The Beta I Trusted

The inn at the border crossing smelled of wet wool and pine smoke, and she was the only thing in it that did not smell of the road. I noticed that first, before I noticed the color of her eyes or the way she held her cup with both hands as though it might escape. Her hair was silver white, cut short at the jaw, and it caught the lamplight in a way that made the room feel smaller.

"You have been watching me for an hour," she said without looking up.

"Two hours," I said. "You came in with the rain and you haven't stopped shivering since."

She looked up then. Amber eyes, steady and wary, and a mouth that had learned to hold its tongue. "The rain is cold. I am not."

I sat down across from her because she had not told me not to. The innkeeper had already given up on us both, and the room above the taproom was cheap and close. I told myself I was being careful. A wolf alone at a border inn in the last weeks of the year was either honest or in trouble, and I had made my living deciding which.

"My name is Konrad," I said.

"I know." She set her cup down. "Everyone on this road knows the enforcer of the Schwarzwald Rudel. You have a face they describe."

"And your name?"

She considered the question the way a wolf considers a strange scent. "Liesel. That is all you need for now."

The fire had burned low and the taproom emptied around us. She was tired; I could see it in the way she kept blinking, the way her shoulders had lost their careful set. I offered her the room above, and I told myself I meant it kindly. She looked at me for a long moment, and then she laughed, a low sound with nothing cruel in it.

"Your face does not lie as well as you think it does," she said.

I could have gone to my own room. I did not. She climbed the stairs ahead of me and I followed, and on the landing she turned and put one hand flat against my chest and I felt the heat of her palm through the wool of my coat. The rain had stopped outside. Somewhere below, the innkeeper bolted the door and dragged a bench against it.

She tasted of the bitter tea she had been drinking. Her hands were cold and then they were not, and my coat ended up on the floorboards and her tunic followed it. I remember the small sounds she made, the way she pressed her mouth to my shoulder to keep quiet, the way her fingers found the old burn on my ribs and did not flinch from it. Lamplight moved over her skin, silver hair against the pale pillow, and when her back arched she gripped the headboard and I felt the whole of her trembling with the effort of staying silent.

I woke once in the dark. She was sitting up beside me with the blanket around her shoulders, staring at the window.

"Sleep," I said.

She did not answer. I pulled her down beside me and she settled against my chest with her ear over my heart, and I fell asleep counting her breaths.

The innkeeper's boy woke me before dawn with a fist on the door and a voice gone high. He kept saying the same words over and over, and none of them made sense until I had pulled on my trousers and opened the door.

The Alpha is dead. The Alpha is dead in the meadow.

I left Liesel sleeping. That is one thing I have carried since, and it was not guilt, not then, because I had no reason to think she was anything but a woman on the road. I pulled my coat on in the corridor, took the stairs two at a time, and went out into the grey.

The meadow lies east of the inn, where the road bends toward the pine woods. The rain had stopped hours before, but the grass was still soaked, and the mist hung at knee height and did not move. I smelled him before I saw him. Blood, and wet earth, and something underneath both that I did not want to name.

Alpha Reinhard lay on his side in the tall grass, one arm folded under him, his grey coat torn open at the chest. He had been a large man in life and he looked small now, smaller than a man should look. I crouched beside him and put two fingers to his throat and held them there until my own heartbeat had counted twenty. Nothing.

The wound was beneath his ribs, one clean thrust, and there was not enough blood on the grass for a wound like that. Someone had known what they were doing.

Then my wolf lifted its head inside me and sniffed, and the whole meadow changed shape.

Her scent. Her scent was on him.

Liesel's scent, the one I had breathed against my own sheets an hour before. I stood up so fast that my vision went white at the edges. I went down on one knee again and put my face close to the body and drew it in, slowly, like a man sniffing a cup of wine he suspects. Warm skin and the bitter tea and the rain in her hair. It sat on his collar, on his chest, on the palm of his open hand.

"No," I said aloud. "No."

The mist moved, and I heard the pack before I saw it. Six wolves came out of the pines in a loose half circle, all of them in human form, Dietrich at their head with his black hair plastered to his forehead and his coat buttoned wrong. He stopped at the edge of the grass and put his hand over his mouth, and his shoulders shook, and every wolf behind him watched him do it.

"Konrad," he said. His voice came out ragged. "Oh, Konrad. What happened here?"

I stood up. My knees were not steady. "I found him like this."

"Did you." Dietrich came forward, and the others spread out to either side of me without being told. "Who was with you at the inn last night, Konrad? The innkeeper's boy came running all the way to the pack house. He said a woman. He said she had silver hair."

My wolf wanted to surge. I held it down with both hands, the way I had been taught, and I felt the nails of my own grip biting into something.

"I was at the inn," I said. "I was not with the Alpha."

"I know you were at the inn." Dietrich looked down at Reinhard and then back at me, and his dark eyes were wet and his face was gentle. "The question is where the woman went when you left her. Because whoever did this was not human, Konrad. Look at him. A human blade would not have gone in like that."

The mist was thinner now, and the sun had come up behind the pines, and I could see the whole meadow clearly. Reinhard's blood had soaked into the grass in a small dark circle, and the rain had stopped, and there was not a single mark of a struggle.

The boy's voice came from the road, thin and frightened. "The lady is gone," he called. "The lady's room is empty, and the window is open, and there is water on the floor."

Dietrich put his hand on my shoulder, and his grip was kind, and his scent was the scent of my Alpha's son, and his eyes did not leave mine.

"Konrad," he said quietly. "Tell me about the woman."