Chapter 10: Declan's Grey Eyes

Declan did not answer me for a long time. The candle had burned down to a stub and the wax was pooling on the step, and he sat with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

"There was no one else in the office," he said at last. "I would have smelled them. The harbor office is one room over a net store and there is nowhere in it to hide. She came in, she stood by the stove, she said what she said, and she went out again."

"Then it was not the office she was afraid of." I pulled the blanket up over my shoulders. "She was afraid of something before she came in and it was still on her when she left. And now it is on you."

"It is on me because I have been carrying it for a month." He turned his head. "You are asking whether I think your sister's death was planned. I have thought that every night since the coroner's report. I have no proof of it. I have a promise I was asked to make and a fight I did not go to and a woman who came down the hill with clean boots."

"Clean boots."

"The headland is peat and rock and wet grass. You cannot go up there and fight and come down with clean boots." He said it without emphasis. "I noticed it that night and I have not been able to stop noticing it since."

I sat on the stairs with the ache coming into my bones, the way he had said it would. The first shift had gone through me and left me feeling like a woman who had been thrown from a horse, and my hands were trembling and my jaw was sore and there was a taste in my mouth like copper.

"Tell me about the bond," I said. "All of it. Not the version you would tell a stranger."

He got up and went down to the kitchen and came back with the bottle of whiskey from the dresser and two glasses. He poured a finger into one and handed it to me and poured a finger into the other and set it down on the step beside him, and he did not drink it.

"Whiskey," I said.

"You need it. You have had a bad night and a worse week and you are about to hear a thing that will make it worse." He sat down. "Drink it. I will not tell anyone."

I drank it. It went down like a coal and sat in my chest and made the ache a little further away.

"The bond is old," he said. "Older than the charter. It is not in the books. The books say that a wolf chooses a mate and the Alpha witnesses it and that is the end of it. But the old wolves knew there was another thing that happened sometimes, between two wolves who were made for each other, and it comes on them without asking. You smell the person before you see them. You feel a pull behind the ribs. The first touch goes through you like a current. And after a while there is a mark, and after the mark there is a link in the mind, and after the link there is nothing in the world that can put the two of you apart except one of you refusing it."

"Refusing it how?"

"By saying no. In front of the pack. In front of the Alpha. Three times. And each time you say it, it tears something out of you, and the third time it kills the bond and leaves a hole where it was." He looked at his glass. "I have seen it done once. The woman was never right afterward. She lived another thirty years and she never shifted again."

"And the mark?"

"Here." He touched the base of his throat, on the left side. "It comes up after the bond is consummated. It is a mark the wolf makes, and it does not fade."

I put my glass down on the step. The whiskey was warm in my stomach and the ache in my bones had settled into something dull and bearable.

"Declan," I said. "Why are you telling me all of this now? You could have told me on Saturday. You could have let me find out what the bond was when it was already too late to do anything about it."

"Because you would have found out tonight anyway, and because I have spent a month lying to a woman who was already dead and I am not going to spend another month lying to her sister." He picked up his glass and drank it in one go. "There is a thing I have not told you. I have been telling myself it was for your own good. It was not. It was for mine."

The wind came up and the rain came hard against the little window at the top of the stairs. I waited.

"The night of the claim," he said, "I was not at the harbor because your sister asked me to be. I was at the harbor because the Alpha told me to be. She came to me in the afternoon and she said, Declan, tonight the woman is going to make her claim and I want you at the harbor with the boats. Do not come up to the headland. If you come up to the headland I will not be able to answer the claim properly, because you are my Beta and you will stand at my shoulder and she will see it and she will say I brought a second wolf to a single combat, and she will have the law on her side." He set the glass down carefully. "So I went to the harbor. And then Siobhan came to me and asked me the same thing, in almost the same words, and I did not think twice about it. I thought they were both trying to keep me out of a fight that was not mine."

"But Siobhan came to you after the Alpha."

"She came the night before. The Alpha came in the afternoon and Siobhan came in the evening and I stood in that office and I listened to two women tell me the same lie in two different ways and I did not see it." He was looking at the wall again. "I have gone over it a hundred times. I know now what I should have seen. The Alpha did not want me on that hill because I am her Beta and my place is at her shoulder and if I had been there I would have seen the fight. Siobhan did not want me on that hill because she knew the Alpha would tell me to stay and she knew I would obey, and she wanted me to obey, because she did not want me to see what she had arranged to happen."

