I make coffee, stand at the kitchen window, and think about last night.
Phoebe at the bonfire. Phoebe with firelight on her face and her hair down, and that blue jumper that made me forget how to form sentences. But also: Phoebe hearing conversations she shouldn’t have been able to hear. Phoebe reading the pack hierarchy through body language alone, categorising dominant and submissive without knowing those words applied. Phoebe standing in the middle of twenty wolves in human skin and sayingI belong herewith her posture even while her mouth said nothing of the kind.
And the others noticed. Tom’s pause when she walked past. The way Arthur tracked her across the field with his nose slightly raised. Rebecca, who misses nothing, holding Phoebe’s hand a beat too long and then watching her for the rest of the evening with an expression I know well: the Beta assessing a newcomer’s place in the hierarchy.
Rebecca’s text sits on my screen like a lit fuse.Who is she?Not “who was that?” or “who’s your friend?”Who is she?Rebecca smelled it too. That thread in Phoebe’s scent that doesn’t belong to a human, and Rebecca wants to know what I know, and if I answer that text, I’ll be having a conversation I can’t control.
Which is exactly how the pack works. One person notices. They tell the Beta. The Beta tells the Alpha. The Alpha makes a decision, issues a directive, and sets the machinery in motion. And somewhere at the end of that chain, a woman who came to Mistwood for a quiet life finds herself the subject of discussions she was never invited to and decisions she never agreed to.
I’ve watched my father do this my entire life. Manage people. Position them. Make choices about their futures with the calm certainty of a man who believes the pack’s interests and the individual’s interests are always the same thing. He’s not cruel about it. He’s not even wrong, most of the time. But the assumption that he has the right, that the role gives him the right, is the thing I’ve been pushing against since I was old enough to push.
I’m not going to let that happen to Phoebe.
So I don’t answer Rebecca’s text. I put on my boots and my jacket, and I walk to Maggie Henderson’s house, because Maggie is the one person in Mistwood who exists outside the chain of command.
Maggie’s cottage sits next door from Phoebe’s, separated by a neglected hedgerow and a garden that looks wild until you realise every plant is exactly where it’s meant to be. Rosemary by the gate. Lavender along the path. Something dark and woody climbing the south-facing wall that I’ve never beenable to identify, and Maggie has never offered to name.
She opens the door before I knock, which she always does and which I’ve stopped finding unsettling.
“The fence?” she says, looking at the toolbox in my hand.
“The fence.”
“Lovely. I’ve just put the kettle on.”
Maggie’s kitchen smells the way it always smells: herbs and beeswax and the faint, earthy undertone of whatever she’s got drying in bundles above the stove. The room is warm and cluttered with purpose rather than chaos. Jars line the shelves, labelled in a handwriting so precise it looks printed. Books are stacked on every surface, their spines cracked and pages marked with scraps of ribbon and dried leaves.
She makes tea in a pot, not a mug, because Maggie has standards. She sets out mismatched cups, a plate of biscuits that taste of ginger and something herbal I can’t place. Sits down across from me. Waits.
Maggie is good at waiting. She’s been in Mistwood longer than I’ve been alive, a fixture of the village who exists in the space between the human community and the supernatural one without fully belonging to either. She’s not pack. She’s not human, exactly, though she passes for it well enough. She’s Maggie, which is its own category, and she’s the only person in this villagewho’s never once told me what I should be doing with my life.
That’s why I’m here instead of at the main house.
“I brought someone to the bonfire last night,” I say.
“I know. Phoebe Clarke.” She sips her tea with the unhurried calm of someone who already knows where this conversation is going. “Nice girl. Good hands. My tabby didn’t scratch her once, and Biscuit scratches everyone.”
“You sent me to her cottage with a welcome basket.”
“I did.”
“Your note said ‘you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.’”
“It did.”
I wait for more. Maggie drinks her tea.
“What did you mean by that?” I ask.
Fuck’s sake. Conversations with Maggie are like trying to nail fog to a wall.
“What did you think I meant by it?”
This is the other thing about Maggie. She answers questions with questions, not because she’s being evasive but because she genuinely believes people learn better when they work things out for themselves. It’s maddening under normal circumstances. Right now, with Phoebe’s scent still lingering in my memoryand my wolf pacing restlessly beneath my skin, it’s almost unbearable.
“Her scent,” I say. “There’s something in it. Something that doesn’t read as fully human.”
Maggie sets down her cup. “Go on.”
