Chapter 3: My Brother's Wound

The truck went past the co-op and did not stop, and the headlights slid off the office wall and left us in the low lamplight again.

I put the knife on the desk. I did not put it away. “You were there,” I said. “You were there when he died.”

“Yes.”

“Say it properly.”

Elias looked at his hands on his knees. The coat was too big for him, and the sleeves came down past his wrists, and there was a smudge of dirt along his jaw. “I was in the field behind the old mill road. It was a new moon. I had changed, and I was on my way back to the trees, and I heard a wolf fight.” He stopped. “I heard your brother.”

“Owen was not a fighter.”

“No,” Elias said. “He was not.”

I sat down on the desk again because my legs were not interested in holding me up. “Tell me what you heard.”

“Two wolves. One of them was your brother, and he was not winning. The other one was talking to him.”

“Talking.”

“Wolves can talk,” Elias said. “Not out loud. In the head. The way packmates do.”

I knew that. Every wolf in the Palouse Ridge pack knew that. My mother had used the mind-link to call me in for dinner until the day she died, and Owen had used it to tell me jokes across a crowded yard when we were young. It had gone quiet for me after he died. I had not told anyone about that, not even Maeve.

“What were they saying?”

“I did not hear the words. I was too far, and the bond between them was not mine to listen to.” His jaw tightened. “But I heard the end of it. Your brother said a name. He said it twice, and then he stopped saying anything at all.”

“What name?”

“I have been trying to decide whether to tell you that for four months,” Elias said. “I did not come here to make trouble for you. I came here because you are his sister, and because someone should know.”

“What name,” I said again, and my voice came out flatter than I meant it to.

He looked up. His eyes were amber and steady. “Dale.”

The co-op clock ticked. I have hated that clock since I was a girl. It is a square wooden thing with a cracked face that Harold won in a raffle in 1962, and it ticks too loud, and in the silence after that name it was the loudest sound in the county.

“You are lying,” I said.

“I am not.”

“Dale is our Beta. Owen worked for Dale. Owen liked Dale.”

“Your brother liked most people,” Elias said. “That is not the same thing.”

I got up and walked to the window and looked out at the dark yard. The loading dock was empty. The grain elevator stood up against the sky with its little red light on top, and the sky had begun to go gray in the east. In four hours the co-op would open and June would come in and find a strange man in Owen’s coat on Harold’s cot, and I had maybe that long to decide what I was doing.

“There is a scar on your shoulder blade,” I said, with my back to him. “It is in the exact place Owen’s was. And you have a round burn at the base of your neck that he had too. You do not get to tell me that is a coincidence.”

The cot creaked. I turned around. He had stood up, and he was holding the coat closed at his chest with one hand.

“It is not a coincidence,” he said. “That is what I am trying to explain to you, and I am doing a poor job, because I have not had a proper meal in five days and I am not at my best.”

“Then get to the point.”

“The wolf that killed your brother was not in his right mind,” Elias said. “And neither was I. It was the new moon, and I was in the field, and when I found your brother he was already down, and the other wolf had gone. I stayed with him. I put my hands on him and I tried to hold the wound shut, and he looked at me and he was not afraid. He told me to find his sister. He told me her name.”

The room was very quiet.

“And then he was gone,” Elias said, “and I was lying in his blood in the field, and when the sun came up I had his scars on my body and I did not know why. I still do not know why. I have been trying to find out for four months.”

I thought about the funeral. I thought about the closed casket, which was strange because Owen had been found in a field and not in the river, and about Harlan saying the injuries were too much for an open coffin, and about Dale standing at the back of the church with his hand on my shoulder and his voice low and kind. I thought about how no one had ever asked me a single question about that night.

“The funeral was closed,” I said.

“I know.”

“There was no investigation. Harlan said it was a rogue, and the Council agreed, and we buried him.”

“I know,” Elias said again.

I turned around and put both my hands on the desk. “Why you?”

“I have thought about that more than anything else,” he said. “The only thing I can tell you is that it happened at the new moon, and I was changed, and he was not. Whatever was done to him, it came through me. His scars are on my back. His death is in my hands. I feel it every day.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No,” he said. “It is not.”

I took a long breath. “Can I see it?”

He did not ask what I meant. He turned around and pulled the coat down off his left shoulder, and there it was in the lamplight, the curved pale scar I had known since I was fourteen, and I put my fingers on it before I could stop myself.

The heat came up through my hand and into my arm and settled in my chest, the same slow heat as before, and my wolf pressed forward and made a sound I had never heard her make. Elias went rigid. His shoulder came up under my hand and his breath stopped, and then he let it out all at once.

“Do not do that again,” he said. His voice had gone rough.

“What is it?” I said. “What is happening?”

He pulled the coat back up over his shoulder and turned to face me, and his eyes had gone darker, the amber gone to something like a jar of honey with the light behind it. “You know what it is,” he said. “Your wolf knows. Mine has been howling at me about it since the moment you put your fingers under my jaw in that field.”

“No,” I said.

“I am not asking you for anything.”

“No,” I said again. “That is not what this is. I am not going to stand in a co-op office at five in the morning and be told by a naked man in my brother’s coat that we are mates.”

He almost laughed. It was a short, tired sound, and it went out of him as fast as it came. “Believe me, I did not plan this either. I came here to tell you about Owen. I did not come here to find you.”

“Find me,” I said. “That is a strange way to put it.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “The scent. When I was in the field, I could smell the pack on the wind, and the wheat, and the diesel from the co-op. And then one day in July I caught something else. Something that made my wolf lie down in the grass and refuse to move, and I have been walking toward it ever since, and every road I took led to this town.” He looked at me. “It led to you.”

The clock ticked. My head hurt. I could hear a truck on the highway, and the grain elevator humming, and my own heart going like a bird in a box.

“I need you to leave,” I said.

“Where would I go?”

“Anywhere. The mill. The trees. Somewhere that is not here when June walks in the door.”

He picked up his boots from where he had dropped them, and he pulled the coat tighter around himself, and he walked to the side door. He stopped with his hand on it.

“Your brother did not say the name in anger,” he said. “He said it the way a man says a thing he cannot believe. I have thought about that every night for four months. I think it is important.”

“I do not want your thinking,” I said. “I want you gone.”

He opened the door and went out into the gray, and I stood in the office with the lamp low and my hand still warm from his shoulder, and I did not sit down until the door had closed behind him.

June found me an hour later asleep at the desk with my head on my arms.

“You look terrible,” she said. “Did you sleep here?”

“I was walking the line.”

“All night?” She put the coffee pot on the burner and struck a match. “Dale called the house at six. The hunters are coming tomorrow instead of next week. He wants everyone at the pack house tonight to meet them.”

I sat up. My neck cracked. “Tomorrow.”

“He says the rogue is getting bolder. He says it has been in the co-op yard.” June looked at me over the pot. “Wren, it has not been in the co-op yard. I would have seen it.”

I looked past her at the peg where Owen’s coat used to hang. The peg was empty.

“No,” I said. “It has not.”