The Severed Bond

The woman beside me smelled of rain and cheap vanilla, and her name had already slipped away from me somewhere between the second glass and the taxi door.

She stirred when I sat up, one hand sliding across the sheet toward my hip. "You're leaving already? The clock on your side says it is barely four."

"I have work in the morning." I found my shirt over the back of her chair, then my boots by the radiator. The room was small and warm and cluttered with plants along the windowsill, green leaves pressed against the fogged glass.

"It is the morning." She rolled onto her back and watched me dress. Dark hair on the pillow, brown eyes that had not yet decided whether to be annoyed with me. "You are the strangest man I have ever met, Elias. You talk for three hours and then you vanish like you owe the city money."

I pulled on my coat and made myself look at her properly. "You should not have let me stay."

She laughed at that, a low sound, and pulled the sheet up over her shoulder. "I did not let you. You fell asleep on my sofa and I took pity on you."

The truth was worse than pity. I had fallen asleep because the wolf inside me had gone quiet for the first time in weeks, drugged by her warmth and her ordinary human smell, and I had mistaken that quiet for peace. Now the quiet had lifted and the wolf was awake again, and it wanted nothing to do with her plants or her vanilla or her bed.

I left her a note I did not sign and let myself out into the stairwell, where the lights were out and the walls smelled of cabbage and old plaster. Berlin in November, four in the morning, the sky over the rooftops the color of a bruise that never quite healed. I walked because walking was easier than shifting, and I did not trust myself to shift tonight.

The city was empty down here. A tram rattled past two streets over, its windows lit and bare. A man in a yellow jacket hosed down the pavement outside a bakery and did not look up when I passed. That was the thing about Berlin. Fifty years after we came out of the shadows, humans still walked past us the way they walked past anything they had decided not to think about.

My phone buzzed. A message from the Bureau. A body on Kirchstrasse, a Council official by the sound of the code, and a request for the bond crimes detective on duty. I typed back that I was on my way, then stood a while longer with the cold metal railing under my hands.

The wolf paced behind my ribs. It had been pacing since I woke up. Not restless. Searching. There is a difference, and any wolf will tell you so. Restless is a dog at a closed door. Searching is what an animal does when it has caught a scent it has lost and cannot find again, and the scent it wanted was not vanilla, and the woman in the bed had known it even if she could not put it into words.

The bond mark on my left forearm had a habit of burning when I was near something I wanted. It had not burned in four years. Tonight it sat quiet under my sleeve, cold as a stone in the river.

I went home first. My flat in Prenzlauer Berg had one window and a landlord who was a werewolf and therefore never raised the rent, and the radiator clanked all night like a man knocking politely to be let in. I changed into a fresh shirt and caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror.

Dark auburn hair, still tied back but loose at the sides. Blue eyes that my mother used to say were the color of the cornflowers in the field behind our old pack house, before the Council took the house and the field and her name. A face I recognized and had stopped liking. There was a time when this face belonged to an Alpha with ninety wolves at his back, and a mate he had chosen, and a future that stretched out ahead of him like a road.

That was four years ago. I had spent most of the time since learning how to be a man in a small flat with one window.

The dispatcher buzzed again, less patient now. I put on my coat and went out, and the wolf went with me, and by the time I reached Kirchstrasse the sky over the rooftops had gone from bruise to slate.

The scene had the usual audience. Two human police officers at the tape, keeping back the early crowd. A Bureau van with its lights off. Detective Rolf already there, silver streaked hair pushed back from his forehead, grey eyes fixed on the body and a cigarette he was not supposed to be smoking in his hand. He saw me and put the cigarette out against the wall.

"Took you long enough." He lifted the tape for me. "Council official. Name of Hartmann, forty two, works in the registration office downtown. No wallet, no phone, no watch. Someone wanted it to look like a robbery."

"And you called me because?"

"Because the body is not quite human, Elias. Look at the neck."

I crouched by the man. Hartmann had been laid out on his back with his arms folded, which is the way an undertaker lays out a body, not the way a killer leaves one. His collar was undone. Under his jaw, where the throat met the collarbone, there were two small puncture wounds, clean as a pair of needle marks, and the skin around them had gone the hard white of old wax.

I had seen that white before. I had seen it on my own neck, in a Bureau mirror, the morning after the night that ended my life.

"You smell that?" Rolf asked.

I did not answer, because the wolf had risen in me all at once and I was having trouble keeping my feet. The scent coming off the dead man was not blood or city or stale cigarette smoke. It was a scent I knew better than my own name, and it was not supposed to exist anymore.

Ash and rain. Bergamot and cold iron. The particular smell of a woman's skin in winter, when she has been walking in the forest and the frost is still on her coat.

I stood up too fast. Rolf said something. The crowd at the tape said something. I walked three steps away from the body with my hand pressed flat to my chest, and my heart was going like a fist on a locked door.

Because the mark on my left forearm had begun to burn. Not cold, as it had been all night. Burning the way it used to burn when she came into a room, when she laughed at something I said, when she reached for my hand under the table and her fingers found the hard line of my wrist.

Anya.

"Elias?" Rolf's voice, sharp now. "What is it? You have gone grey."

I turned around. The morning traffic was starting up on the street, and a woman in a dark coat was walking toward us through it, unhurried, stepping around a puddle as if she had all the time in the world.

She was tall and her hair was cut short in a bob the color of ash. Her eyes were hazel, and they found mine across thirty meters of wet pavement and did not let go.

She had been dead for four years. I had buried her in the forest outside the city and stood at the grave until the snow came up over my boots.

A man stepped out of the crowd and shook her hand. I watched her say something to him, and then she turned back toward the body, toward me, and raised one eyebrow as though we had an appointment and I was late.

"Detective," she said, and her voice carried across the street as clean as a bell. "I heard you were looking into the Severance."