The calf had been dead for maybe an hour when I found it, and the field had already started to drink it. I smelled it before I saw it. Blood has a thick smell in September heat, especially when it is not fresh and the flies have found it. I had been walking the fence line since four o'clock because Dale had put the new patrol schedule on the co-op bulletin board and given me the north end again, the part with the worst fences and the most rabbit holes and no view of anything except wheat and sky. The calf was lying half under the back wheel of Harold's combine, which Harold leaves parked in the yard from August to October because he says moving it is a two-man job and he has been a one-man operation since his brother died. I knew the calf. It was the white-faced one with the crooked ear that June had named Biscuit, and I had watched it nurse in the lower pasture two days ago while I ate a sandwich on the tailgate. I crouched down. The flies lifted and then settled again. It had been opened along the flank, not eaten, not torn apart the way a hungry animal would. The cuts were long and shallow, four of them, and the edges of the hide had curled back like someone had used a dull knife. There were tracks in the dirt around the calf, and I put my hand beside the biggest one. It was wide. Wider than my palm, and I have big palms for a woman my size. It was a wolf track. There was no mistaking it. I stayed crouched for a while, and my eyes went past the calf to the track again and then out to the edge of the wheat, where the stalks moved in the wind and the light was going orange. My wolf, the thing under my skin that I had spent most of my adult life not talking about, pressed forward and made my jaw ache. She did not like the smell of the calf. She did not like the quiet of the yard. I got up and walked the ground in a wide circle, my boots crunching on the stubble, and I found a second set of tracks leading back toward the fence. These were smaller and neater. A coyote, probably, or a farm dog. The big wolf had come from the north, along the fence, and it had gone back that way. I followed the tracks to the fence and crouched again where the wire had been pushed down, and that was when I caught the other scent. I had spent twenty-six years in this pack. I knew what all of my packmates smelled like. I knew what the wheat smelled like when it was cut and when it was standing, and I knew what the soil smelled like after rain and what the mill smelled like when the grain dust was thick. I knew my sister's hair and my brother's jacket and the beer on Dale's breath. This smell was not any of that. It was warm, and it was close, and it had something in it like pine and something like the inside of a cedar chest, and it hit me so hard I put my hand on the fence post and missed it. My wolf rolled over. She had never rolled over for anyone. She did not roll over for Harlan, who was our Alpha, or for Dale, who thought he was everyone's Alpha. She sat up straight and she turned her head toward the wheat and she made a low, wanting sound that was so far from fear I did not have a name for it. I stood there with my fingers gripping the wood and my heart going too fast. Then the scent thinned, and the wind changed, and it was gone, and I was just a woman on the wrong side of a fence with a dead calf behind her and the sun going down. I got home a little after seven. Our house sits at the end of a gravel road, a small place with a sagging porch my father never got around to fixing, and June had left the porch light on for me. She was in the kitchen with the radio on, and she had her feet up on the second chair the way our mother used to yell at her for. "You are late," she said. "There is stew." "I found Biscuit dead in Harold's yard." June took her feet off the chair. Her hair is red and she had it tied back with a piece of blue baling twine, and her freckled face went a shade paler. "Dead how?" "Wolf. Or something with wolf tracks and a dull knife. It was cut up, June. Not eaten." She was quiet for a moment, and then she got up and pulled the pot off the stove and set it down hard enough to slosh. "Dale is going to say it is the rogue. He has been saying that for two weeks. Every time a cow loses a calf, it is the rogue, and everyone nods." "Dale is going to say whatever makes Dale look right." "Well." June spooned stew into two bowls. "Maybe he is right this time." I sat down and ate, and I did not tell her about the scent at the fence. I could not have explained it if I had wanted to, and I did not want to. I ate too fast and burned my tongue and June gave me a look over her bowl. The pack meeting was the next morning in the yard of the pack house, which is a long white building with a porch on one side and an old bell on a post that nobody has rung since before I was born. Harlan stood on the steps with his gray beard