Her Match, His Fire

I woke with smoke in my nose and my wolf already on his feet inside me.

He does that before I do. He was up and growling at the inside of my ribs while I was still fumbling for the edge of the bed, still half in a dream about my father's boat and the winter he did not come back from it. The smell was the thing that got me moving. Cold smoke, the sharp kind, pine and lamp oil burned together. Not the chimney smoke that hangs over the harbor on a still night. This was thin and mean and it came from the direction of the sea.

Runa would say I should have rung the bell first and asked questions after. Runa says that about most things.

I pulled on my trousers and the old wool sweater that still smelled of last week's cod run, and I went out barefoot onto the boards of the warehouse gallery. The harbor lay below me in the flat grey light of a June night that never gets properly dark, the boats knocking together, the stockfish racks standing like rows of thin men along the shore. Everything was quiet. The water was quiet. The only thing wrong was the smell, and the single yellow eye of the lighthouse out on the sea rock, burning steady where it should not have been burning at all.

Nobody lights that lamp but me.

I took the path down to the boathouse at a run, and my wolf ran with me, and neither of us said a word to the other because there was nothing to say. The rowboat was where I left it. I put my back into the oars and I crossed two hundred yards of black water with my eyes fixed on that yellow light, and the whole way I told myself it was a wick that had caught from the stove, or a reflection, or some nonsense of my own tired head.

The door at the base of the tower was open. That is the thing I remember most clearly from that night, more than anything that came after. The door was open, and the iron had been forced with something, and the sea wind was pushing the smell of smoke out through the gap.

I went up the stairs two at a time. One hundred and twelve steps, I could walk them blind and backward, and I climbed them with the stone cold under my feet and my heart going like a hammer.

The lamp room door stood ajar.

She was standing at the lamp with a match in her hand, and the wick was already smoking, a thin curl of it rising into the glass, and she was watching it burn as if she had all the time in the world.

I did not think. I crossed the room and caught her wrist and pulled her hand away from the lamp, and the match dropped to the iron floor and went out. That was the moment. My fingers closed on her skin, and her skin was warm and salt-damp from the sea air, and the smell of her came up through the smoke and hit me in the chest like a fist.

My wolf stopped growling. He went quiet in a way he had never gone quiet before, and then he made a sound I had never heard him make, low and long, and the word came with it.

Mate.

I let go of her wrist as if it had burned me.

She was young, younger than me by a year or two, with a braid of pale golden hair falling over one shoulder, coming loose at the end. Her eyes were amber, and they were not afraid. That was the second thing I noticed. I had a wolf's temper in me and my hand on her arm and a burning lamp behind us, and this woman looked at me with amber eyes and no fear at all, and her mouth was set in a line like someone waiting for a bus.

"You are the keeper," she said.

"I am the Alpha of this rock," I said. "And you are standing in my lamp room with a match. Give me one reason I should not throw you off the gallery."

She looked at the lamp, then at me, and her face did something strange and small, a flinch she covered up quickly. "You should not have let the wick run dry," she said. "The oil feed is clogged. Look at it. It has been clogged for days. Anyone could have seen it."

I looked. The feed was clogged. I had meant to clear it that morning and I had not, because the cod run had come in and I had spent the day on the docks with the rest of the pack, hauling fish until my arms ached.

"That is not an answer to my question," I said.

She wiped her hands on her coat. It was a good coat, grey wool, too good for a woman who had washed up on my rock, and her boots were good too. There was salt crusted on her cuffs and a canvas bag slung across her body that she kept one hand on, even now.

"I came to put out the light," she said.

"You came to put it out." I laughed, and it came out ugly. "You came to my island in the middle of the night to put out my lamp. Do you know what that lamp is?"

"I know what it is," she said. "I know exactly what it is."

We stood there, the two of us, with the smoke thinning and the great glass lens turning slowly between us, throwing its yellow beam out over the water and back again, and I could feel her through my own skin, a pull in my chest that had nothing to do with the wolf and everything to do with him at the same time. It was like standing too close to a fire. It was like the first warm day after a winter that had gone on too long.

"I should lock you up," I said.

"You should," she said. "You probably will."

"What is your name?"

She hesitated. Only a moment, but I saw it, and my wolf saw it too, and he stirred uneasily.

"Ingrid," she said.

"Ingrid," I repeated, and the name sat strangely on my tongue. "Well, Ingrid. You have picked a bad night for a swim. My boat is at the bottom of the stairs. You can explain yourself to my Beta in the morning, and if she does not like your story, she will be the one who decides what happens to you."

"And you?" she said. "What do you decide?"

I looked at her amber eyes and her loose braid and the hand she still had on her bag, and I made myself say the sensible thing, the Alpha thing, the thing my father would have said. "I decide whether you ever see the mainland again."

She nodded slowly, as if I had confirmed something she already suspected. Then she looked past me, out through the glass, and her face changed.

"Your boat is gone," she said.

I turned. Below us, on the black water, there was nothing where my rowboat had been. Nothing but a smear of white foam and a few broken planks drifting toward the rocks.

The current does not take a tied boat. The current has never taken a tied boat.

Behind me, Ingrid said, very quietly, "I did not come alone, Alpha. And I think the people who brought me are still on your rock."