The Alpha I Inherited

The coffee had burned down to sludge before dawn, and I was in the back room with my back against the flour bin, letting a man I did not know kiss the hollow of my throat.

His name was Daniel. That much I had gotten out of him between the first cup and the second. He had a room at the boarding house on Mill Street and hands that knew where to rest without asking twice, and he smelled of diesel from the trucks that ran the valley road at night. A woman of thirty-two could do worse than a stranger who did not talk about the coal company, and I had been right. He did not talk at all. He breathed against my neck and pressed me into the flour bin, and the bin rocked on its warped floorboard, and I had to reach back and steady it.

The diner was empty. Mabel would not come in until six. The valley sat under a low fog that turned the windows into grey squares, and the only sounds were the coffee pot ticking as it cooled and Daniel's belt buckle knocking the wood.

"You are going to leave a mark," I said.

"That a problem?" He lifted his head just enough to look at me. Brown eyes, a jaw that needed a shave, and a mouth that turned up at one corner like he had already won something.

"Only if Mabel sees it and decides to pray for me."

"She prays for you anyway."

"She prays for the diner. I am included as furniture."

He laughed, low, and kissed me again, and I let him, because the front door was locked and for ten minutes nobody in Blackridge County needed anything from me. His hands slid to my waist. I slid my fingers into his hair. The flour bin rocked, and a puff of white dust came up off the lid and settled on his shoulder, and I brushed it off, and he caught my wrist and pressed it flat against the lid, and then the bell over the front door rang.

Daniel froze.

"Nobody's open," he said.

The bell rang again, a slow metallic jingle, the way it did when a person pushed the door and then stood holding it open. I eased Daniel back and pulled my collar straight. My lipstick was somewhere on his jaw. I wiped it off with my thumb.

"Stay here," I said.

"That's a customer?"

"That's a customer. Sit down and drink your coffee and do not come out until I say so."

I walked through the swinging door past the counter and the pie case that had not held a pie since Tuesday, and I stopped when I saw the wolf.

It filled the space between the door and the first booth. Its shoulders came to the height of my hip. Its back was a long grey ridge under the fog light, grey with a darker line down the spine, and its head was the size of a bushel basket, and its eyes were amber and fixed on me. The door swung shut. The bell jangled once more and went quiet.

I did not scream. My hands went cold and my mouth went dry and I stayed exactly where I was, one hand on the counter, because the diner had a shotgun under the register and the register was nine feet away and the wolf was closer to it than I was.

"You are not a dog," I said.

The wolf sat down. It sat the way a person sits, with its weight settled and its front paws together, and then the air around it changed. The fog light bent around the shape of the thing, and the shape narrowed and rose, and the grey fur pulled back into skin, and a man was kneeling on the linoleum with his hands braced on the floor.

I knew him before he raised his head. I knew the set of those shoulders, the champagne blond hair neat even now, the high cheekbones and the crooked half smile that came up when he finally looked at me.

"Miss Calloway," Wade said.

"Get out of my diner."

"Nora."

"Get out of my diner, Wade. I have a shotgun and I know how to use it, and I did not use it on the wolf because I thought I was dreaming."

"You are not dreaming." He got to his feet slowly. He was taller than I remembered, and he wore the same clothes the wolf had come in with, a worn leather jacket and a miner's scarf and boots that had been in the mud of the valley road, which made no sense until I understood that it made every kind of sense. He brushed off his knees. "Your grandmother died last night. The burial is tomorrow at the ridge. The pack needs you to come home."

"You have lost your mind."

"I have lost my uncle's patience, which is worse. Nora, listen to me. The Blackridge Pack has no Alpha. Your grandmother was the last one, and she named you before she died."

I laughed. It came out wrong, too high and too fast, and I heard Daniel shift his weight in the back room and prayed he would stay put.

"I am a cook," I said. "I have been a cook for eleven years. I am a widow. I have never shifted in my life and I do not intend to start, and the last time I checked, the Blackridge Pack was a story my late husband's family told at Christmas."

"Your husband knew."

"Andrew is dead."

"And he knew." Wade's voice was measured, and there was something underneath it, some pressure, like a boiler with the valve screwed down. "He knew what you were. He knew what your grandmother was. He married you because of it, and I am standing here now because there is no one else left to tell you the truth."

The fog light flickered. The coffee pot ticked. I thought about the shotgun, and I thought about how Andrew had never once let me meet his grandmother. Not once, in six years of marriage. She sent a jar of preserves at Christmas and a card with no note, and Andrew said she was too old for visitors.

"Daniel," I said, without turning around. "Go out the back."

The swinging door opened. Daniel came out with his shirt half tucked and a look on his face I had seen on men before, the one that says I did not sign up for this. He stopped when he saw Wade.

"Who the hell is this?"

"Nobody," I said. "Go."

Daniel looked at Wade. Wade looked at Daniel with a calm that made the hairs on my arms stand up, and then Wade said, "You should go," in a voice so pleasant it could have come off a radio, and Daniel went. The back door banged. A truck engine turned over in the alley and faded down Mill Street, and I was alone with a man who had been a wolf four minutes earlier.

"All right," I said. "Start again. From the beginning, and this time leave out nothing, because I am going to have questions and I do not have the patience for a man who answers them with riddles."

Wade reached into his jacket and took out something small and silver. He laid it on the counter between us and slid it toward me, and I looked down at it and my stomach dropped.

It was my grandmother's crescent moon pendant. I had seen it once, as a child, in a photograph Andrew had shown me and then taken back.

"She wore it to the burial of your mother," Wade said. "She wanted you to have it before the funeral. She told me to bring it to you and tell you that the spring is failing and the road is closed and the pack will not last the winter without a wolf who can stand in the water."

I picked up the pendant. It was warm from his pocket.

"I do not know what any of that means," I said.

"You are the Alpha now," Wade said. "Whether you want it or not."

I opened my mouth to tell him where he could put his pack and his spring and his silver pendant, and then the back door banged again and Mabel's voice came through it, sharp as a fork on a plate.

"Nora Calloway, there is a wolf scent all over this kitchen and a stranger's shirt on the flour bin, and I want an explanation before I put my apron on."

Wade looked at me. I looked at the pendant in my hand.

"Anyway," I said, and neither of us believed me.