The diesel heater had been ticking all night, and by morning the cabin smelled of hot metal and wet wool. I woke with Aldric's arm across my waist, his breath slow against my shoulder, and for a moment I let myself pretend the bond was real. Then he moved, and the mark on my throat stayed cold. "You're awake," he said. His voice came out rough. He pulled his arm back and sat up on the edge of the bed, and I watched the long muscles move under his skin in the grey light from the window. He had a scar on his left shoulder from a challenge four winters back, and a habit of rubbing it when he was thinking. That morning he rubbed it a great deal. "The trucks come at six," I said. "You wanted to be at the landing before the mill crew." "I know what I wanted." He turned and looked at me. Aldric was forty-one and looked it, with a broad face and iron grey eyes that had never once softened for me in the way a mate's should. My mother used to say a Luna could read her Alpha's mood by his hands. I could read Aldric's by the set of his jaw, and that morning it was set like a locked gate. He leaned over and kissed me, because the pack house had thin walls and we had a performance to keep. His lips were warm and dry, and his hand slid up my ribs under the quilt, practiced and unhurried, and my body answered the way it had learned to answer in four years of marriage: willingly enough, while my mind stood off to one side and watched. He pulled me against him and I let him, and the friction of his skin on mine built into something that should have mattered. It didn't. When he finished he pressed his forehead to mine and breathed, and I lay still and stared at the ceiling beam and thought about the ledger I had left open on the table. "You'll want to see the manifests," I said. "Later." He got up and reached for his shirt. "Marit. The blood moon is in three weeks." "I know when it is." "Then you know what it means for us." I said nothing. He pulled on his boots and left, and the door banged, and I lay there a while longer with the cold creeping back into the sheets. That was the last time I saw him alive. I went down to the pack house at seven to sort the mail and found Kellan in the kitchen with a mug of coffee and the radio on. He was thirty-five, broad across the chest, with blond stubble he never quite shaved clean and a jaw that made him look more stubborn than he was. He had wanted the Alpha seat once, before Aldric took it, and he still wore the grudge lightly, like a coat he might put back on if the weather turned. "Alpha's late," he said. "He's at the landing." "The landing's two miles. He left before six." I poured myself coffee and said nothing. Kellan watched me over the rim of his mug. "You look tired, Luna." "Long night." "Mm." He set the mug down. "Dara's been in the archive since four. Said she found something in the trap reports you should see. I told her you had a pack to run and she told me to mind my own business, so now I'm telling you." I put my coat on and went out. The morning was clear and hard, the kind of cold that makes the spruce trunks click, and the snow on the road was packed into ruts by the mill trucks. I walked because I liked the walk, and because the truck belonged to the pack and the pack's fuel was written in a ledger I would have to account for. Timber Landing sat where the access road met the cut block, a wide flat pad of frozen mud and snow with a loading ramp on one side and the hydro line running along the ridge above it, four wires strung between leaning poles. The mill crew had not come yet. The trucks had not come. There was only the wind and the smell of diesel and pine sap, and a shape on the ice at the far end of the pad where the ground dipped toward the creek. I knew it before I got close. I knew it the way a wolf knows weather. Aldric lay on his back with his arms out and his eyes open, and the front of his coat was black with frozen blood from his throat to his belt. The snow around him had been trampled, then smoothed over, then left. His throat was torn open the way a wolf tears a throat, one deep bite and a wrench. I knelt. My knees made a sound in the crust. I did not touch him. I had never touched him easily when he was alive and it seemed a poor time to start. Then I saw the ice beside his left hand. Someone had carved into it with something sharp, and the carving was fresh enough to be white against the grey. Three letters and a fourth that had been scratched out. M. A. R. Then a long score where the second letter had been gouged away. Someone had written my name beside my husband's body and then changed their mind about the ending. I got up. My hands were steady. That surprised me. I had spent four years being told I was a Luna of moderate gifts, that my calm was my greatest asset, and there on the landing I discovered what my calm was for. I did not run for the pack. I stood there and looked at the hydro line and listened. The wires were humming, faint and low, the way they did