Chapter 3: The Stranger in the Coat

Lorcan was already seated when I came down, which told me something about him. A guest waits to be invited to sit. Lorcan had chosen the chair nearest the fire, the one with the good cushion, and he had his coat folded over the arm of it as if he were doing the room a favour by staying.

The coat was grey wool, cut close, and it had not a speck of the coast on it. No salt, no rain, no dog hair. Beside him stood a man I did not know, broad and quiet, with sandy hair and a jaw like a door.

"You must be Fiadh," Lorcan said, and rose, and took my hand. His fingers were cool and dry and he held mine a moment longer than politeness asks. "I am Lorcan, envoy of the Council of Alphas. I have been looking after the Blackthorn Pack's interests in this difficult season. This is Eamon, my assistant."

"Envoy," I said. "That's a fine word."

"It keeps me busy." He smiled. He had grey eyes and black hair silvered at the temples, and the smile was the sort that a man practises in a mirror. "Sit, please. I have a few questions about your credentials. Council procedure, nothing more."

Ronan came in behind me and took his place by the mantel with his arms folded. He did not sit. Lorcan noticed, and his smile widened a fraction, and he went on as though the Alpha were a piece of furniture.

"Where did you train, Fiadh?"

"With my mother. She was a healer before me. Before that, her mother."

"Family trade. Charming. And your mother's name?"

"Siobhan."

"Ah." Lorcan's pen moved on his paper, a small neat stroke. "And she is deceased."

"She is."

"Five years now, isn't it?"

"Six."

He wrote that down too. I kept my face still and my hands in my lap and thought about the contract with the blank space where a number should be.

"Your mother had dealings with the Council," Lorcan said. "A debt, I believe. Which you have kindly agreed to settle by service. That is a generous arrangement, and unusual. Most children of debtors simply vanish."

"I'm not most children."

"So I see." He turned a page. "What do you make of our Alpha's condition?"

"Early days," I said. "I'll know more when I've had a week."

"Take a guess. Between friends."

Eamon shifted his weight by the door. Ronan said nothing, which I understood as permission.

"Something is draining him," I said. "His pulse is wrong and his healing is slow and there's a mark on his chest that should not be there. I'll know more when I've had a week."

"You already said that." Lorcan's pen stopped. "The mark. Describe it to me."

"No."

The room changed. Eamon's head came round slowly, the way a big dog's does when it hears a gate. Ronan did not move at all. Lorcan set his pen down and looked at me with his head tilted, and for the first time the pleasantness slipped, just at the edges, like a tablecloth pulled a half inch out of place.

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm a healer. What I see on a patient's body stays with me and my patient. Council procedure or no Council procedure." I smiled at him. "I'm sure you have your own physicians for that sort of thing."

Lorcan picked his pen back up. "Of course. I respect a professional." He wrote something, though I could not see what. "One more question. Have you ever heard the term blood ritual?"

Behind me, Ronan's breathing changed. It was a small thing, half a beat, but I heard it.

"I've heard the term," I said.

"Where?"

"In a book. My mother's book. There was a picture of a mark and a page about a rite that ties two wolves together by force. She told me it was old nonsense and I should forget it." I shrugged. "I forgot it."

"Did you." Lorcan smiled again, and this time it reached his eyes, and I did not like what was in them. "Your mother was a careful woman, I think. Careful women leave careful daughters. I wonder what else you forgot."

He closed his notebook and stood and put on the grey coat with two precise movements, and Eamon opened the door for him.

"Alpha," Lorcan said, turning at the threshold. "You look better than you did last week. I am glad the healer is helping. But I would remind you that the Council's patience is not endless, and the summons for your health assessment stands. Six weeks. If you are not fit by then, the Council will have to consider whether the Blackthorn Pack is properly led." He nodded to me. "Fiadh. We shall speak again."

The door shut. The car started. Nobody in the room breathed for a good five seconds.

"Six weeks," Ronan said, and his voice came out flat. "He gave me six weeks."

"You knew about the summons," I said.

"I knew." He walked to the window and stood with his back to me. "I did not know he would say it in front of you."

"He was testing me. He wanted to see if I'd flinch." I got up and straightened the cushion Lorcan had been sitting on, because it annoyed me to leave it as he had left it. "He knows something about that mark, Alpha. He wrote down every word I said about it and he did not once look surprised."

"I know."

"Then why is he still walking in and out of your house with a notebook?"

Ronan turned round. His face had gone hard in a way I had not seen before, and there was something under the hardness that I could only call fear, though he wore it badly.

"Because if I throw him out," he said, "the Council sends a Gamma and twenty wolves to assess the territory, and they find a pack that has not paid its harvest tithe in two years and an Alpha who cannot shift without falling over. And then Lorcan is not the problem any more. He is the man who writes the report." He came away from the window. "I do not need a healer, Fiadh. What I need is a way to be strong again by the end of six weeks. If you cannot give me that, say so now and I will have Maeve put you on the bus to Galway myself."

I looked at him. Six weeks. I had three months of contract and a debt with no number on it and a Council envoy who wrote everything down, and the man in front of me was dying and too proud to admit the size of it.

"Right then," I said. "Roll up your sleeve. I'm going to take some blood."

He stared at me. "Now?"

"Now. Before you change your mind and decide you don't need me again." I went to the sickroom and came back with my bowl and my knife, and when I returned Ronan was sitting on the chair by the fire with his sleeve already rolled up, and his pale green eyes followed me all the way across the room.

"This will hurt," I said.

"It always does."

I made the cut small and quick. The blood came slow, slower than it should have, and it was dark, and when I spread it on the glass slide and held it up to the lamplight I saw the whole problem in one drop.

Wolves heal fast. Their blood knits and thickens and closes. Ronan's blood was full of tiny black grains, like sand in a river, and the grains were moving against the flow.

"What is it?" he said.

I set the slide down and wiped my hands, and my voice came out steadier than I felt.

"It's not an illness, Alpha. There's something in your blood that isn't yours, and it's eating you from the inside. And I have seen those grains once before, in my mother's book, on the page she told me to forget."

Ronan's sleeve was still rolled up. On his forearm, faint as a watermark, there was a second spiral mark I had not seen on the beach.

"When did that appear?" I asked.

He looked down at his own arm as if it belonged to someone else. "This morning," he said. "Before dawn. I woke up and it was there."