and then I held out my hand.

He looked at it for a long moment.

"It's not a trap," I said. "It's a hand."

He reached out and took it.

I had thought about this, in a vague, nervous way, on the walk down. A handshake with an enemy. Some stiffness, a quick release, a cold look. That was how it worked between the packs. That was how my father had shaken hands with the other Alphas at the border meetings, back when there were still border meetings.

It was not like that.

His palm was warm and dry and rough at the base of the fingers, and the moment it closed around mine something happened in the desert behind my ribs. I felt it go up my arm and down into my stomach and settle there like a stone dropped into still water. His eyes went wide and then narrow. His breath caught, and his grip tightened, and I saw his throat move.

Neither of us let go. We stood there in the dry riverbed with our hands joined for maybe five seconds, six, and the sky went from orange to a soft bruised purple, and the wind picked up sand and dropped it again. I could hear his heartbeat. Not with my ears. With my hand.

He pulled his hand away as if the sand had burned him. He took a step back, then another. His face had gone very still, and his eyes would not stay on me, and he was breathing through his mouth like a man who had run a long way.

"Come on," he said, and turned, and started up the slope.

I picked up my suitcase and followed him, and behind my ribs the stone was still falling, and my heart was beating too fast, and somewhere deep and dark and quiet, where I had not felt anything in ten years, my wolf lifted her head.