trimmed and his hat in his hands, and Dale stood next to him in a clean shirt with his sandy hair combed back, smiling at people as they came in. I stood at the back with June and a couple of the younger border-wardens. The wind was out of the north. Dale talked for a long time. He talked about the calves and the torn fences and the rogue that had been seen at the border, and he talked about how the Council was watching, and how the Council did not like packs that could not keep order. He said the word rogue about eleven times. I counted, because I count things when I am angry, and I was angry. When he was done, Harlan cleared his throat and asked if anyone had anything to say, and I put my hand up. "Wren," Dale said warmly. "Of course. Our sharpest nose." "The calf at Harold's place was cut with a blade," I said. "Four long cuts and no eating. A wolf does not do that. A wolf eats what it kills." The yard went quiet. Dale's smile did not move, and he looked at me the way he looked at a bill he did not want to pay. "And you are a tracker, Wren, not a doctor. The rogue could have been interrupted. It could have been a bad hunter. You know what a hungry wolf is like when the moon is off." "I know a blade cut when I see one." "Then you should have brought it to me before you brought it to the whole pack," Dale said, still warm, and a couple of people laughed. "But since you are so sure, I will make it easy for you. The cull goes ahead. A pair of hunters out of Spokane, licensed and quiet. We take the wolf and the calves stop dying. Simple." "The Council will not like outside hunters on pack land," Harlan said slowly. "The Council will like a rogue problem less," Dale said, and turned to face the crowd again, and the meeting was over. People drifted away. I stayed where I was and watched them go, and that was when I noticed the man standing near the corner of the porch with a leather folder under his arm. He had black hair cut short and a gray suit that did not belong in a wheat town, and pale gray eyes, and he was looking at me and not at Dale. I had never seen him before. He walked over to me, and June moved in closer to my shoulder, and he held out his hand with a small neat smile. "You must be Wren. Dale has told me about you. I am Silas, from the Council. I am here to look at the grain land." "Nobody said the Council was sending anyone." "Nobody likes to announce bad weather, either," he said. "And your grain land is very good weather indeed. The Council is buying, quietly. I would like to talk to you about your family's fields, and about your brother, if you have the time." My brother. Owen had been dead for four months and no one in that yard had said his name out loud in at least two. "What about my brother," I said. Silas closed his folder. "Not here. Come by the trailer tomorrow. I think you will find I am a good listener." He tipped his head at June and walked off across the yard, and the north wind came up again and brought something with it that made my wolf turn in a slow circle under my ribs. It was the scent from the fence. Pine, and cedar, and something warm underneath. "Wren," June said. "Your hands are shaking." I looked down. They were. I put them in my pockets and said, "I am fine," and June gave me the look she always gives me when I say that. That night I could not sleep. I lay on my bed with the window open and the curtains moving and the wheat making its dry sound in the dark, and the scent kept coming back to me. It was not strong, the way it had been at the fence. It was faint and it was moving, and it was out there along the north border. Around two in the morning I got up and pulled my boots on and went out. The moon was not up. The field was black and silver and the wheat went past my waist, and I walked north along the fence with my senses opened all the way and my wolf pressing at my skin. The scent got stronger as I went. It was ahead of me and then beside me and then ahead again, and once I stopped and listened and heard the wheat move where there was no wind. I followed it to the edge of Harold's second field, where the old mill road runs along the border. The mill has been empty for years, and the fence there is down, and I could see the dark shape of the mill against the sky. There was something in the wheat behind me. I turned around. The stalks moved. The smell of pine and cedar and warm skin came over me and my wolf rolled over again and this time she would not get up, and I stood there in the dark with my heart beating in my throat and the wheat parting in front of me. Then the shape came out of the wheat and it was too low and too fast and much too big. It hit me in the chest and took me down into the dirt, and my head cracked against a stone, and the last thing I saw was a pale face over mine, close enough to feel the heat of it, with eyes that were not a wolf's eyes at all.

