Chapter 20: The Mark That Burned

The woman in the green scarf was younger than I had expected. Thirty, maybe a year or two more, with dark hair pinned up and a narrow clever face and a mouth that was already smiling before she had finished getting out of the car.

"Elara," Ronan said. His voice had gone flat and cold. "You are not welcome here."

"I am never welcome anywhere. It is one of the burdens of my profession." She looked at me, and her eyes went over my coat and my boots and the little kit in my hand. "And this is the healer. Fiadh. I have heard a great deal about you."

"From whom?"

"From everyone. You have been in this pack eight days and you have already found the false bond, the poisoned tea and the spiral on the beach. That is a good week's work." She leaned back against the car. "I am here to help you."

"You put a mark on his chest that is killing him."

"I put a mark on his chest that was supposed to save his pack." Elara's smile did not move. "It has done that. The tithe was forgiven. The boats were repaired. The storehouse was rebuilt in June. I did what I was paid to do, and I did it cleanly, and I did not know until the spring that the mark would take more than it gave."

I took a step toward her and Ronan's hand came out and caught my arm.

"Not here," he said. "The road is open and the house is watching."

"Listen to your Alpha," Elara said. "He is a sensible man. He was a sensible man in April when he signed my paper and he has been sensible ever since."

"Say what you came to say and go," I said.

She looked at me for a moment. Then she reached into her coat and took out a small glass bottle, no bigger than my thumb, and held it up in the moonlight.

"This is the second mark," she said. "Or it is the beginning of it. The bargain is not finished until the second mark is given, and your Alpha has been carrying the first one on his chest for six months and the first roots of the second one on his arm since the beach. If the second mark is given, the bond closes, and what he signed in April is finished, and the Council gets what it paid for."

"What does the Council get?"

"His strength. His territory. His name on a paper that says the Blackthorn Pack belongs to the Council in perpetuity." Elara put the bottle back in her coat. "If the second mark is not given, the bond stays open and it drains him until there is nothing left. That is the whole of it. It is a good bargain for the Council and a poor one for Ronan and a worse one for you."

"Why worse for me?"

Elara looked at me with her head tilted, the way a bird looks at a worm.

"Because you are his mate," she said. "I felt it from the top of the road. It came off the two of you like heat off a stove. A true mate bond cannot sit in the same body as a false one. They fight. They will tear him apart from the inside, and it will be quick, and it will not be clean." She straightened up off the car. "You have perhaps three weeks. Perhaps four. And then the false bond will either close or it will break, and either way Ronan will not survive it. Unless you let me finish the second mark, and then he will live, and the pack will live, and you will go back to whatever road you came from."

I hit her.

I am not proud of it. I have never hit anyone in my life who was not trying to hit me first, and I am a healer and healers do not hit. But my hand came up and caught her across the mouth and her head went sideways and the sound of it was very loud on the empty road.

Elara straightened up slowly and put her fingers to her lip and looked at the blood on them and then at me.

"There," she said. "Now you know what you are."

"Fiadh." Ronan's voice. "The house."

The front door of the pack house had opened and there were three wolves on the step with a lamp and I could see Maeve at the front of them with her copper curls loose and her eyes going from the black car to the woman in the green scarf to me.

Elara got back into her car and started the engine.

"Three weeks," she said through the window. "Give or take. I will be at the grey house until Friday and then I am going back to the south. If you want to live, Ronan, you know where to find me."

The car went down the road and turned at the harbour and the red of its lights went out behind the pines.

Maeve came down the path with the lamp. "Who was that?"

"Nobody," Ronan said.

"That was not nobody. That was the woman from the spring. That was the mate." Maeve's voice was level and cold and her eyes were on me. "What did she want?"

"She wanted to finish what she started," I said. "And I want to know how she knew to find us on that road at midnight."

Maeve looked at me. The lamp in her hand threw her shadow long and black across the grass.

"You are the healer," she said. "You tell me."

She turned and went back up to the house with the three wolves behind her. Ronan and I stood on the road in the dark.

"Your arm," I said.

"It can wait."

"It cannot. The wound opened again on the cliff and you have been standing on a road for ten minutes arguing with a woman who wants to own you. Come inside and let me bind it properly."

He did not move. The moon had gone behind a cloud and I could barely see his face.

"The first night," he said. "In the lamplight. When I took the contract out of your hand and you felt the spark. I told you I felt the cold." His voice was low. "I lied. I felt it then. I have felt it every day since. I have been lying to you since the first hour you came into this house."

"I know," I said. "I have known for a while. I did not want to know it."

"Then say it. Say what it is."

I stood there on the road with my hand still stinging from Elara's mouth and my chest full of a pull that had been there since the lamplight and would not go away, and I said the thing I had been refusing to say for eight days.

"You are my mate," I said. "And I am yours. And it will kill you."

Ronan shut his eyes and let out a breath that sounded as though it had been in him for months.

"Yes," he said. "It will. Unless we find another way."

Above us, in the dark of the pines, something howled, and this time it was answered by a second wolf, and then a third, and then by a long ugly half sound that was not a wolf at all.