Chapter 36: Lorcan's Smile

Lorcan came into the room with his coat on and his notebook in his hand and two wolves behind him in the grey coats of Council guards.

"Elara," he said. "You were told to have no contact with the pack until the twenty eighth."

"I was told a great many things," Elara said. "Most of them by you."

Lorcan looked at her for a moment and then at Ronan and then at me. He did not look angry. He looked like a man who has found a stain on a tablecloth and is deciding whether to send it back.

"I see," he said. "The healer has been at work again. You do not do anything by halves, do you, Fiadh."

"I read a ledger and I asked a question and I got an answer," I said. "If you have a problem with answers, take it up with the woman in the green scarf."

"I have a problem with wolves who dig," Lorcan said, and his smile did not move. "You dug into the Alpha's mark, you dug into his tea, you dug into the Council's own files and you dug into a retired clerk's room at the end of the pier. And every time you dig, you turn up a worm, and then you show it to the pack and the pack gets frightened and the pack starts to ask questions I have to answer." He put his notebook away inside his coat. "So. There is no cure and there is no rite and there is no way out of this for you. There is a summons, a paper, and eleven days. And in the meantime I am going to tell the pack a story about a rogue healer with no name who came to this coast and put a dying Alpha in her care."

Ronan stepped forward.

"You will not say a word to my pack."

"I am not going to say a word to your pack. I am going to say a word to the Council and the Council is going to say it to the pack." Lorcan turned to the door and then stopped with his hand on the frame. "Actually. There is no time like the present. I have a car outside and a pack full of wolves who have been asking me for three weeks why their Alpha keeps getting worse. I think I will go and answer them."

He went out. We stood in the grey house and listened to the car start, and Elara put her face in her hands.

Padraig met us on the harbour road. He was out of breath and his stick was going.

"Healer," he said. "The grey car went past me with Lorcan in it and it is going to the pack house. Colm was on the wall and he said Lorcan had sent word ahead for the pack to be brought into the hall."

We ran.

By the time we got to the pack house the hall was full. Lorcan was standing on the bottom step of the stairs with his notebook open in his hand and his coat off, and forty wolves were packed in with their faces turned up to him.

"This is not the first false bond I have investigated," Lorcan was saying. His voice was mild and clear and it carried to every corner of the room. "It is not even the first this year. And in every case the pattern is the same. A pack in trouble. A Council offer of help. And then a stranger arrives, and the Alpha gets worse, and the stranger is always at his side." He looked up as we came in. "Ah. Here they are. The Alpha and his healer. Ask them how the Alpha came to be in the boathouse alone in the storm. Ask them why he was on the cliff with her at midnight. Ask them why a healer with no registration and no pack has been closer to the Alpha than his own Beta for three weeks."

The hall broke into noise. Colm was on his feet saying something I could not hear. An old woman near the door had her hand over her mouth.

Maeve was standing at the front with her arms folded. She did not look at me. She was looking at Ronan.

"Alpha," she said. "Answer him."

"There is nothing to answer," Ronan said. "He is a liar and he is trying to split this pack in two before the Council can do it for him."

"That is not an answer, it is an insult." Maeve's voice was level and it cut through the noise. "Answer the question. Why has this healer been in your room at midnight and on the cliff with you in the moonlight? Why did the two of you come out of the boathouse at dawn holding hands?"

The hall went quiet.

Ronan stood there in the middle of it with forty wolves looking at him, and I could see him weighing it.

"Because she is my mate," he said.

The noise that went up was not anger. It was worse than anger. It was the sound of wolves who had suspected something and had hoped they were wrong.

"Your mate," Maeve said. "You are telling this pack that you have taken a true mate and you did not see fit to tell us."

"It is new. It is not a thing I chose."

"It is never a thing anyone chooses." Maeve took a step forward. "It is a thing that happens and then the Alpha tells his Beta and his pack, and we celebrate it, because a mate bond is a gift. And instead you have hidden it for three weeks and let this house fill up with rumours while you sat in your room with a rogue healer." She looked at me, and there was something in her brown eyes that was worse than hatred. It was disappointment. "You should have told me. Both of you. I would have stood by you."

Lorcan smiled and closed his notebook.

"Thank you, Alpha," he said. "That is all I needed."

He walked out through the pack with his coat over his arm and nobody stopped him. The front door opened and closed and the hall sat in silence.

Maeve did not move.

"You have eleven days," she said. "You have eleven days and a true mate and a pack in pieces. Go and find your cure, Alpha. Because when the twenty eighth comes, this pack is going to remember that you did not stand up for it in its own hall."

She turned and walked out, and eight wolves went with her, and the rest of them stayed where they were and would not look at us. Nessa had her hands pressed together in her lap and her eyes were wet.

Ronan stood on the flags in the middle of his own hall until the last wolf had gone out and the door had shut.

Then he turned round and looked at me.

"Come with me," he said. "Not here."

We went out the back way and up the cliff path in the dark with the wind coming off the sea, and he walked fast and I walked behind him and neither of us said anything until we got to the flat rock at the top of the headland.

He stopped with his back to me and his hands at his sides.

"Eleven days," he said. "And now the pack knows and Lorcan knows and by tomorrow the whole coast will know."

"Let them know."

"Fiadh."

"Ronan, turn round."

He turned round. The wind took his ginger hair and laid it flat across his forehead and his pale green eyes were bright and hard in the dark.

"You said you would not take my hand on the slip," he said. "You said you needed an hour and then you sat behind a door for a whole night and a day and would not let me in. And now the pack has been told and half of them think I am a fool and the other half think you are a witch, and I have eleven days to find a cure I do not have and a rite that may kill you." His voice cracked. "So tell me what you want. Tell me plainly. Because I have been guessing for two days and I am too tired to guess any more."

I looked at him standing there on the cliff in the cold with the wind in his hair, and I thought about the door in my head and the book in my room and the eleven days.

"This," I said, and took two steps and put my hands on either side of his face and kissed him.