Chapter 11: The First Shift

We went up to the high ground at first light, before the village was awake.

Declan walked ahead with a canvas bag over his shoulder and I followed him along the shore road and then up the track past the peat cuts, and the higher we went the more the world opened out. Below us the harbor was a grey smudge with twenty dark lines in it for the boats, and beyond it the sea went out to a white edge of light where the sky met the water. The wind came up off the Atlantic and it was cold and clean and it smelled of salt and heather and something deeper underneath, something like iron and old rain.

"Stop," Declan said, when we were well above the last of the cottages. "Sit down."

I sat on a flat stone. He put the bag down and took out a pair of trousers and a shirt and a pair of boots and laid them on the grass beside me.

"Put those on the ground where you can find them in the dark," he said. "When the shift comes on you the clothes will go. They will be ruined or they will come off and you will not have time to worry about either. You will need something to put on when you come back and you will be cold and stupid and you will not be able to find your own feet, so you put them in the same place every time and you do not move them."

I looked at the clothes on the grass. "You have done this before."

"I have done it for thirty years. Every full moon since I was fourteen." He took a small flask out of the bag and handed it to me. "Water. Drink it. A shift takes water out of you and you will not feel it until it is too late."

I drank. The water tasted of the flask, metal and cold, and the wind pulled at my hair and the sun was coming up behind the clouds in a long grey gold streak, and it was the strangest thing in the world to be sitting on a hill in Ireland at dawn with a man I had known for a week, drinking water out of a flask, about to learn how to be an animal.

"Tell me what to do," I said.

"There is nothing to do. The shift is not a thing you do. It is a thing that happens, and what you learn is how not to fight it." He crouched in front of me. "The first time you fought it. You went to the door and you would have gone through it if I had not been there. That is because your wolf is new and it does not know what it is and it is frightened. It wants to run. It wants the open ground and the moon and the pack. You have to show it that the open ground is here and the pack is here and there is nothing to run from."

"And if I cannot?"

"Then you will shift, and you will run, and I will run after you, and I will bring you back." He said it without any doubt at all. "There is no shame in it. Half the wolves in this village spent their first shift running for the hills. But you do not want to run today. Today you want to shift and stay, because there are forty people in this village who are going to want to see you do it properly on Saturday, and if you can do it today you can do it in front of them."

"How do I start?"

"You do not start. You let it come." He sat back on his heels. "Close your eyes. Think about the wolf. Not the shape of it. The smell of it. The sound of it. You have felt it twice now and you will know it when it comes."

I closed my eyes.

The wind was cold on my face. I could hear the sea and the gulls and the far off clank of a chain on the pier. I could smell the heather and the peat and the damp wool of Declan's jacket and the salt in the air.

And then, under all of it, the thing that was not any of those. The thing that had been sitting in the back of my head since the first night, waiting, patient as a stone. It was not a voice. It was not a presence. It was a smell, a deep animal smell like a dog's coat after a walk in the rain, and when I found it in my head it found me at the same time, and the pull came up through my spine like a hand closing.

I heard my own breath go out.

"Good," Declan said, very quiet. "That is good. Do not chase it. Let it come to you."

It came. The heat came first, the way it had in the kitchen, spreading out from my chest along my arms and up my neck. Then the sound went strange, the way it had gone strange before, the wind and the gulls and the sea all roaring at once. Then my hand began to change and I saw the fine gold hair come up on the back of it and the nails go dark and long, and the fear came with it, the animal fear, the get out get out get out.

"Breathe," Declan said. "It is only fear. It cannot hurt you. Let it come."

It hurt. It hurt worse than in the kitchen, because in the kitchen I had been frightened and alone and there had been nothing to hold on to, and now there was a man crouched in front of me with his grey eyes steady on mine, and holding on to him was the hardest thing I had ever done. I wanted to pull away and run. I wanted to go through the heather and down the hill and into the sea. Every part of me that was still a woman wanted to stand up and walk away.

I stayed.

The shift came through me like a wave going out and I went down on my hands in the wet grass and it went on and on and then it stopped, and I was lying in the heather with the wind in my fur and the world so loud and so close that I could not tell where I ended and the hill began.

I lifted my head.

