Chapter 8: A Wolf in My Mirror

Cormac put the black boots on the desk between us. They were muddier than they had been when I found them, and there was a tear in the left one that I had not noticed, and the laces had been cut rather than untied. Declan looked at his son and did not say anything for a while. Then he said, very quietly, "Sit down, Cormac. You look like you are going to fall over."

"I am not going to sit down." The boy's voice was a raw thing, high and thin. "She sent me up to the cottage at seven with a can of petrol and a box of matches and she told me to put the boots and the bag in the yard and burn them and then come back and tell her it was done. And I carried the can up the road and I stood outside the gate for ten minutes and I could not do it. And then I came here." He looked at me, and his grey eyes were wet, and he wiped them with the back of his hand like a child. "I burned the boathouse for her last night. I did not know what was in it. She told me it was rubbish from the old days and it had to go before the council man came. I did not know it was my uncle's..." He stopped himself. "I did not know what it was."

"You burned the boathouse," I said.

"She told me it was an order. She said it in the pack voice and I could not say no to it, and I have been sick about it since four this morning." He sat down after all, on the chair by the stove, and put his head in his hands. "I am sorry. I am sorry about your sister. I liked her. She used to give me sweets when I was small and she never once looked at me like I was a fool, and when the Alpha told the pack she had gone into the water I believed it, and I have been believing it for a month and it is a lie, is it not? It is a lie."

Declan crossed the room and crouched in front of his son and put a hand on his shoulder. "It is a lie. Or it is not the whole truth, and the whole truth is worse. Look at me." Cormac looked up. "You did what a boy does when the Alpha gives him an order. You are not to blame for the boathouse and you are not to blame for what she told you about Siobhan. But you are to blame if you go back up that road tonight and tell her where those boots are. Do you understand me?"

"I cannot lie to her. You know I cannot lie to her. When she calls the pack to listen she hears everything, and I am no good at keeping things out of my head."

"Then you will not go back up that road. You will stay here with me tonight, and in the morning we will work out what to do." Declan stood up. "Niamh. The boots. What is in them that she wants burned?"

I picked one up and turned it over. The tear in the left one was in the heel, and the heel was hollow. I got my penknife out and worked the leather apart and a folded slip of paper came out onto the desk, thin and greasy, and I opened it with two fingers.

It was a list. Not of names this time. Of dates, going back fifteen years, one or two a year, and beside each date a short phrase in my sister's handwriting. "Cormac, first shift, high ground, April." "Nora's girl, first shift, the shore, August." "Tom's boy, first shift, high ground, December." And at the top, in a different hand, thin and elegant and sloping to the right, the hand that had written Bring her to me: "Record of shifts, Dún Aonghasa, kept by S. for the true Alpha. Copy sent to Galway."

I looked at Declan. He was reading it over my shoulder and his face had gone very still.

"What does it mean, copy sent to Galway?" I said.

"It means your sister was keeping a record of every first shift in this village for the last fifteen years, and sending a copy of it to someone in Galway." He took the paper from me and read it again. "A first shift is a private thing in most packs. It is a family thing. It is not written down. And it is certainly not sent out of the territory to a stranger."

"Unless you are gathering evidence," I said. "Unless you are building a case."

"For what?"

"For whatever it is you would take to a court if the court were a council of wolves instead of a panel of judges." I took the paper back and folded it and put it in my coat. "Your Alpha is not just a thief, Declan. She is a thief who has been covering her tracks for twenty years, and my sister was keeping a ledger of every lie, and somebody in Galway has been reading it."

Declan looked at Cormac. Cormac looked at the floor.

"Go home with your father," I said to the boy. "Do not go up the high road. And if she calls the pack to listen tonight, think about the harbor. Think about the boats. Think about anything except that list and those boots, and if you cannot do that, think about me standing in front of you with a penknife, because that is a true thing and it will fill your head."

He nodded. He got up. He looked at me for a moment as if he was going to say something else, and then he went out of the office and down the stairs and I heard his boots on the pier.

Declan stood by the door with his hand on the frame. "You should not have told him to think about you."

"Why not?"

"Because it is a true thing and it will fill his head, and if the Alpha calls tonight, the first thing she will hear out of that boy is your face." He looked at me. "It is a good plan. It is a better plan than I would have made. I am only saying it has a cost."

"Everything has a cost." I put my hands in my pockets. "Go after him. He should not be alone tonight."

"I will." He hesitated. "Niamh. The pull. It has been coming on you since the funeral and it is going to get worse before Saturday. If it comes on you tonight, do not fight it in the house. Get out. Get to the high ground above the peat cuts. I will find you."

"Go after your son, Declan."

He went. I stood in the harbor office for a while with the stove ticking and the rain on the window and the black boots on the desk, and then I went back to the cottage and locked the door and threw the bolt and sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea I did not drink.

It came on me at nine o'clock, and it came on me like a fever.

