Chapter 19: The First Touch

I did not go back to the house. There were wolves howling in the pines and the Alpha was somewhere up the cliff path with a bandaged arm and no strength, and I went after him because there was nothing else in the world I could have done.

I found him a hundred yards up the path on his knees.

"Ronan."

He had his good hand on the turf and his head down and he was breathing in short hard pulls, and the bandage on his arm had gone dark in one place where the wound had opened again.

"I told you to go back."

"You told me a great many things tonight and I have not done any of them." I got down beside him and put my arm round his shoulders. "Up. Come on. There is a wall at the top of the path and you can sit on it."

He got up. He leaned on me the whole way and I took his weight and we made it to the drystone wall at the top of the cliff where the path turned down toward the harbour. He sat on the wall and I sat beside him and the sea went on below us, black now, with the moon behind a cloud.

The howling had stopped.

"Was it the rogues?" I said.

"It was not rogues. Rogues do not answer each other that neatly." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "That was two wolves calling and answering. That is a pack."

"There is no pack on the north side of this bay."

"No," he said. "There is not."

We sat there for a while. The wind came up off the water and pulled at my coat and I pulled it tighter and neither of us said anything. His shoulder was against mine. The pull in my chest had settled into something warm and steady and low, and it was not unpleasant, and I had stopped pretending it was anything else an hour ago.

"I have to tell you something," he said, "and I would rather you heard it from me than worked it out for yourself."

"I worked most of it out already."

"You have not worked out this."

I turned my head. His face in the dark was close to mine, close enough that I could see the shape of his mouth and the pale green of his eyes, and the wind had put a strand of his hair across his forehead.

"Then tell me," I said.

He reached out. I think he meant to take my hand. I think he meant to take my hand and say whatever it was he had to say with his fingers round mine, the way people do when the words are hard.

But the wall was low and the night was dark and I moved at the same moment he did, turning toward him, and instead of my hand he caught my face.

His palm was warm on my cheek and his thumb came to rest at the corner of my mouth and we both went completely still.

The spark came up through his hand into my skin like heat through a wall.

It was not a shock. It was a spreading, a flood, a warmth that started at my cheek and went through my jaw and down my throat and into my chest and further, into my belly and my knees and the soles of my feet, and I heard a sound come out of my own mouth that I did not recognise.

And in the back of my head, in the dark empty room where there had never been anything at all, something woke up and pressed against the door.

Ronan made a sound like a man taking a blow. He took his hand away so fast he nearly fell off the wall, and he sat there with both hands held up in front of him and his chest going hard.

"That," he said. "That is what I had to tell you."

I could not speak for a moment. My cheek was still warm where his hand had been. The thing behind the door in my head had gone quiet again, but I could feel it now, I could feel it the way you feel a bruise.

"What was that?" I said.

"That is what happens when a wolf touches his mate."

The sea went on below us. A gull cried out over the harbour.

"No," I said.

"I felt it the first night. When I took the contract out of your hand. I felt it and I told myself it was the cold and the wet and the strangeness of the evening, and then I felt it every day after that and I told myself a hundred lies." He looked at me. "You are my mate, Fiadh. The bond is true. It is the one true thing in this house and it is the worst thing that could possibly have happened."

"Why is it the worst thing?"

"Because I am bound already." He held up his arm with the bandage on it. "There is a false bond on my chest that is killing me and it is not finished, it is not done, and if it is a bond at all then the one who made it will know. She will feel it, the way I feel it. She will feel that a true mate has come, and she will come back for me, and she will not come alone." He got up off the wall. "And if the Council learns that the Alpha of the Blackthorn Pack has a true mate, an unregistered healer with a debt and no pack, they will not bless it. They will call it an unlawful bond and they will take you, and I will be too weak to stop them."

"Ronan."

"Do not." He held up his hand. "Do not say my name like that. I have spent six months being careful and I am not careful when you say my name."

I stood up off the wall. He was a foot away from me and neither of us closed the gap.

"Then what do we do?" I said.

"We do nothing. We do not touch. We do not speak of it. We go back to the house and you treat my arm and I hold my pack together and we do not do that again."

"And the pull?"

"It will get worse." He said it flatly. "It always gets worse. That is what the pull is for."

He turned and started down the path toward the harbour, and I followed him, and we did not touch and we did not speak, and the whole way down I could feel him in front of me in the dark, warm and solid and mine, and I could feel the false mark on his chest the way you feel a stone in your shoe.

At the bottom of the path, where the track met the road, there was a car parked on the verge.

It was not grey. It was black, and it had no flag on it, and the driver's window was down, and a woman's voice came out of the dark of it, low and pleasant and very sure of itself.

"Ronan," she said. "You look terrible. Get in, and bring the healer. We have a great deal to talk about and I have come a long way."

The door opened and she stepped out into the moonlight, and she was wearing a green scarf.