I woke up in the dirt with a headache like a horseshoe nail driven into the back of my skull and a naked man lying half across my legs. The first thing I did was reach for the fence post. The second thing I did was get my boot under his shoulder and push him off me, hard, and roll away into the wheat, and I came up on my knees with my knife out and my wolf already halfway through my skin. She wanted out. She wanted out badly, and she was not making any noise about it. He did not move. I stayed on my knees in the wheat with the knife in my hand and my breath going hard, and I looked at him. He was face down in the dirt, and he was tall; even lying flat I could see he was longer than the fence posts, and his back was broad and pale in the dark. He was barefoot. He had no clothes on at all. His hair was the color of wheat when it has been standing too long in the sun, and there was grain in it. Actual grain. I could see the little pale kernels caught in the strands above his ear. I waited for him to get up and try again. He did not. His hand twitched once in the dirt, and then nothing. The mill road was empty, and the wheat was quiet, and the only sound was my own breathing and a cow somewhere off to the west. I got up slowly, keeping the knife out, and walked around him in a wide half circle until I could see his face. He was not young, or not as young as I had thought. There were lines at the corners of his eyes, and his jaw was covered in three or four days of stubble, and his mouth was pressed tight even with his face in the dirt. His eyes were closed. His skin was cold-looking, blue at the lips, and I could see him shivering even though he was not moving. The night air was not that cold. September in the Palouse stays warm till midnight. My nose found the scent again, and this close to him it was not a faint thing at the fence or a moving thread in the dark. It was him. Pine and cedar and warm skin and something else I could not name that made my throat ache. My wolf went still. She went so still that I put my free hand flat on my own chest to feel her there, and she was pressed against the inside of my ribs, her head down, her whole body quiet. I do not trust quiet. In my experience, quiet means a thing is waiting. "Hey," I said. "You. Wake up." He did not wake up. I crouched down beside him and put two fingers under his jaw, and the touch went through me like a nail through a board. Not a shock, not a spark, nothing like the stories I had heard from the older wolves at pack bonfires. It was heat. It was a slow, deep heat that started at my fingertips and went up my arm and into my chest and sat there. His skin under my fingers was cold and his pulse was slow, and I felt my own pulse answer it, and I pulled my hand back so fast I nearly fell over. "Nope," I said out loud, to nobody. "Nope. Get up." Then I saw his back. There was an old scar there, low on the left shoulder blade, a curved thing about the length of my thumb. Pale. Healed a long time ago. I looked at it for a while in the dark and I told myself it was nothing, and then my eyes found the other one at the base of his neck, a small round one like a burn mark, and the fence post behind me started to go out of focus. Owen had a scar like that. My brother had a scar on his left shoulder blade from a fall off the co-op truck when he was nineteen, and he had a round burn on the back of his neck from a welding spark when he was twenty-three, and he had both of them in the exact same places. I do not know how long I crouched there. Long enough that the cow out west stopped making noise and the wind shifted and something in the mill creaked. He groaned. I was up and back with the knife out before his eyes opened. He turned his head in the dirt and blinked slowly, and then he saw me, and he went very still, the way an animal goes still when it thinks you have not seen it yet. His eyes were amber. Not brown. Amber, like a jar of honey held up to the sun, and in the dark they caught what little light there was and threw it back. "Do not move," I said. "Do not move, and tell me who you are." He swallowed. It looked like it cost him something. "You are a wolf," he said. His voice was rough and low, like he had been shouting or not using it at all. "I asked you a question." "Elias," he said. "Elias what?" "Just Elias." He got his elbows under him and tried to push himself up, and his arms gave out and he went down again with his face in the dirt. I did not help him. I watched him do it a second time and fail, and then I watched him lie there with his breath going in and out of him, and my wolf pressed against my ribs so hard I felt it in my teeth. "Where are your clothes?" "Gone." "Gone where?" "Wherever they go." He turned his head again and looked at me with one eye, since the other was half in the dirt. "I wake up like this. Every time. It is not my favorite part of the arrangement." I lowered the knife a little. Not much. "You are the rogue." "Is that what they are calling me?" He almost smiled. It was a tired thing, and it went away fast. "I have been called worse by better people." "There is a dead calf in Harold's yard with four blade cuts in its side. Was that you?" His face changed. Something went out of it, and he put his forehead down on the ground and breathed. "No. It was not." "A wolf would eat what it killed." "A wolf would," he said into the dirt. "And so would I, if I were hungry. I am not. I have not killed anything in this county except a rabbit in July, and I did not use a blade to do it." I stood there with the knife in my hand and the wheat around my knees and the dark mill behind him, and I believed him. I did not want to believe him. I did not trust the wanting. "You are shaking," I said. "I am cold." He said it plainly. "I have been in the field since Tuesday, and the nights are getting longer, and I do not have a coat, on account of the clothes problem." "Tuesday was five days ago." "Yes." I