Chapter 1: The Alpha on the Sand

The rain had been falling since Galway, and by the time the bus left me at the top of the harbour road it had settled into the kind of grey, patient drizzle that soaks through wool and makes every stone in Donegal look like it has been weeping for a century. I stood with my case at my feet and counted the fishing boats in the harbour. Nine. Then I counted the lights in the windows of the big house on the hill. Four. Then I picked up the case and started walking, because a healer with a debt contract does not get to stand in the rain feeling sorry for herself.

The pack house smelled of salt and wet dog and something warm underneath it, bread maybe, or the ghost of bread. A woman with short copper curls opened the door before I knocked. She looked me up and down, took in the case and the damp coat, and smiled with her mouth only.

"You'll be the healer," she said. "Maeve. Beta. I run this house, so if you need anything, you ask me and not one of the young ones, they'll only tell you wrong."

"Fiadh," I said. "Where's the Alpha?"

"Out." She stepped back to let me in. "He's always out. You'll find him before he finds you, I'd wager."

The hall was long and low, lined with pegs and boots and a smell of wet rope. A fire burned at the far end, and someone had hung seaweed over the beams to dry. I have stayed in worse places. I have stayed in better. I put my case down, and when I turned around a man was standing in the doorway to the kitchen with a towel over one shoulder and his sleeves rolled past his elbows.

He was tall, taller than the door frame wanted him to be, with short ginger hair gone dark at the edges from water and pale green eyes that found me and stayed there. His face had dimples even when he was not smiling, which was strange, because he was not smiling.

"You're early," he said.

"The bus was early." I held out the contract, folded and sealed. "Fiadh. Healer. Three months, starting tonight."

He did not take the paper. He looked at my hands instead, then at my face, and I felt my skin go warm under the scrutiny in a way that had nothing to do with the fire. "Ronan," he said. "Alpha of this pack. Nobody told me the Council was sending a woman."

"Nobody told me the Alpha was rude."

Maeve made a small sound behind me that might have been a laugh, quickly buried. Ronan's mouth twitched. He reached out then and took the contract, and his fingers brushed mine, and the whole room tilted.

I do not have a word for it. Warmth came up my arm like water finding a crack in a wall. His eyes widened a fraction, and he pulled his hand back fast, the way you pull back from a stove. The paper dropped between us and neither of us bent for it.

"You feel that," I said. It was not a question.

"I felt the cold," he said. "You're soaked through. Maeve, find her a room."

He was gone before I could say another word, out through the back door into the rain, and I stood there with my heart going like a rabbit's and my hand still tingling.

That was the first hour. I should have left then. I have thought about it since, many times.

Maeve gave me a room at the end of the corridor, small, with a window that looked down on the beach. She talked while I unpacked, about the seaweed harvest and the boats and the Council and the weather, and I let her talk and made the right noises, and all the while I was thinking about the spark in my hand and the way the Alpha had looked at me, as if I were a door he had not expected to find in his own house.

"There's a curfew on the beach after dark," Maeve said at the door. "Rogues have been seen on the north side of the bay. I'd not go wandering if I were you."

"I never wander," I said.

I wandered. Of course I wandered. I have never once in my life done as I was told.

I woke before dawn because the gulls started screaming, and I could not get back to sleep, and the window showed a strip of silver sea that I could not ignore. I put on my coat and went down the back stairs and out onto the sand.

The tide was out. The beach at that hour is a wide grey plain of weed and shell and shining wet stone, and the air tasted of iron. I walked north along the waterline, counting the breakers. Eleven. Then twelve. Then a shape at the far end of the strand that was not a rock.

I ran.

Ronan was on his knees in the shallows with one hand pressed to the sand and the other to his chest. His shirt was open and his skin was grey, grey the way a fish is grey, and there was a mark on his chest above the heart, a dark spiral thing like a burn that had healed badly. He did not look up when I reached him. He was breathing in short pulls, and each breath made a sound I did not like.

"Alpha," I said, and knelt in the water beside him. "Ronan. Look at me."

His hand came up and caught my wrist. His grip was strong for a dying man. "Go back to the house," he said. His voice came out in pieces. "This is not your trouble."

"You hired a healer," I said. "This is exactly my trouble. Let go of my wrist."

He let go. I got my arm around him and got him up, which was not easy, because he was heavy and the sand was soft and the sea kept pulling at my boots. He leaned on me and I felt the heat of him through the wet cloth, and under the heat something else, something wrong and cold that moved when his chest moved.

The mark on his chest caught my eye again. I had seen marks like that once before, in a book my mother had kept wrapped in oilcloth at the bottom of a trunk.

"Right then," I said, because my mouth says that when my mind is running. "We're going to walk to the house and you're going to tell me who put that bond on you."

Ronan stopped walking. His head came up and his pale green eyes found mine, and there was something in them I had not seen yet, fear, real fear, the kind a wolf does not show to his own pack.

"Nobody put anything on me," he said.

I looked past him, up the beach to the line of dark pines above the tidemark, and saw a man standing there in a long grey coat with his hands folded in front of him. His hair was black with silver at the temples and he was watching us the way a farmer watches a sick animal in a field. He was too far away to hear, and I knew he was smiling anyway.

"Then who's that?" I said.

Ronan turned his head, and the fear in his eyes went hard and flat and old. "That," he said, "is Lorcan. And you should be very careful what you say to him, healer, because he writes everything down."

The man in the grey coat raised one hand in a greeting that was not a greeting, and the wind came off the water and brought his scent to me across the sand. Clean linen. Paper. And underneath, faint as a stain, the smell of blood that has been spilled on purpose.

My wolf, who had not spoken in twenty-eight years, stirred once in the dark of me and went still again.