Chapter 5: Scent at the Border

The scent came down the fence line toward me, and I stopped where I was and let it come.

I had spent the afternoon telling myself that the smell in the co-op office had been a trick of the dark and a bad night. I had told myself that the heat in my hand when I touched his shoulder was the blood going back into my fingers. I had told myself a lot of things that a woman tells herself when she does not want to walk into a room she knows is on fire.

The scent reached me and my wolf went down.

Not a slow sinking. She dropped like a dog that has been called by someone it loves, and she put her chin on her paws inside my ribs and made a low, contented sound that spread through my whole body. My knees went weak. I put my hand on a fence post and held on and stood there in the dark with my eyes shut, and the scent filled me up and I did not want it to stop.

There is a word for this. Every wolf is taught the word before the first shift, in the same tone of voice that is used for the word fire or the word silver. Mates. The moon chooses two wolves and ties them together with scent and touch and a bond that runs between their minds. Some pairs find each other young, and some go their whole lives without finding anyone, and some find each other and it ruins them. My mother used to say that a mate bond was a gift from the moon, and my father used to say that a gift from the moon was still a thing with teeth in it. They were both right.

“You came back,” Elias said.

He was standing on the other side of the fence about twenty feet away. He had Owen’s coat buttoned up to his throat and his boots on his feet, and he had a dark scarf wrapped around his neck that I had not given him. He looked a little less like a drowned man than he had that morning.

“Do not flatter yourself,” I said. “I came to walk the line.”

“At ten o’clock at night.”

“I am a border-warden. The line does not keep office hours.”

He came closer, and I stayed where I was, and he stopped on his side of the fence with his hands at his sides. The wire ran between us at chest height. I could see his breath in the dark.

“The hunters are coming tomorrow,” I said. “They will be on the north line at first light, and I am supposed to walk it with them.”

He did not move. “I heard.”

“How did you hear?”

“I have been sleeping in the mill,” he said. “The wind carries. I heard the meeting from the mill loft, most of it. I heard the Beta call you a liar.”

“He did not use that word.”

“He used a worse one,” Elias said. “He called you a woman who keeps finding bodies.”

I looked at the wire between us. It was the same old wire that has run along that fence since before I was born, with a bent staple every ten feet and a place near the corner where it has been spliced so many times it looks like a scar. I could not see Elias’s face clearly in the dark, only the shape of him and the pale hair.

“If they find you,” I said, “they will kill you.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you still here?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Because I have nowhere to go, and because the thing that killed your brother is still in this pack, and because every time I think about walking away from this line I find my feet have brought me back to it.”

My wolf pushed at my ribs, and I pushed back. “Where were you Tuesday?”

“In the field behind the mill.”

“What about two weeks ago, when the corral fence at the north line came down?”

“In the field behind the mill.”

“And when the Henderson calf died?”

“I am telling you the truth,” Elias said. “I have been in that field since July. I leave it to find water and I come back to it. I do not go near your corrals and I do not go near your calves.”

“You went near the co-op.”

“I went to the co-op because it was the only place in this town with a light on at four in the morning, and because the scent was there.” He looked at me. “You are the scent. You have been the scent since July. You cannot pretend you do not know that.”

I should have walked away. I should have gone home and gone to bed and let the hunters do their work and let the Council buy its grain land and let the whole thing die down like a bad summer. That is the sensible thing, and I am a sensible woman in most weather.

I climbed through the fence instead.

He did not move back. I came through the wire and stood on his side of the line with maybe three feet between us, and I could hear his heart. I could hear it going too fast, and I could hear my own doing the same, and I could smell him so strongly that the wheat and the night and the whole county had gone quiet under it.

“If I am going to be killed for this,” I said, “I want to know what it is.”

“I am not going to kill you.”

“I did not mean you.”

He looked at me. His eyes in the dark were the color of honey with a lamp behind it, and his jaw was tight, and the scarf at his throat had slipped down a little so that I could see the round burn on the back of his neck.

“What do you want to know?” he said.

“What happens if I touch you again.”

He swallowed. “I do not know. I have been trying very hard not to find out.”

I put my hand on his chest.

The heat came up through my palm and into my arm and it did not stop at my chest this time. It went through me and down into my belly and out into my fingers and toes, and my wolf rolled all the way over and put her belly up, and I made a sound I had never made in my life. Elias made a sound too, low and rough, and his hand came up and closed around my wrist and he did not pull my hand away. He held it there against his chest, and I could feel his heart under my palm going like a hammer.

“Wren,” he said.

“You know my name.”

“I have known your name since the field,” he said. “Your brother told me.”

That stopped me. I looked up at him. “Owen told you my name?”

“He told me to find his sister. He told me her name was Wren, and that she walked the north line, and that she would know what to do.” His hand tightened on my wrist. “I have been walking this line for four months trying to find a woman I had never met. And then you found me in the dirt instead.”

I pulled my hand away. It took effort. The heat went out of me slowly, like water draining out of a tub, and I felt colder than the night could account for.

“This cannot happen,” I said. “You are a rogue. You are the thing the pack is hunting. If Dale finds out you are on this side of the fence, he will not wait for a cull, he will do it himself, and he will do it in front of me.”

“I know.”

“And if the Council finds out there is a mate bond, they will have questions. The Council does not like questions it cannot answer with paper.”

“I know that too,” Elias said. “I have been on the wrong side of the Council since before you were born.”

I looked at him then. Something in the way he said it made me slow down. “What does that mean?”

He opened his mouth to answer, and then his head came up and he turned toward the north, and every line in his body went hard.

“What?” I said.

“Someone is on the fence,” he said. “Two of them. A half mile up, with a lamp.”

I turned and listened. My wolf came up out of her roll and stood at attention in my chest, and then I heard it too, the soft crunch of boots on stubble and the low murmur of two voices, and a light bobbing between them.

“The hunters,” I said. “They came early.”

Elias stepped back from the fence and the wire caught at his coat, and he looked at me with his head tilted, listening still. “They are not hunters.”

“What?”

“Hunters walk slower,” he said. “And there is a third one behind the other two, and he is not carrying a lamp, and he is carrying something that smells like silver.”

I did not ask how he knew. I grabbed the fence and climbed back through it, and my boot caught on the wire, and I went down on one knee in the dirt on my own side. By the time I got up, Elias was gone. There was only the wheat moving where he had been standing, and the scent thinning on the wind, and the lamp up the line coming closer.

I walked toward the light. I did not run. A border-warden walking her line at night is a normal thing, and I made myself normal, and I put my hands in my pockets so that they would not shake.

The lamp came down the fence and stopped, and behind it was Mrs. Bell with her braid and her rifle, and behind her was Mr. Hask with his gray beard and his canvas jacket, and behind both of them was Dale.

He was not carrying a lamp. He was carrying a coil of silver wire, the thin kind the Council uses for traps, and when he saw me he smiled the way he smiles when he has won something.

“Wren,” he said. “You are out late.”

“So are you,” I said.

“I thought I would help the hunters get a feel for the line before morning.” He lifted the coil of wire a little. “You never know what you will find in the dark.”