looked at the road. The road was empty both ways. I looked at the mill, which was dark, and at the wheat, which was quiet, and I thought about Dale and his two licensed hunters out of Spokane, and about the Council man with his leather folder and his gray eyes. "Can you walk?" I said. He lifted his head. "I can try." "Then try." He got to his hands and knees and then to one foot, and I did not help him. He leaned on the fence post and the fence post bent, and he got up straight, and he was taller than I had guessed. Much taller. He kept one hand on the post and he did not look at me while he steadied himself, and I saw the way his ribs showed under his skin. "There is a coat in the co-op," I said. "It is my brother's. It is not a gift, and I want it back." "Understood." "And you do not speak to anyone, and you do not step off the co-op floor, and if you try anything, I will put this knife in your ribs before you finish standing up. Do you understand me?" He looked at me then. Amber eyes, tired and steady, and something in them that I could not read. "I understand you," he said. "I have not been understood this well in a long time." We walked along the fence line to the co-op road, and he kept pace with me better than a man who had been lying in a field for five days should have. He did not ask me my name. I did not offer it. The co-op yard was dark and the loading dock was empty, and I unlocked the side door with the key I keep on a bootlace and took him in. The office smells like burlap and diesel and the coffee June burns every morning. There is a cot in the back for when Harold sleeps off a double shift, and I took the army coat off the peg and handed it to him. He put it on and it hung on him, and he did up the buttons with fingers that were still shaking. "Sit," I said, and he sat on the cot, and it creaked. I got the lamp lit and turned it low and looked at him properly for the first time, and that was a mistake. He was not handsome the way Dale was handsome, with his clean shirt and his smile. He was something else. His face had been put together with a lot of straight lines, and his jaw was square, and his eyes were amber under the wheat-colored hair falling over his forehead, and there was grain still in it. I wanted to reach out and take it out. I did not. "The scar on your back," I said. "The one on your shoulder blade." He went still again. "What about it?" "Where did you get it?" "I fell off a truck when I was nineteen," he said. "It is an old thing. I do not remember it well." I sat down on the desk. My hands were cold and my head hurt and I was suddenly very tired, and I said, "My brother had that scar. Right there, in that place. And a burn on the back of his neck." Elias did not say anything. He looked at me, and his jaw worked, and then he looked down at the floor. "Owen," he said. I got off the desk so fast the lamp rocked. "How do you know his name?" "Because I knew him," Elias said. "And I have been trying to find you for four months." The lamp was the only light in the co-op and it was not much of one, and his shadow went all the way to the loading dock. I had my knife out again and I did not remember taking it out. "Say that again," I said. "I knew your brother," he said. "I was there the night he died." Outside, a truck started up on the co-op road, and the headlights swung across the loading dock and through the office window and over both of us, and through it all Elias sat on the cot in my brother's coat with the grain still in his hair and looked at me like a man who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time.

The truck went past the co-op and did not stop, and the headlights slid off the office wall and left us in the low lamplight again. I put the knife on the desk. I did not put it away. "You were there," I said. "You were there when he died." "Yes." "Say it properly." Elias looked at his hands on his knees. The coat was too big for him, and the sleeves came down past his wrists, and there was a smudge of dirt along his jaw. "I was in the field behind the old mill road. It was a new moon. I had changed, and I was on my way back to the trees, and I heard a wolf fight." He stopped. "I heard your brother." "Owen was not a fighter." "No," Elias said. "He was not." I sat down on the desk again because my legs were not interested in holding me up. "Tell me what you heard." "Two wolves. One of them was your brother, and he was not winning. The other one was talking to him." "Talking." "Wolves can talk," Elias said. "Not out loud. In the head. The way packmates do." I knew that. Every wolf in the Palouse Ridge pack knew that. My mother had used the mind-link to call me in for dinner until the day she died, and Owen had used it to tell me jokes across a crowded yard when we were young. It had gone quiet for me after he died. I had not told anyone about that, not even Maeve. "What were they saying?" "I did not hear the words. I was too far, and the bond between them was not mine to listen to." His jaw tightened. "But I heard the end of it. Your brother said a name. He said it twice, and then he stopped saying anything at all." "What name?" "I have been trying to decide whether to tell you that for four months," Elias said. "I did not come here to make trouble for you. I came here because you are his sister, and because someone should know." "What name," I said again, and my voice came out flatter than I meant it to. He looked up. His eyes were amber and steady. "Dale." The co-op clock ticked. I have hated that clock since I was a girl. It is a square wooden thing with a cracked face that Harold won in a raffle in 1962, and it ticks too loud, and in the silence after that name it was the loudest sound in the county. "You are lying," I said. "I am not." "Dale is our Beta. Owen worked for Dale. Owen liked Dale." "Your brother liked most people," Elias said. "That is not the same thing." I got up and walked to the window and looked out at the