"What had she arranged?"

"I do not know. But I know it was not a fair fight. She was not afraid of losing to Mairéad. She was afraid of something else, something that would happen if I was there to see it." He turned to me. "And that is what I have been carrying. Not that I failed to save your sister. That I was kept away from the truth of her death by both women, for two different reasons, and I obeyed them both like a good dog."

The candle guttered and went out. The landing was dark except for the grey light from the window and I could see his profile against it, the auburn hair and the line of his jaw and the small white scar through his eyebrow.

"There is more," I said. "I can smell it on you."

He was quiet. Then he said, "The coroner's report said she had been in the water only a night. But the claim was on the Thursday and the body was found on the Sunday. Three nights. So either the coroner was wrong, or she went into the water three days after the claim and someone kept her somewhere in between."

The cold came down through the blanket and into my bones.

"Somewhere in this village," I said. "For three days."

"Somewhere in this village." He turned to face me. "And I have been through every house and every shed and every net store in my head since the report, and the only place in Dún Aonghasa that no one would think to look is the one place that was emptied and then burned." He looked at me with those grey eyes and the fear on him was so strong now that I could taste it. "The boathouse, Niamh. She was kept in the boathouse. And the locker was in the boathouse. And whoever burned it was not just destroying what was in the locker. They were destroying where she was kept."

I got up off the stairs. My legs hurt and my hands hurt and the blanket slid off my shoulders and I did not care.

"You knew," I said. "You knew that this morning and you did not tell me."

"I did not know it this morning. I knew it an hour ago when I stood on that slip and smelled the petrol and saw that the lock was not broken. I have been putting it together while you were upstairs." He stood up too. "And I did not tell you because I did not know how to say to you that your sister was kept in a boathouse for three days while I was standing on a pier fifty feet away, and that if I had broken a promise and gone and looked, she might have come out of it alive."

The landing was very dark. His grey eyes in the grey light were the only thing in it.

"You were not the one who killed her," I said.

"No. But she is dead because of me."

"You were lied to by two women who both needed you out of the way."

"That is not the same thing as being innocent." He said it quietly and he did not look away. "I am the Beta of this pack. There is not a door in this village that opens to me without a key and there is not a shed I could not have walked into, and I walked past that boathouse every morning for three days, and I did not once ask myself what was inside it. I told myself it was a fight between two women and it was not my business. And that is what I am sorry for. Not the promise. The business."

I stood on the dark landing and looked at him and I did not know whether I wanted to hit him or to put my hand on his chest and feel whether the fear on him would go quiet under my palm. The pull was there, steady, patient, pulling me toward him, and the whiskey was warm in me and the house was quiet, and for one moment there was nothing between us but the narrow space on the landing and the smell of rain on hot stone.

Then his hand came up and he touched my face, just the back of his fingers against my cheek, and the touch went through me like a struck match, and I heard his breath change.

"Do not," I said. My voice came out very low. "Do not do that unless you mean it. I have had a year of people saying things they did not mean and I am done with it."

He took his hand away.

"I mean it," he said. "But you are three days into this world and you are grieving and I am the man who could have saved your sister and did not. So I am going to go downstairs and sleep in the chair, and in the morning I am going to take you up to the high ground and teach you to be a wolf, and we are going to find out who burned that boathouse before Saturday night." He picked up his glass and his boots and went down the stairs, and at the bottom he stopped and looked up at me. "One thing more. When Siobhan came to me the night before the claim, she gave me a name. I have not told you because I did not know whether it was a name or a threat. She said, 'If I lose, tell Niamh to look for the woman from Galway.'"

"Bridget," I said.

"Bridget." He went into the kitchen and the chair creaked as he sat down in it. "Look for the woman from Galway. And Niamh. She said one other thing. She said, 'Tell her she is not the first wolf in this family to be lied to about what she is.'"

The chair creaked once more and then the house was quiet. I stood on the landing in the dark with the blanket round my shoulders and the ache in my bones and my sister's voice in my head, and out on the shore the tide was turning and the sea was coming in over the slip where the burned boathouse stood, and somewhere up on the high ground a wolf was walking in the dark and I could hear it.