Chapter 9: The Scent of the Shore

Declan was on his feet before the second call. He crossed the kitchen in three steps and put himself between me and the back door, and his voice came out low and fast.

"Get up the stairs. Take the blanket. Do not put a light on and do not answer her whatever she says." He was already reaching for the bolt. "She has come to the back door because the front is bolted and she will have smelled the shift on this house from the road. I will keep her out here."

"She will know you are in here with me."

"She will know I am in here. She will not know what she walked in on." He looked back at me. "Go."

I went. I got up the stairs with the blanket round me and my legs shaking and I stopped at the top in the dark and crouched on the landing where I could hear through the floorboards. The bolt went back. The door opened. The wind came into the kitchen and with it the smell of the shore, cold and salt and full of weed, and under that the smell of her, lavender and clean linen and something old and dry like paper in a church.

"Declan," Mairéad said. "You are up late."

"I am up late because there is a woman in this village who has just lost her sister and I am the one who finds her when she cannot sleep." His voice was flat and easy. "What do you want, Mairéad?"

"I want to know why the boathouse is a shell and why my Beta is standing in a dead woman's kitchen at half past nine at night." A pause. "And I want to know why this house smells like a wolf."

"Because a wolf has been in it. Cormac was up here this evening. He came to bring the boots back."

There was a silence that went on a little too long.

"The boots," Mairéad said.

"Your boots. The ones you sent him to fetch." Declan's voice did not change. "He brought them to me instead. He is a good boy and he does not like burning a woman's things in her own yard in the rain, and he came to ask me whether he had to. I told him he did not have to, and I sent him home, and I have the boots in my office if you want them."

"I did not send Cormac for any boots."

"Then one of us is confused, and I do not think it is me." The floorboard creaked as Declan shifted his weight. "Mairéad. It has been a long week. The woman upstairs has lost her sister and the boathouse is a ruin and the whole village is unsettled. Whatever this is, it will keep until morning."

"It will not keep until morning." Her voice had lost its music and gone hard and quiet. "You are lying to me, Declan. I have known you thirty years and you have never once been able to lie to me without your left hand going into your pocket."

I heard him move. I could not see it but I could hear the small rustle of cloth, and I knew she had been right, and I put my hand over my mouth.

"All right," he said. "The truth. There was a wolf in this kitchen tonight and it was not Cormac. It was the woman. She shifted on her own in a house with no one to help her and she did not howl and she did not run and I sat with her until it passed. She is upstairs in a blanket and she is frightened and she does not know what she is, and I am not going to hand her over to you tonight."

Another silence. Longer.

"She shifted," Mairéad said at last.

"She shifted."

"On her own. In the cottage. Without a howl."

"She howled in her head and I sat on the floor and held her by the scruff until it passed. That is all it was."

"And the pull did not take her out of the door."

"It did not."

The wind came in and something in the yard knocked against the wall. I thought about the buoy, the blue buoy my father had painted, and I thought about the fact that I could hear the paint flaking off it from the top of the stairs.

"Then she is stronger than I thought," Mairéad said. "That is a pity. If she had run, this would be a great deal simpler for everyone." Her voice moved closer to the door. "Declan. You know what she is. You have known since she arrived. Her mother's number is on a weight that came back to this village after twenty years, and her sister made a claim that has not been answered properly, and now the woman herself has shifted in a house inside my territory on a night when the moon is not yet full. Do you understand what that means?"

"It means she is a wolf."

"It means the claim is alive." Mairéad said it slowly. "And on Saturday night I am taking the Mary Rose out past the headland in front of the whole co-op to prove that it is not. If she is in this village on Saturday, and she shifts where anyone can see her, and someone with a memory and a charter number puts two and two together, then everything I have built in twenty years comes down in a night." She paused. "So I am going to ask you a question and I want a straight answer. Where is she going to be on Saturday night?"

"Up on the high ground with me," Declan said. "Where the old charter house stood. Where no one goes and no one sees."

"You would take her up there."

"I would take her up there and teach her to shift properly and bring her down on two legs on Sunday morning with the whole village having seen nothing." His voice was steady. "It is the only way to keep the peace, Mairéad, and you know it. If she shifts in the village she is a challenge. If she shifts on the high ground she is a woman who had a bad night. Let me manage it."

