Who Killed Our Alpha?

The freezer door clicked shut behind me at three in the morning, and the cold hit my face like a hand.

I had come down from the pack house with a penlight and a bad excuse, and I stood among the hanging salmon and the frost on the steel shelves and told myself I was checking the locks. My wolf knew better. He had been pacing since the Council letter arrived, and the smell in that room pulled me toward the back corner where the old ledger cabinet stood.

Wolfsbane. Not much. A thread of it under the fish and the salt.

The cabinet was unlocked. The ledger sat on the shelf, the black book the Gamma kept, the one every wolf in the Blackthorn Pack signed at every full moon. I opened it to the last page. My name was there in my own hand, signed beside a lie that had been sitting in my chest for ten years.

I tore a blank page from the back and soaked it in the resin jar behind the salt bins. If I burned it, the smell would be gone. If the smell was gone, the audit would not find what I had buried.

"You are not as quiet as you think you are."

I turned. Nora Vance stood in the doorway with a flashlight in one hand and her coat half buttoned. The light went from my face to the wet page in my fingers and stayed there.

"Freezer is closed after midnight," I said.

"It is now." She pulled the door to behind her. "The Gamma was down here an hour ago. He stood right where you are standing and sniffed the air like a dog at a table."

My wolf came up hard at her scent. It was not the freezer or the fish. It was her, clean and sharp, like cold water over stone, and something in my chest turned over and locked into place.

I knew what it meant. I had heard older wolves describe it. I had never believed a word of it until that moment.

"You should go back to bed," I said.

"Give me the page."

"No."

She crossed the floor and put her hand out, and I let her take it. Her fingers closed over mine on the wet paper, and the touch went up my arm like a match to dry grass. Her grey eyes widened. She felt it too, and I watched her jaw tighten and decide to say nothing about it.

"You are burning evidence," she said.

"I am burning trash."

"You are burning a page with wolfsbane on it in the one room where the Gamma already smells resin." She pulled the page from my hand and held it to her light. "This is not even from the ledger. It is blank."

"It is a test."

"It is a stupid test." She folded the page and put it in her coat pocket. "Do you know what happens to an enforcer caught masking his scent before an audit? Doran will not need a challenge. He will have you removed by the Council before the week is out."

She had been in the pack four years, and in those four years she had treated my burns, my cuts, and one badly set wrist, and she had never once asked about the night the old Alpha died. That was the thing about Nora. She treated what was in front of her and let the rest alone.

"You know what this is," I said.

"I know what wolfsbane does." She set the flashlight on the shelf between us. "I know the Gamma keeps the ledger, and I know he has been keeping it close since the Council wrote to us. And I know you have not signed your name in it this month."

"I signed it."

"You signed a page that was not there two weeks ago." She said it flat, no heat in it. "I know because I look at that book more often than you do."

The cold was getting into my hands. I flexed them and heard the frost grit under my boots.

"Why do you look at the ledger?" I asked.

"Because my brother's name is in it."

That stopped me. Elias. Nineteen, sandy-haired, still waiting for his first shift, the kind of boy who flinched when a door slammed. He had been in the pack house since their mother died, and Nora had kept him close, and I had never thought much about it.

"Elias signed it," I said.

"Elias signed it with a hand shaking so hard the ink ran." She looked at the cabinet, then at me. "He was on the shore the night the Alpha died. He was out past the boundary marker, and he saw something he has never told me about, and since that night he has not slept more than three hours at a stretch. I have been keeping him out of the ledger's way as best I can."

"You have been forging pages."

"I have been correcting them." Her grey eyes did not move from mine. "There is a difference, and if you are going to turn me in for it, do it now so I can get Elias out of the territory before the auditor arrives."

I should have told her to leave. That was the pack answer, the answer an enforcer gives. Instead I heard myself say, "The auditor is already here."

Her face changed. Not much. A small tightening around her mouth.

"Silas," she said. "The one with the cold eyes."

"He came in on the morning boat and he has been in the Gamma's office since noon." I picked up the resin jar and set it back behind the salt. "If Doran smells wolfsbane on me, it will not be the page that hangs me. It will be the jar, and the jar has your brother's scent on the lid."

She went very still.

"Elias has never touched that jar."

"Someone in this pack has." I turned the jar so the lid faced her. "And if the auditor finds it, he will trace it, and he will find the last wolf who handled it, and that wolf will be answering questions about the night our Alpha died."

Nora took a slow breath. Then she reached past me, took the jar off the shelf, and put it inside her coat, against her ribs, where the smell would sit against her own skin and cover itself.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"What you should have done an hour ago." She buttoned her coat over it. "The Gamma will smell wolfsbane on me now, and he will assume it is because I am a healer who handles it for wounds. He will not assume I am carrying his evidence out of his own freezer."

"You do not know what you are carrying."

"I know it is the reason you came down here at three in the morning with a penlight and no gloves." She picked up her flashlight. "Walk me to the clinic. If we are seen together, it will look like I am treating your hands, and your hands are raw enough to make that true."

I looked down at them. The cold had cracked the skin over my knuckles. She was right, and I hated that she was right.

We went out through the back door and along the shore path with the wind coming off the bay, and the moon was a thin white line over the water. She walked fast with her hands in her pockets, and I kept half a step behind her, and my wolf would not stop turning toward her, would not stop naming her, would not stop telling me what I already knew.

At the clinic door she stopped and turned.

"The Gamma smelled resin on you tonight," she said. "Not on the page. On you. He stood in the freezer and asked me if the enforcer had been down here, and I told him I had not seen you since dinner."

"You lied to him."

"I bought you one night." She opened the door and held it. "Tomorrow he will ask again, and he will ask the Beta, and he will ask Maggie, and one of them will tell him the truth. So you need to decide what you are going to do before then, Rafe."

"I am going to find out what your brother saw."

She looked at me for a long moment. The light from the clinic doorway fell across her face and her grey eyes and the strong line of her jaw, and I felt the pull again, steady and patient, like a hand closing around my ribs.

"Then come inside," she said. "Because I have been waiting four years for someone in this pack to say that, and I am not going to waste the night."