Bound to Enemy Alpha

The border stones of Kielder Forest still smelled of wet moss and iron, and under that, faint as a heartbeat through a wall, something else.

I stopped at the third stone with my boot half in a puddle and let my wolf take the air. She came forward without my asking, ears flat, nose working. We had crossed forty borders in my life and never once had she done this.

"Nessa." Mara's voice came from behind the hawthorn. "You stop at the stone, not before it. Get moving."

I did not move. The scent had a shape to it, warm birch bark and cold river water, and when it reached the back of my throat it made my hands shake. My skin went tight. I felt the shift start somewhere under my ribs, the push of bone against bone, and I dropped to one knee in the mud with my palm flat against the stone and my jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached.

Tilda crouched beside me, her red hair wet from the drizzle, and put her hand on my shoulder. "What is it? Is it a hunter?"

"No." My voice came out rough. "I do not know."

"You do not know." Mara stepped out of the hawthorn with her grey eyes narrow and her rifle slung low on her back. She was lean as a whip and had taught me to read ground sign before I could read letters. "Say it plainly, girl. What is on that wind?"

I made myself breathe through my mouth. It did not help. The scent was in the moss now, in the stone, in my own wrists. My wolf turned in a circle and lay down, which she had never done in her life.

"Something I have not smelled before," I said. "Something big."

"Then we go around." Mara looked past me at the dark line of pines on the ridge. "Blackpine pays for the spring's location, not for a fight with whatever walks in there."

I stood up. The shift retreated, sulking, and I wiped mud off my knee and pulled my braid free of my collar. "I go in tonight. You said the deal expires at the full moon and the full moon is in nine days."

"Nine days is enough."

"Nine days is enough for Fen to find another tracker." I picked up my pack. "I will be in and out before their muster. Nobody counts a stranger during a muster."

Mara studied me the way she studied a track: for the thing that did not fit. "You are shaking."

"I am cold."

"You are a poor liar for a girl I raised to lie."

I walked past her before she could say more. Tilda caught my sleeve and pressed something into my hand, a stub of chalk she used to mark trail trees, and I put it in my pocket because her face said she needed me to take it.

Kielder Forest at dusk was all sound. Wood pigeons settling, a stream running under the roots, and somewhere far off the crack of a branch under a heavy foot. I kept to the deer paths and marked my turns with Tilda's chalk on the north side of the trunks where rain would not wash it. A tracker's habit. My wolf kept her head low and her ears forward and did not once complain about the wet.

The ridge took an hour. When I came out of the pines the whole valley lay under me, and in it, grey and low and built of the same granite as the hill, the Kielder pack house. Smoke from two chimneys. A wall of fieldstone with a gate of iron bars. Lights in the lower windows.

And at the edge of the valley, under the shadow of the far cliff, a line of silver in the grass that caught the last of the daylight like a dropped coin.

The spring.

I had heard Fen describe it in his careful, flat voice: water that forced a shift in any wolf who drank it, water that healed in hours what should take days. I had not believed half of it. Looking at that silver line, I believed more.

I got out my chalk to mark the height of the ridge and dropped it. It rolled two feet and stopped against a boot.

Not a boot I had heard arrive.

The man was standing under the pine beside me with his hands loose at his sides, and the first thing I noticed was his hair, pale as frost and swept back from his forehead, and the second was his eyes, which were blue-grey and entirely calm. He was tall and built like someone who ran up hills for pleasure. He was also, by his scent, the thing that had nearly torn me apart at the border stone, and my wolf rolled over in my chest like a dog showing its belly.

I did not run. Running from a wolf that size would have been stupid, and I had promised myself years ago that I would never be stupid in front of a pack Alpha.

"Evening," I said. "I did not hear you."

"No," he said. "You did not." His voice was low and clipped, the voice of a man who was used to being answered. "You are on my land."

"I am on the ridge above your land. That is a difference where I come from."

"Is it." He looked down at the chalk in the mud, then at the marks on my trees. "A tracker. What are you tracking?"

"Deer."

"You are tracking deer with chalk marks that lead back to the Blackpine border." He said it without heat, the way a man might remark on rain. "Try again."

My wolf wanted to step toward him. I put my heel down hard on that want and gave him my best smile, the one that had got me out of three pack prisons and one marriage offer. "I am a visiting tracker looking for work at the muster. My name is Nessa. I have no kin in Kielder and no quarrel with it."

"You are lying about the name," he said.

My smile did not move. "And you are the Alpha, since nobody else would dare to stand in the woods and insult a stranger."

"I am Rhys." He stepped closer, and the mate scent came off him so strongly that my knees went weak and my skin prickled all over with the beginning of a shift. I dug my nails into my palm until it stopped. He tilted his head, and I saw him take a breath through his nose, and something crossed his face that I could not read. "You feel that."

"I feel the cold."

"You feel the bond, and so do I, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in my own forest." His jaw tightened. "Which is a problem, because you smell of rogues and pine smoke and another Alpha's territory."

I opened my mouth to answer and found nothing in it.

He turned his head toward the valley, and his whole body changed, shoulders squared, chin up, the way wolves do when they hear something the rest of us have not caught yet. Then I heard it too. A howl from the pack house, long and low, and a second one answering from the gate.

Rhys looked back at me with those blue-grey eyes, and for a moment he was not an Alpha at all, only a man doing arithmetic he did not like.

"You will come down to the pack house and you will tell me the truth there," he said. "Or you will run, and I will catch you before the gate, and the warriors will not be as gentle as I am."

I picked up my pack. My wolf was already walking down the slope beside him, and I hated her for it.

"One question first," I said. "How did you know I was lying about the name?"

Rhys did not break stride. "Because there is no Nessa in any pack on this border. And because your mother used to say it exactly the way you do."

I stopped dead on the path. He kept walking, and the wolves howled again, and the silver line of the spring glittered below us in the dark.