Chapter 25: The Night of the Spark

The howl went on and then it stopped and the harbor was quiet again, and Declan was already running.

I went after him. He went down the pier and along the shore road with his coat open and his boots slapping the wet stone, and I kept up with him because the wolf in me was up now and my legs were longer than they had been a week ago. We went past the boathouse and up the track and the gulls were up off the cliffs screaming and the light was going out of the sky.

He shifted on the track. He did not stop and he did not slow down. He went from a man running to a wolf running in the time it took me to take three breaths, and his clothes were left on the grass, and the wolf that came out of them was big and grey-brown and fast, and it went up the track like a thrown stone.

I shifted too. It was the third time and it came easier and worse, the heat and the sound and the pain taking me down onto the grass, and then I was on four legs and the world was loud and green and I went up the track after him.

We came over the top of the headland and there was nobody there. The ring of stones was empty. The flat rock where Mairéad had stood was empty. The sea was below us and the wind was up and the whole headland was bare.

Declan's wolf stood in the middle of the ring with his head up and his nose working, and then he put his nose down to the grass and went along the ring and out the far side, and I followed him. There was a smell there, Cormac's smell, and under it another smell, sharp and chemical, and a third smell that I knew from the boathouse and did not want to know.

We followed the trail down the far side of the headland to the cove. It was a small stony inlet with a slip cut into the rock and one boat tied at the slip, and the boat was Declan's, the Cormorant, and there was a light in the cabin.

Declan shifted back and stood there naked in the wind and did not care. I shifted back and went down the slip after him and we came to the boat and looked in through the cabin window.

Cormac was sitting on the floor of the cabin with his back against the bunk and his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped round them. There was a can of petrol beside him and a box of matches and a coil of rope, and there was blood on his hands. Not a lot of blood. Enough.

Declan went in through the cabin door and knelt down in front of his son and put his hands on either side of his face.

"Cormac. Look at me."

Cormac looked at him. His grey eyes were strange, the pupils wide, and there was a smear of blood on his cheek where he had touched his face with his hand.

"She told me to," he said. "She called me to the hall at four and she said, the woman is going to the boathouse tonight and you are going to be there before her and you are going to put a match to it and make sure there is nothing left of the floor. And I said, there is nothing left of it already, and she said, there is a flagstone and under the flagstone there is a thing that belongs to me, and you are going to bring it to me and then you are going to burn the rest."

"Did you go to the boathouse?"

"I went to the boathouse. I took the can and I went down the shore road and I stood in the gap in the wall and I looked at the third flagstone from the slip." He looked at his father. "And I could not do it. I stood there for an hour with the can in my hand and I could not do it, and then I came up here and I howled because I did not know what else to do with it."

"Where is the can?" Declan said. "Is it the one in this cabin?"

"It is the one in this cabin. I brought it up here and I put it down and I sat down and I have been sitting here since."

"Did you light it?"

"No."

"Did you touch the flagstone?"

"No."

Declan sat back on his heels. He looked at the can and the matches and the rope and his son's bloody hands.

"Cormac," he said. "What is the blood?"

Cormac looked at his hands as if he had not seen them before. "It is mine," he said. "I put my hand through the window of the cabin when I was getting the can out. It is nothing. It is a cut."

Declan got up and opened the cabin door and stood in the doorway with his back to us and his hands on the frame, and I looked at the set of his shoulders and I knew what he was doing. He was standing in a door with his hands on the frame and he was deciding what to do, the way he had stood in the door of the boathouse a month ago.

"Declan," I said.

He did not turn round.

"There were footprints," I said. "On the track. When we came over the top I saw them in the mud before the light went. There were two sets. One was Cormac's and it went up to the headland. The other one came down from the headland to this cove and it did not go to the boat."

He turned round.

"It went along the shore," I said. "The way we came. And it stopped at the top of the slip and then it went back the way it came."

Declan looked at the slip. The tide was coming in over the stones and there were marks in the mud that the water had not yet reached, and he crouched down and put his hand over one of them and then stood up and looked at the headland.

"Someone was up there with him," he said. "Someone followed him up and stood behind him while he howled and then went back down before we came."

"The Alpha," I said.

"The Alpha was in the hall at four. Cormac said she called him at four." He looked at me. "She called him at four and she sent him to the boathouse and then she went to the hall and sat in her chair and let him go. She has been sitting in that chair for two hours with the enforcer beside her. She did not follow him up here. She did not need to."

"Then who did?"

Declan looked down the slip at the footprints and his face was grey in the last of the light.

"There is a third thing I have not told you," he said. "The night of the claim. When I carried your sister down to the boathouse and put her on the floor, there was a woman already in the boathouse. She was standing in the corner with her back to the wall and she had a bag in her hand and she was crying. It was the woman with the red hair. Bridget. And she said to me, I did not know it would be like this, and I said, what did you think it would be, and she said, I thought it would be a fight and he would lose and go away. And then the Alpha came in and told her to be quiet and she was quiet." He looked at me. "She has been in this village ever since. Someone has been keeping her. And if she was up on the headland tonight following my son, then she is not hiding any more and she is not crying any more, and I want to know why."

I went down the slip to the water's edge and looked along the shore at the mud and the stones, and the tide was coming in and the light was nearly gone. The footprints went along the shore toward the village and they were a woman's boots, small and neat, and there was a mark on the left one where the heel had worn down on the outside.

The black boots. The roll to the right foot. The woman in the garden had told me to ask what the payment was and what she would do if the payment stopped.

"Declan," I said. "Take Cormac home. Put him in a room with a fire and a lock on the door and do not let him out of your sight until Sunday. I am going to follow the footprints."

"You are not going alone."

"I am going alone because if she sees two of us she will run and there is no one in this village who can catch a wolf on the shore in the dark." I came back up the slip. "And because you have to take your son home. Look at him. He has been sitting in a cold cabin with a can of petrol for two hours and he is not a wolf who should be alone tonight."

Declan looked at Cormac and then at me. The bond in my chest went tight and warm and he put his hand out and touched my face, just the back of his fingers against my cheek, and the spark went through me and I saw him feel it.

"Come back," he said.

I shifted on the slip and went up the shore along the mud with my nose down to the trail, and the wind was in my face and the sea was on my left and the moon was coming up over the headland behind me. The footprints went along the shore to the village and up the bank by the boathouse and across the shore road, and there they stopped being footprints and became a smell.

The smell went up the lane between the shop and the priest's house, and then across the road, and then up to the green door of the co-op hall.

The door was shut. There was a light on in the hall and I could hear voices through the wood. The Alpha's voice, low and warm and musical. The enforcer's voice, patient and dry. And a third voice, a woman's voice, high and nervous, saying something I could not make out.

I shifted back and pulled my coat round me and went up to the door, and I put my hand on it and pushed it open.

They were all three at the long table with the frame behind them on the wall, and they all three looked up. Mairéad in her chair with her hands folded. Korkut in his town coat with his elbows on the table. And between them, in a chair, with her red hair loose on her shoulders and her hands in her lap and a mark on her left cheek like a hand had been there recently, was the woman from the car.

"Come in," Mairéad said. "We were just talking about you."