Chapter 50: The Ritual Marks

The pack house door was open and there was nobody behind it.

We went in with the lantern doused and Padraig first with his stick and me after with my hand on Ronan's arm and Elara last, and the hall was empty. The kitchen was empty. The fire was out and there was a pot on the stove with nothing in it and a chair on its side by the door.

"Where is everyone?" Elara whispered.

"Gone," Padraig said. "Or taken."

There were marks on the flags in the kitchen. A chair had gone over and there was a scatter of something dark on the stone, and I knelt down and put my finger in it and it was blood, and it was dry.

"The Council," Ronan said.

"The Council does not take a whole pack out of a house and leave the door open," Padraig said. "The Council arrests one wolf at a time and writes it down. This is not the Council."

"Then who?"

"Bran," I said. "Or Petra with Bran's help. It does not matter who. What matters is that the house is empty and the box is still under the floor."

We went up. Ronan took the stairs slowly with his hand on the rail and I stayed behind him with my hand out in case he went, and we got to his room and I got the chest open and the false bottom up and put my hand into the hollow.

The box was there.

I pulled it out and held it in both hands and it was cold, colder than it had been, and the iron spirals were warm under my fingers the way they always were.

"We have it," I said.

"Then we go," Padraig said from the door. "Now. Before whoever took this house comes back."

We went down the back stairs and out through the kitchen and along the harbour wall to the beach below the headland, and Oisin was not there.

The boat was not there either. The shingle was empty and the sea was black and there was no lantern on the water.

"An hour," I said. "He said an hour."

"It has been forty minutes," Padraig said.

"Then we wait."

We waited on the beach below the headland with our backs to the rocks and the box in my lap and the sea going in and out, and Ronan sat down beside me and put his head back against the stone and shut his eyes.

Twenty minutes. Thirty.

Then a light came round the point.

It was not Oisin's boat. It was a boat with a lantern at the mast and six wolves in it, and it came round the point slowly and quietly with its sail down and its oars out.

I got up.

"Into the rocks," I said. "Now."

We went into the rocks at the base of the headland where the tide had cut them into a maze of channels and pools, and we got down behind a great slab of stone and stayed there.

The boat came in to the shingle and the wolves got out.

I could hear them talking. One of them said something about the house and another one laughed and a third one said, "The Alpha's not here. The Alpha's gone north with the healer and the old man." And then a fourth voice, a voice I knew, said, "Then we wait for him to come back."

Petra.

They pulled the boat up and sat down on the shingle and one of them got a fire going in the lee of a rock, and they were not going anywhere.

I sat behind the slab of stone with the box in my lap and Ronan's hand in mine and Padraig on the other side of me and Elara pressed against the rock with her knees up.

"Fiadh," Ronan said quietly. "The cave."

I looked at him.

"The cave with the marks," he said. "The one you told me about on the boat. It is a mile up the coast and the Council does not know it exists."

"It is a mile up the coast and it is through the rocks."

"Then we go through the rocks."

I looked out at the shingle. The fire was burning and Petra was standing by it with her back to us and six wolves were sitting round it.

"Now," I said. "While they are warm."

We went through the rocks.

It took an hour. There is nothing in this world like the base of a headland at low tide. There are channels you can walk and channels you cannot and pools deep enough to take you to the waist, and the rock is covered in weed that is slick as soap, and the whole time you are listening for the sound of a boat behind you.

I went first with the box inside my coat and my hand out. Padraig came behind me and Elara behind him and Ronan last, and Ronan fell twice.

The second time he fell I got down beside him in the weed and put my hand on his face.

"Ronan. Talk to me."

"I am all right."

"You are on your knees in a rock pool and you are grey to the lips."

"I am all right." He got his hand under him and pushed himself up. "Fiadh. Keep walking."

We came into the cave at three in the morning.

The marks were on the walls and the hollow in the fourth circle was empty and the shingle was dry above the tide line, and Padraig got a fire going with the driftwood and Elara sat down against the wall and put her head back and closed her eyes.

I got Ronan out of his wet clothes and onto the shingle with a blanket under him and a blanket over him and looked at the mark.

It had reached his throat and it had begun to go down his chest toward his belly. The roots were black now and the skin over them had gone tight and shiny.

"Padraig," I said. "Come and look at this."

The old man came and knelt down beside me and looked.

"We do it now," he said.

"Now?"

"Now. Tonight. In this cave." He looked round at the marks on the wall. "This is where the first breaking was done. This is the cave the old blood used. That is why your mother drew the circle in her notebook. She knew. She knew the rite had a home and she knew where it was." He got up. "Elara. Get the knife. Fiadh, get the black pot. We are doing the breaking in the cave where it was made."

Elara got up slowly.

"Now?" she said. "He can barely breathe."

"Now," Padraig said. "Or not at all."

I got the black pot out of the bundle and opened it. It smelled of something green and bitter and old, and when I put my finger in it the stuff was cold, colder than the sea.

"Put it on your hands," Padraig said. "Both hands. All the way to the wrist. And then sit down at the head of the circle and do not move until I tell you."

I put the salve on my hands.

Ronan lay on the shingle with his eyes open and his chest going up and down and the mark black on his throat.

"Fiadh," he said.

"I am here."

"If this does not work."

"It will work."

"If it does not." He caught my wrist with his hand. "I want you to know that I would have taken the three months and the debt and the ugly contract and the whole of it again. I would take it a hundred times."

I knelt down and kissed him.

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