Declan was standing a few feet away. I could see him in a way I had never seen anything. I could see the heat coming off him and the small movements of his chest when he breathed and the exact shape of his face, and I could smell every part of him, the wool and the soap and the sweat and under it the thing that was his wolf, and the thing that was me answering it.

"You did it," he said.

I tried to speak and I could not.

"You cannot talk. Not yet. It takes practice. You can hear me, though, cannot you? You can hear the words." He crouched down and put his hand out flat, palm up, and I put my nose in it and the smell of him went through me like whiskey. "There. That is the bond. Feel that? That is what it is like on the other side of it. You have been feeling it for a week and now you know what it is."

I stood up. My legs were strange, four of them instead of two, and the ground was close under my chest. I took a step and then another and the heather moved under my paws and the world was the colour I had never seen before, grey and green and gold, the whole hill alive with smells.

"Now," Declan said. "Do you want to run?"

I did. I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything.

"Then run," he said. "I will be behind you."

I ran. The hill went past under me and the wind came into my fur and I was faster than I had ever been in my life, and the smell of the sea and the peat and the heather came into me like a song. I went up over the top of the high ground and down into the hollow beyond it and back up along the ridge, and Declan was a dark shape behind me, and the sun came up over the Atlantic and turned the clouds gold and the sea silver.

And then, on the far side of the ridge, I stopped.

There was a ring of stones there. It was old, older than anything in the village, and the stones were grey and tall and some of them had fallen and the grass had grown up between them, and in the middle of the ring the ground was flat and bare. It was the old charter house. I knew it without being told. Declan had said it was a hundred years fallen and nobody had looked at it in living memory, and here it was, and the stones had marks on them, and the marks were the same fish and the same numbers that were stamped on the weight in my pocket.

And in the middle of the ring, on the flat bare ground, there was a smell.

It was old and faint and it was a woman's smell, and under it the smell of petrol and smoke and under that a smell I did not have a name for, something cold and mineral and wrong. I put my nose down to the ground and I followed it around the ring, and near the fallen stone on the seaward side the smell was strongest, and there was a mark in the earth where something had been dug and filled in again, and the grass had not grown back over it.

Declan came up behind me and shifted and I heard his breath go out hard.

"That is a grave," he said.

I turned and looked at him. He was naked and he did not care and he was looking at the earth and his face had gone white.

"Not a grave," I said. My voice came out hoarse and strange and it was the first word I had spoken as a wolf. "Look at the size of it. It is not a grave. It is a cache. Someone dug here and buried something and then took it out again."

He crouched down and put his hand on the earth and then he put his nose to it the way I had, and when he lifted his head his eyes had gone cold.

"Petrol," he said. "And something else. Something I have not smelled since I was a boy." He looked at me. "Niamh. This is where Bridget was digging in March. Your sister's letter sent her here. She found the thing that was buried here, and she put it in the locker, and the locker was burned. And whoever burned it came back here to make sure there was nothing left of where it came from."

"But there is," I said. I put my nose back down to the earth and I followed the old smell around the fallen stone and I found a place where the earth was packed tighter than the rest, and I put my paws to it and dug, and there was a small tin box under the peat, rusted at the edges, and I got my teeth into it and pulled it out and dropped it on the grass.

Declan opened it.

Inside there was a photograph. A woman with golden blonde hair and sky blue eyes, standing in front of a cottage with a baby in her arms, and on the back of the photograph, in handwriting I knew, was written: "Maeve, 1955."

"That is your mother," Declan said quietly.

"That is not my mother," I said. "My mother was born in 1940. This woman is too old to be her." I looked at the golden hair and the blue eyes and the shape of the face and my own face looked back at me out of the picture. "That is my grandmother. And nobody in my family has ever mentioned her."

The wind came up over the ridge and the stones stood around us and the sea was silver and the pack was down in the village, and somewhere below us a church bell began to ring for the first mass of the day.

Declan looked at the photograph and then at me and then at the ring of stones, and he said, "Maeve. There was a Maeve in this village once. There was a Maeve who was Alpha before Mairéad, and there is no record of her in the charter, and every old wolf in this territory has been told not to say her name."

The bell went on ringing. I stood in the middle of the old charter house with my grandmother's photograph in my mouth and the taste of rust on my tongue, and down on the shore road I could hear the village beginning to stir and a woman's voice, low and warm and musical, calling across the water to someone on the pier.