Chapter 5: The Pack House at Midnight

I woke at midnight because someone in the corridor was trying not to make a sound.

That is a particular kind of noise. It is the noise of a person who is ill and does not want to be found. A boot scuffing a floorboard and then stopping for a count of ten. A hand sliding along a wall. A breath let out slowly between the teeth.

I lay still and listened. The gulls had gone quiet hours ago. The wind had dropped, which on this coast is its own kind of warning. Down the corridor, something heavy met the wall with a soft thud.

I got up, put my coat on over my shift, and opened my door.

Ronan was four doors down, halfway between his room and the stairs, with one shoulder against the panelling and his hand flat on the wall. He had no lamp. The moonlight came through the corridor window and lay in a pale band across his face, and his face was wet.

"Alpha."

"Go back to bed." His voice was a scrape. "This is nothing."

"It's not nothing. You're standing in the dark talking to a wall."

"I'm leaning on the wall. There's a difference." He pushed himself upright and swayed, and I crossed the corridor and got under his arm before he could argue.

The heat came off him like a stove. I felt it through my coat and through his shirt, and there was the shake underneath it, fine and steady, a tremor that ran through his whole frame and would not stop. He smelled of sweat and salt and something else, something under the skin, an iron taste of it that made my own chest pull tight.

"Right then," I said, because my mouth says that when my mind is running. "My room. It's closer and it has my tins."

"I am not going into the healer's room in the middle of the night, the pack will talk."

"The pack will talk more if their Alpha drops dead in the corridor."

He was quiet for two steps, and then he laughed, a short wet unhappy sound, and let me take his weight.

My room was small and the bed was narrow and he sat down on the edge of it like a man sitting down in a boat he did not trust. I lit the candle and put water in my basin and found the comfrey and the willow bark and the small brown bottle of valerian, and all the while he sat there with his hands hanging between his knees.

"Sleeve off," I said. "Shirt off. I need to see the mark."

He did not move for a moment. Then he pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor, and I have seen a great many bodies in my work, and I did not expect what I saw.

He was built the way an Alpha is built, wide at the shoulder and hard through the chest, and the mark sat over his heart like a hand pressed into soft clay and left there. It was dark, as Nessa had said, dark as an old bruise, and the spiral went round and round into the centre and in the candlelight the centre looked wet.

But it was the arm I had not seen. From the second spiral on his forearm, thin dark lines ran up under the skin toward the shoulder, like roots, like the veins of a leaf, and they moved when the candle flame moved. I watched them for a long while and they did not move with the flame. They moved on their own.

"How long have the lines been there?" I asked.

"Since the beach." He would not look at his own arm. "Before that it was just the one mark. It has been spreading all summer. Slower at first. Fast, now."

"Fast since when?"

"Since the day a rogue crossed my border in May and I could not catch him." He said it flatly. "I run this territory. I have run down every wolf who ever crossed it. That day I got two hundred yards into the trees and my legs went out from under me and I lay in the mud for an hour before Maeve found me. That was the day I knew I was dying."

I put my hand out and laid my fingers on the edge of the mark.

I should have asked first. I know that. A healer asks. But the pull in my own chest had been getting stronger all evening, and now, in this small room with the candle and the sea and his bare skin, it had become something I could not ignore, and my hand moved without me.

The moment my fingers touched him, two things happened at once.

He caught his breath and his head went back and his whole body arched like a bow, and under my fingers the mark went from dark to a dull red glow, and I felt the heat of it come up my arm.

And in my chest, the pull snapped tight and turned into a rush of warmth that started behind my breastbone and spread out through my ribs and down into my belly, and I heard, in the back of my head, a small distant whine, like a dog shut in a room.

I took my hand away so fast I knocked the candle.

We sat there in the dark for a moment with the flame guttering and neither of us breathing.

"Fiadh," Ronan said. His voice had gone strange. "What was that."

"The mark reacted to me."

"That is not what I asked."

"I don't know what that was." I got up and lit the candle again from the stub and my hands were not steady. "I don't know, Alpha, and I don't say that often. There is something in your chest that is hurting you and it knows my hand. That is all I know tonight."

He looked at me. The moonlight and the candlelight together did strange things to his pale green eyes, and the pull in my chest had not gone away, it was only quieter, and it was still pointed at him like a compass needle.

"You are not what I expected," he said. "When the Council sent word of a debt healer, I expected an old woman with bad teeth and a grudge."

"That's next week."

He laughed again, and this time it was almost a real laugh, and then he stopped laughing and his face went carefully blank, the way a man's face goes when he has just remembered something he should not have said.

"You felt it too," he said.

I put the willow bark back in its tin.

"The fever has to come down before morning," I said. "I'll make a tea and you'll drink it and you'll sleep, and in the morning you'll go back to your own room and we will not talk about what my hand did."

"Fiadh."

"Drink the tea, Alpha."

He drank the tea. He sat on the edge of my narrow bed with the cup in both hands and drank it slowly, and I sat on the stool by the wall with my arms folded and watched him, and neither of us said anything for a long while. When the cup was empty he lay down, still in his boots, and I pulled the quilt over him and meant to go and sit in the sickroom, and he caught my wrist.

His fingers were hot and they were steady for the first time all night.

"Don't go far," he said.

I sat down on the floor with my back to the bed and my knees up, and I was still there when the sky went grey. And just before the gulls started, when I had nearly fallen asleep, I heard him say something in his sleep, a single word, and it was not a word I could make out. It was not a name I knew. But my chest tightened when I heard it, and I turned my head and looked at him for a long time in the grey light.

Then I got up and went to the window, and there, in the wet sand below the house, someone had drawn a spiral in the beach with a stick. It was fresh. It went round and round, and it pointed at the sea.

The tide was coming in, and the water was already touching the outside of it.