The first thing was the heat. It started in my chest and went out along my arms and up my neck and into my face, and I stood up and went to the sink and put cold water on my wrists and it did no good. The second thing was the sound. Every sound in the cottage got louder at once, the tick of the clock, the drip of the tap, the wind in the chimney, and then beyond them the sounds I should not have been able to hear at all, the gulls on the pier a quarter mile away, a dog barking up the hill, the low mutter of a television in the next cottage through two stone walls.

The third thing was the smell. I could smell the soap in the dish and the tea going cold and the mud on my sister's boots and under all of it, coming up through the floor, the sea. Not the sea at the shore. The sea itself, deep and salt and full of fish and weed and old iron, and the smell of the rain on the hill and the peat and the warm animal smell that was my own skin.

And then I looked in the mirror over the sink, and the woman looking back at me had yellow eyes.

Not the blue I had seen in a mirror every day of my life. Yellow. A pale, bright, luminous yellow like the eye of a dog caught in a headlight, and the pupils had gone long and narrow and the whites had gone dark, and around the edges of my face my hair was moving though there was no wind in the kitchen.

I put my hand over my mouth and my hand had changed. The nails were longer and darker and there was a fine gold hair on the back of it, and I made a sound that was not a word and the sound came out low and rough and wrong.

Then the pain came.

I have tried to describe it since and I have never managed it. It was not like a broken bone or a burn. It was like being taken apart from the inside by a hand that knew exactly where every joint was and was pulling them out of their sockets one by one, and there was a noise in my head that was my own voice and a noise under it that was something else, something old and patient, saying, let go, let go, let go. I went down on my hands and knees on the flagstones and the flagstones were cold and then they were not cold and then there was no floor under me at all.

I do not know how long it went on. I know that at some point I was standing on four legs in my sister's kitchen with the table above me and the chair knocked over and the door in front of me, and the smell of the outside world was so strong and so good that I could not think of anything else. The door. The door was closed and bolted. I could hear the wind on the other side of it, and the gulls, and the whole night, and I went at the door with my shoulder and the wood gave.

Then the back door opened and Declan was there.

He came in fast and shut it behind him and stood with his back against it, and he was not looking at the wolf. He was looking at me, at the thing I had become, and there was no fear in his face at all, only a hard flat attention.

"Not out there," he said. "Niamh. Look at me. Not out there. If you go out that door you will run, and if you run tonight she will hear you, and I cannot stop her from hearing a howl a mile off. So you are going to stay in this kitchen and you are going to let it finish, and I am going to stand here with the door shut until it does."

I tried to say his name and it came out a growl.

"I know," he said. "I know it hurts. I know it feels like your skin is on fire. It will pass. It always passes." He slid down the door until he was sitting on the flagstones with his back to it, and he put his hands flat on the floor on either side of him, and he looked at me with those grey eyes and did not look away. "Come here. Lie down. You do not have to fight it. The wolf will settle if you stop fighting it."

I did not want to lie down. I wanted the door. I wanted the night and the hill and the moon, and there was a voice in my head that was not my own telling me to run, and I took a step toward the door.

Declan put his hand out and took hold of the fur at the back of my neck, and the touch went through me like the spark at the weight, like the first heat of a fire, and every muscle in my body went loose at once. I lay down on the flagstones. I put my head on the floor and I felt the shift go out of me like a tide, and the pain went with it, and I was a woman again lying naked on my sister's kitchen floor with my breath coming in gasps and Declan's hand still in my hair.

He took his hand away. He got up and took the blanket off the back of the chair and put it over me and then he crouched down beside me and said, "There. That is the worst of it. That is the first one done."

I lay there with the blanket around me and the flagstones cold under my hip and I could not stop shaking. "I howled," I said. My voice had gone hoarse. "I heard myself. Before you came. I howled."

"You did not."

"I did. I heard it."

"You heard it in your own head. That is not the same thing." He sat back on his heels. "A howl carries. It carries over water and it carries up the hill and it carries into every wolf in the territory. What you did in this kitchen did not carry. I would have felt it if it had."

"How do you know?"

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, "Because I felt it anyway. I have been standing at the bottom of your path since eight o'clock, because I knew it was coming, and at nine I felt a pull in my chest like a rope going tight and I started up the road before I knew I had moved." He looked at the floor. "That is not a thing that happens between two wolves who are strangers."

I sat up slowly with the blanket around me. "What is it, then?"

"It is called the mate bond." He said it without any softness. "It is a thing the old wolves talk about and most of us go our whole lives without it. It means the wolf in me knows the wolf in you, and it will not let go, and it is going to make the next few weeks very difficult for both of us."

The clock ticked. The wind went on outside. I looked at him crouched on my sister's kitchen floor and I felt the tug behind my ribs again, and it was not a thing I had asked for and it was not a thing I wanted and it was the truest thing in the room.

And then, out on the road, a woman's voice called my name. Low and warm and musical, the voice that had said I am sorry we are meeting like this, and it was close, and it was walking up the path toward the door.