“If she’s an emerging Omega, her scent is broadcasting. Every unattached wolf within miles will be picking it up. The rogues have been pushing closer to the village for weeks, and I’m not so old that I can’t connect those facts.” He holds my gaze. “You’ve been doubling the eastern patrols. I noticed. I assumed you had a reason.”
I did have a reason. The reason is sleeping in a cottage half a mile from here, and the rogues have been circling closer to that cottage with every incursion.
“They’re drawn to her,” I say. “I think they have been since she arrived. The emergence is making it worse.”
“Then we need to address it.”
“I know.”
“Together, Roan. Not you on your own in the dark, running patrols you won’t let anyone help with. Together. As a pack.”
I want to resist. The word “together” has been weaponised against me so many times that my defences go up automatically, the same way they’ve gone up every time my father has tried to draw me into pack operations. But this isn’t about leadership training or succession planning. This is about keeping Phoebe safe. And I can’t do that alone. I’ve been pretending I can, and the pretence is getting more dangerous by the day.
“Together,” I say. The word tastes strange in my mouth. Not bad. Just unfamiliar. Like a bone I’ve been refusing to chew. “But I run the tactical side. Not you, not Rebecca. I decide where the wolves go and when. You provide the bodies. That’s the deal.”
He wants to argue. The effort of not arguing is visible in every line of his body. I can see the Alpha in him straining against the father, the instinct to command warring with the decision to concede.
He just nods, and screws the cap back on his flask, and stands there for a moment looking at me like he’s seeing something he hasn’t seen in a long time.
“I’d like to meet her,” he says. “When she’s ready. No pressure, no ceremony.”
“I’ll ask.”
“That’s all I’m asking.” He walks down the steps, then pauses at the bottom. “Roan. Your mother would have liked her.”
He leaves before I can respond, which is probably deliberate, because the thing that happens to my chest when he says those words is not something I want anyone to witness. Bastard. He knew exactly what that would do to me.
I sit on the porch in the dark for a long time after he’s gone. The stars wheel overhead. Slow. Indifferent. The forest breathes around me. I think about my mother. My father. The woman sleeping half a mile away who’s changing everything I thought I knew about what I’m capable of.
The rebel in me is quiet tonight. Not defeated. Not converted. Just quiet, the way a storm goes quiet when it’s run out of wind and is deciding what to be next.
I think it might be deciding to be something new.
Chapter 24
Veterinary Mysteries
Phoebe
The springer spanielon my examination table has a wound that shouldn’t exist.
It’s a puncture, deep and clean, on the left flank just behind the ribcage. The entry point is too precise for a bite and too narrow for a branch or fence post. If I’d seen this in London, I’d have suspected a knife or a sharp instrument. Here, in Mistwood, with my newly calibrated senses reading the tissue like a language I’m only beginning to speak, I know it’s something else.
The wound smells wrong. Not infected, not dirty, but layered with a scent signature I’m learning to associate with the supernatural. It’s the same musky, animal undertone I catch on Roan, on the pack members I’ve met, on the air around the bonfire field.Except this is different. Sharper. Less wolf, more something else that I don’t have a category for yet.
“When did this happen?” I ask the owner, a young farmer called Pete, who’s shifting nervously from foot to foot.
“Found him like that this morning. He was out all night. Gets through the fence sometimes, wanders the fields.”
“And you didn’t see what caused it?”
“No.” He says it too quickly, and his eyes don’t quite meet mine. In my old life, I’d have noted the evasion and moved on. Now I can smell the anxiety coming off him in waves, sour and metallic, and beneath it something else. Not guilt exactly. Fear. The specific fear of someone who knows more than he’s saying and is afraid of what happens if he says it.
I clean and dress the wound, prescribe antibiotics, and send Pete on his way with instructions to keep the dog indoors at night. After he leaves, I stand in my surgery and look at the gauze I’ve just removed. The blood on it is normal. Canine. Red and iron-rich and unremarkable.
But the edges of the puncture were already closing when I examined it. Not at the accelerated rate I saw on Roan in the forest. Slower, subtler, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it. As if whatevermade the wound left something behind that was encouraging the tissue to repair itself.
I add it to the file I’ve started keeping. Not my official case notes, which remain scrupulously normal. A separate file, a notebook I keep in my desk drawer, documenting the cases that don’t fit.