dark yard. The loading dock was empty. The grain elevator stood up against the sky with its little red light on top, and the sky had begun to go gray in the east. In four hours the co-op would open and June would come in and find a strange man in Owen's coat on Harold's cot, and I had maybe that long to decide what I was doing. "There is a scar on your shoulder blade," I said, with my back to him. "It is in the exact place Owen's was. And you have a round burn at the base of your neck that he had too. You do not get to tell me that is a coincidence." The cot creaked. I turned around. He had stood up, and he was holding the coat closed at his chest with one hand. "It is not a coincidence," he said. "That is what I am trying to explain to you, and I am doing a poor job, because I have not had a proper meal in five days and I am not at my best." "Then get to the point." "The wolf that killed your brother was not in his right mind," Elias said. "And neither was I. It was the new moon, and I was in the field, and when I found your brother he was already down, and the other wolf had gone. I stayed with him. I put my hands on him and I tried to hold the wound shut, and he looked at me and he was not afraid. He told me to find his sister. He told me her name." The room was very quiet. "And then he was gone," Elias said, "and I was lying in his blood in the field, and when the sun came up I had his scars on my body and I did not know why. I still do not know why. I have been trying to find out for four months." I thought about the funeral. I thought about the closed casket, which was strange because Owen had been found in a field and not in the river, and about Harlan saying the injuries were too much for an open coffin, and about Dale standing at the back of the church with his hand on my shoulder and his voice low and kind. I thought about how no one had ever asked me a single question about that night. "The funeral was closed," I said. "I know." "There was no investigation. Harlan said it was a rogue, and the Council agreed, and we buried him." "I know," Elias said again. I turned around and put both my hands on the desk. "Why you?" "I have thought about that more than anything else," he said. "The only thing I can tell you is that it happened at the new moon, and I was changed, and he was not. Whatever was done to him, it came through me. His scars are on my back. His death is in my hands. I feel it every day." "That is not an answer." "No," he said. "It is not." I took a long breath. "Can I see it?" He did not ask what I meant. He turned around and pulled the coat down off his left shoulder, and there it was in the lamplight, the curved pale scar I had known since I was fourteen, and I put my fingers on it before I could stop myself. The heat came up through my hand and into my arm and settled in my chest, the same slow heat as before, and my wolf pressed forward and made a sound I had never heard her make. Elias went rigid. His shoulder came up under my hand and his breath stopped, and then he let it out all at once. "Do not do that again," he said. His voice had gone rough. "What is it?" I said. "What is happening?" He pulled the coat back up over his shoulder and turned to face me, and his eyes had gone darker, the amber gone to something like a jar of honey with the light behind it. "You know what it is," he said. "Your wolf knows. Mine has been howling at me about it since the moment you put your fingers under my jaw in that field." "No," I said. "I am not asking you for anything." "No," I said again. "That is not what this is. I am not going to stand in a co-op office at five in the morning and be told by a naked man in my brother's coat that we are mates." He almost laughed. It was a short, tired sound, and it went out of him as fast as it came. "Believe me, I did not plan this either. I came here to tell you about Owen. I did not come here to find you." "Find me," I said. "That is a strange way to put it." He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "The scent. When I was in the field, I could smell the pack on the wind, and the wheat, and the diesel from the co-op. And then one day in July I caught something else. Something that made my wolf lie down in the grass and refuse to move, and I have been walking toward it ever since, and every road I took led to this town." He looked at me. "It led to you." The clock ticked. My head hurt. I could hear a truck on the highway, and the grain elevator humming, and my own heart going like a bird in a box. "I need you to leave," I said. "Where would I go?" "Anywhere. The mill. The trees. Somewhere that is not here when June walks in the door." He picked up his boots from where he had dropped them, and he pulled the coat tighter around himself, and he walked to the side door. He stopped with his hand on it. "Your brother did not say the name in anger," he said. "He said it the way a man says a thing he cannot believe. I have thought about that every night for four months. I think it is important." "I do not want your thinking," I said. "I want you gone." He opened the door and went out into the gray, and I stood in the office with the lamp low and my hand still warm from his shoulder, and I did not sit down until the door had closed behind him. June found me an hour later asleep at the desk with my head on my arms. "You look terrible," she said. "Did you sleep here?" "I was walking the line." "All night?" She put the coffee pot on the burner and struck a match. "Dale called the house at six. The hunters are coming tomorrow instead of next week. He wants everyone at the pack house tonight to meet them." I sat up. My neck cracked. "Tomorrow." "He says the rogue is getting bolder. He says it has been in the co-op yard." June looked at me over the pot. "Wren, it has not been in the co-op yard. I would have seen it." I looked past her at the peg where Owen's coat used to hang. The peg was empty. "No," I said. "It has not."