His Father's Last Word

The room smelled of him before I opened my eyes. Pine resin, woodsmoke, and the warmth that was Konrad's skin after a long night. My cheek rested against his shoulder blade, and his breathing came slow and even, the deep rhythm of a wolf who had finally stopped running.

I should have left before dawn. I had told myself that three times in the dark, and three times I stayed.

His back was bare under my hand. I traced the ridge of muscle along his spine without meaning to, and he stirred but did not wake. There was a small scar near his hip, old and pale. I knew the shape of it now. I had known it for six hours.

Eight years ago he had told me I was nothing to him. The memory sat in my chest like a swallowed stone, and still I had come here last night when he found me in the rain outside the coroner's office, still I had let him pull me through the door of the old mill cottage, still I had said nothing when his mouth found mine.

My father's funeral had been that afternoon.

My hand slid up Konrad's shoulder. My fingers brushed the spot where his neck met his collarbone, and the world went white.

Cold rain. The smell of wet earth. A voice I knew, low and furious, saying words I could not catch. Then the pain, a bright tearing in the chest, and a thought rising through it like a bubble from deep water.

She did this. Your mother knows.

I jerked my hand back and sat up. The quilt fell to my waist. My own breath came hard and fast, and I pressed the heel of my palm against my sternum to stop the shaking there.

The gift does not wait for permission. That is what Greta told me when I was fourteen and first touched a dead rabbit in the forest. It comes when it comes, girl, and it is not polite.

Konrad rolled onto his back and blinked up at me. His dark golden blond hair had come loose from its slicked-back order and stuck up in tufts, and his golden hazel eyes found mine in the grey light. Then he smiled. The gap between his front teeth showed, and for a heartbeat he looked like the boy I had grown up beside.

"What time is it?" he asked.

"Early." My voice came out rough. I was already reaching for my dress on the floor. "I have to go."

He sat up. The quilt fell away from him and I made myself look at the window instead, at the rain running down the glass in long wavering lines.

"Ilse."

"Don't." I found my dress and pulled it over my head. "Whatever you are going to say, don't."

His bare feet made no sound on the boards. He stopped a few steps away and did not touch me.

"You know what last night was," he said.

"I know exactly what it was." I sat on the edge of the bed to pull on my stockings. My hands were steady. I had spent eight years learning how to keep my hands steady around this man. "It was grief. Yours and mine. Two people in the rain."

He was quiet long enough that I looked up. His jaw was set, and his gaze had gone flat and careful, the way it did when he was about to say something he believed was kind.

"The bond is not a promise," he said. "You know that better than anyone. We can feel it and still live our lives."

"You told me that eight years ago as well. I remember. You were very clear."

His hand came up and touched his jaw. I had never told him that I had noticed the gesture, or what it meant. He lied with his hand.

"The pack cannot know about this," he said.

I laughed. It came out flat and short. "The pack can smell you on me, Konrad. Half the wolves in that house can smell you from the porch."

"Then we do not walk in together."

"No. We certainly do not."

He moved then, and his hand caught my wrist before I could reach the door. The contact went through me like a struck bell. His scent closed around me, and my wolf turned over in my chest and pressed toward him with a hunger I had spent eight years starving.

"Listen to me," he said. "My father is dead. Someone in this pack killed him, and the whole forest is going to look at me and see the wolf who wanted his seat. I need you clear. If the mate bond muddies your judgment, we both burn."

My wrist was warm under his fingers. I could feel his pulse there, or perhaps it was my own.

"My judgment has never been clear where you are concerned," I said. "You saw to that."

He let go. His hand went back to his jaw.

Then he said it, in the soft voice he used for hard things. "Last night meant nothing. Do not make it into more than it was."

I had heard him say a version of this before. In the pack house courtyard, with the whole pack watching, when I was twenty-one and still believed that fate was a thing that protected people. He had said, in that same soft voice, I do not want you, and the world had folded itself up small around me.

I put my hand on the door latch and did not look back.

"Lock the door after me," I said. "You always did like to do things properly."

The rain had stopped, and the forest dripped. Wet pine needles released their smell into the cold air, and the path down to the pack house was slick with mud. I walked it quickly, my boots sinking and pulling, and I kept my hands in my pockets like a woman carrying something breakable.

The pack house had been a sawmill once, before the war. Its long grey front faced the road, and the two great doors of the drying shed had been painted green forty years ago and never repainted since. Smoke came from the kitchen chimney. Someone was already up.

Marta stood on the porch with a cup in her hands.

Her platinum blonde hair was loose and wavy over the shoulders of her grey wool coat, and her emerald eyes went from my face to my dress to my boots in the time it takes a person to blink. She was the Beta. She saw everything twice as fast as anyone else.

"You are up early," she said. "Or late."

"Early. I had a body to see to."

"Anselm's body." She said the name carefully. "You saw to it yesterday."

The cup in her hands steamed. Her lips pressed together, full and pale against her fair skin, and then she smiled the bright perfect smile that made new wolves trust her instantly and made me want to check my pockets.

"Are you coming in? Greta has porridge on, and Rolf is already making speeches at the table about the state of the pack. I think he has been rehearsing."

"In a moment."

She watched me climb the porch steps. At the door she set her cup on the rail and turned, and her voice dropped lower than her usual crispness.

"Ilse. If you are going to keep walking out of that cottage at dawn, you should know that Rolf is not the only one watching. There are strangers in the forest. Humans, from the town. They have been asking about the missing logger again."

She picked up her cup and went inside before I could answer.

I stood on the porch with the wet cold coming through my boots, and I thought about my father's last thought, and the way my mother's hands had been cold at the funeral, and the way she had asked me afterwards whether the coroner had examined the body properly.

The door behind me opened again. Marta's voice, bright enough to carry into the yard.

"The Alpha wants everyone in the hall, Ilse. He says there is something he needs to say, and he wants the whole pack to hear it at once."

I turned and walked into the house, and my hands were steady, and the dead man in the rain was still talking to me.