A long, long pause. I could hear her breathing, slow and even.

"Very well," she said. "The high ground. Saturday. You will keep her up there until the moon is over and you will bring her down in the morning, and if I hear a howl from that hill on Saturday night I will come up with the whole pack and I will answer the claim where she stands." The door moved. "And Declan. The boots. I want them in my hand by tomorrow noon. Whatever is in them, I want it in my hand, and if it is not, I will come and take it myself."

The door closed. Her footsteps went down the path, and the smell of lavender went with her, and then there was only the shore and the rain and Declan's slow breath in the kitchen.

He came up the stairs a minute later with a candle. He sat down on the top step beside me and put the candle on the boards and looked at the wall.

"That was quick thinking," I said. "The boots. The high ground."

"It was not thinking. It was the only lie she would believe." He rubbed his face with both hands. "She will send someone up to the high ground on Saturday to watch. She always does. She will not come herself because she will be on the Mary Rose, but she will have eyes on that hill and if we are not there she will know."

"Then we will be there."

"We will be there." He looked at me. "You shifted. That is three days early. Your sister's letter said Saturday. The pull came on you tonight and it came hard and you held it in a house with a bolted door and no one to help you, and that is not a thing most wolves can do on their first night."

"Your hand on my neck did it," I said. "The minute you touched me everything went quiet."

He did not look away. "That is the bond. It is what the bond is for. One wolf steadies another." He was quiet a moment. "I have smelled it on you since the first night. The pull. It is a scent like rain on hot stone and it is the strongest thing I have ever smelled in my life, and I have been trying not to stand too close to you since you walked into your sister's kitchen."

"Declan."

"Do not say anything. You do not have to say anything." He stood up. "You need sleep. The first shift takes it out of you and tomorrow you will ache in every bone. I will sleep in the chair downstairs and be gone before the village is up."

He turned to go down and I caught his wrist.

The spark came through my fingers and up my arm and I felt it go through him too, because his breath caught and his whole body went still. I pulled my hand back. It was too late. The kitchen had gone very quiet and the candle flame was steady and there was nothing between us but the narrow stair and the smell of rain on hot stone.

"I need to ask you something," I said. "And I want a straight answer."

"Ask."

"When my sister died. The night of the fight on the headland. You were at the harbor. You heard the fight and you did not go up." I looked at him. "Why not?"

He was silent for a long moment. Then he came back up one step and sat down beside me again and put his hands on his knees.

"Because she told me not to," he said.

"Who told you?"

"Siobhan. Two nights before the claim, she came down to the harbor office and she stood where you are sitting and she said, Declan, when I make the claim, whatever happens on that hill, you stay at the harbor. You do not come up and you do not interfere and you do not let anyone else come up either. She made me promise it." His voice had gone very flat. "And I promised it. And I kept it. And when I heard the fight stop and I heard Mairéad come down the hill alone, I was standing on the pier with my hands in my pockets, and I did not go up."

"Why would she ask you to stay?"

"I do not know. I have thought about it every night for a month." He turned his head and looked at me and his grey eyes were very tired. "But I know this. If I had broken that promise and gone up the hill, your sister might be alive. So when I tell you that I am sorry about Siobhan, you will understand why I say it plainly and not softly. I owe her more than a soft word."

I sat on the stairs with the blanket round me and the candle guttering and the ache already starting in my bones. And then I caught it, under the soap and the rain and the wool of his jacket. The old fear on his hands, dry and sour, like a thing that had been kept in a drawer for years and taken out too often.

He had been afraid on the hill. He had been afraid before the claim, and he had been afraid after, and the fear was still on him, and it had a shape to it that I had smelled before.

It was the same fear that had been on Siobhan's letter.

"The night you promised her," I said. "Was there anyone else in the harbor office when she asked you?"

He looked at me. "Why do you ask that?"

"Because the fear on you and the fear on her letter are the same fear, and it is the smell of a person who knows they are being listened to." I pulled the blanket tighter. "She was not asking you to stay at the harbor so you would not see the fight. She was asking you to stay at the harbor so that whoever was listening would hear you agree to it."