Hellebore

I could kill every wolf in Brackenmoor with what I grew in my greenhouse. That was the only reason they let me live.

Not that anyone said it out loud. They came to me for tinctures when the pain got bad. For salves when wounds wouldn’t close. For the chamomile concentrate I brewed strong enough to calm a wolf on the edge of feral. They took what I made and never looked at my face.

I was useful. Useful was the only kind of safe I’d ever been.

That morning, the hellebore was blooming too fast. Three new flowers since yesterday, petals trembling on the north wall like they were bracing for something. I pressed my palm against the soil. Cold on top. Underneath, a faint sourness, like iron left in water too long.

Sick soil grew desperate plants. And something in Brackenmoor had been wrong for weeks.

Then the howl came from the east ridge.

Not a patrol howl. I knew those the way I knew the seasons — by rhythm, by pitch, by what they asked of the wolves who heard them. This one was lower. Longer. It scraped along the base of my skull and stayed.

A death howl.

My hands stopped in the soil.

Wolves spilled from the barracks before I reached the door. Voices sharp. Boots on frozen ground. Someone running toward the Alpha’s quarters.

I didn’t go out. When the pack surged in one direction, the safest place was wherever they weren’t.

Through the fogged glass, I watched the chaos settle into grief. Beta Cassius came out of the Alpha’s quarters with his shoulders dropped and his hands open at his sides. Like he’d been holding something that vanished.

Alpha Aldric was dead.

The compound went still. Then it went loud. Grief moves fast in a wolf pack. It travels through the ground, through the howls that followed one after another until the whole territory rang with it.

I didn’t howl. I didn’t grieve. He’d led Brackenmoor for eleven years. Kept the territory standing. Settled the disputes.

He also sentenced my mother to death five years ago for a crime she didn’t commit. I wasn’t going to mourn the man who made me an orphan.

I went back to the hellebore. Touched the petals. Still trembling.

Brackenmoor had no Alpha. I knew what came next. The challenge. The claiming. A dead Alpha’s territory was blood in the water.

Someone would come. Someone always came. And whoever came would choose a Luna from the existing pack to seal the claim.

I didn’t have rank. I didn’t have a wolf. I was Linden Briar, the dead healer’s daughter. The pack didn’t overlook me. They looked away on purpose. Easier to pretend I didn’t exist than to think too hard about what I could put in their next tincture.

That silence was the safest thing about me.

I ground valerian for the sleep tinctures the pack would need tonight. Measured henbane into careful doses for the grief that would settle into body aches by morning. Made myself useful. Let them keep ignoring me.

Nobody came to the greenhouse that morning. Nobody ever did.

It was Sorrel who finally came. Pushed through the greenhouse door without knocking. Gray hair pulled tight. Apron dusted with flour.

She’d been the pack’s kitchen mistress for longer than I’d been alive. She’d known my mother. And she kept me close the way you keep a candle near a curtain. Warm enough to help. Far enough to not catch fire.

“A blood challenge,” she said. “Filed before the body was cold.”

“Who?”

She closed the door behind her. “Aldric’s son.”

My hands went still around the mortar.

Aldric had a son. Raised outside Brackenmoor. His mother had taken him to the Greyveil pack when he was young. A name spoken in low voices when older wolves drank too much.

A boy who became an Alpha in his own right. A man who absorbed two packs before he turned twenty-eight. The first surrendered. The second didn’t. There were no survivors from the second pack’s leadership.

His name was Tarn.

Behind me, the hellebore shuddered. Every bloom on the north wall pulled tight, like the flowers felt it before I did. Like they knew what was coming.

“He’ll need a Luna,” I said.

“He’ll choose from the ranked families. Petra is already preparing.”

I nodded. That was right. That was how it worked. The Beta’s daughter in her deep red dress, her practiced smile, her ambition filed to a point. Petra was born for this.

I was born for the greenhouse.

Sorrel watched me. “Linden. When the last Alpha died, they blamed the healer.”

“I know.”

“Right now, the pack ignores you because it’s easier than fearing you. Don’t give them a reason to stop.”

I wanted to tell her the pack had been ignoring me for five years. That they only remembered my name when something hurt and they had no one else to ask.

Instead I said, “I’ll be careful.”

She shook her head slowly. Like she’d heard that exact promise from someone who looked just like me.

Then she left.

I stood alone in the greenhouse with dirt under my nails and bergamot on my fingertips. The hellebore was still trembling. The soil still smelled like iron. And somewhere east of Brackenmoor, the son of my mother’s killer was already coming.

Something shifted in my chest. Low and warm and completely uninvited. Not fear. Not grief. Something I didn’t have a name for. My hand pressed flat against the potting bench and I held it there until the feeling passed.

It didn’t pass.

Every unmated woman in the pack was about to stand in a line. Petra would be first. The rest would follow. They’d brush their hair and lift their chins and compete for the attention of a man whose bloodline had already taken everything from me.

I told myself I wouldn’t be one of them.