when the cold pressed down on them. Three weeks to the blood moon and the lines already singing. Aldric had known. Everyone would know soon. I found the second set of tracks in the snow past the ramp. Boots, not paws, size large, coming down from the ridge road and going back up. I followed them ten yards and stopped where the snow turned to frozen gravel and left no print at all, and stood looking up at the black wall of spruce and the four wires cutting across the sky. When I came back down, Kellan was there. He had brought two warriors and the truck, and he stood in the snow with his hands at his sides and his face gone the colour of the mill's old ash. "Luna," he said. "Marit." "Don't touch him." "I wasn't going to." He took a step closer anyway. "Who did this?" "Someone with boots and a reason." I looked at the ice. "Cover the landing. Send someone up the ridge road and have them bring back what they find, and tell them not to eat anything they find." "What's that supposed to mean?" "It means I've read the boundary reports this year, Kellan, and half of them are signed by men who were dead when they signed them." I walked past him to the truck. "I'm going to the archive. Tell the pack I'll speak at noon." He caught my arm. His grip was careful, and his voice was quiet, and his thumb rested exactly where the mark sat under my collar, cold as a stone. "At noon you'll stand up in front of the pack house and tell them the Alpha's dead and the bond passed to you. And they'll look at your throat, Marit. They'll look at your mark and they'll want to see it lit up and burning for him. Are they going to see that?" I looked at him. Somewhere behind his careful voice something else was moving, some thought he had been carrying for a long time and had finally found a reason to take out and hold up to the light. "At noon," I said, "I'll tell them the truth." The hydro line hummed above us, and the wind brought the smell of the cut block down the road, sap and diesel and old snow, and under it, faint and wrong, a stranger's scent I did not know.

The archive smelled of dust and camphor, the moth repellent Dara kept in cloth bags among the pelts. I shut the door and stood a moment with my back against it, then went to the small mirror above her sink. I pulled my collar down. The mark sat under my jaw on the left side, a pale crescent the size of a thumbnail. Aldric had set it there four years ago in front of the whole pack, and it healed in a week and never once glowed. Not under the moon, not in the dark, not when he put his hand on it. A true mark burned. Mine looked like a scar on someone who had been lucky. I pushed the collar up. In the glass my face was the same as ever, honey blonde braids coming loose, sea green eyes with the lashes my mother said came from her mother, the delicate bones everyone called a gift. My hands were steady. Then I heard the hum through the floor. The hydro line ran along the ridge east of the pack house, four wires carrying power from the dam down to the mill and the town. Ordinary cold made them tick. In the days before a full moon they began to hum, low and even, a sound you felt in your teeth. I stood at the window and counted. Twenty days to the blood moon. A month out, the lines never hummed. A week out, perhaps. Not twenty days. Unless I had lost count, which I had not. I wrote the dates down. The hall filled before noon. The mill crew came with sawdust in their cuffs, the warriors from the boundary with their boots wet, the kitchen omegas with flour on their hands. The ones who could not walk were carried up and set on benches. Kellan stood at the front with the Beta chain around his neck. He did not look at me. He looked at the crowd and let them look at him, and whatever happened in the next few minutes would decide which of us the pack remembered standing there. "The Alpha is dead," I said. "He was killed at Timber Landing last night. A wolf tore his throat. Someone with boots came down from the ridge road and went back up. We have not found them." The hall let out one long breath. "Until the Council sends an auditor, the pack's business is mine. The mill runs. The patrols run. Nobody goes up the ridge road alone. Anything you find on the cut block comes to me first." Anselm, the old warrior with the grey beard and the limp, lifted his head. "Luna. Did the bond pass?" Every face turned to my throat. "The bond passed to me the night he marked me," I said. "What the moon does with it is between the moon and my husband's memory." It was the kind of answer that closes a door quietly. Anselm lowered his head. Kellan's jaw worked once, and then he nodded, because the hall was watching and he was the Beta. After they filed out, he caught me in the passage by the kitchen. "That was a fine speech," he said. "The bond passed to me." He said it back in a voice pitched higher than mine. "What does that even mean, Marit?" "It means the pack has a Luna until the Council says otherwise." "It means the pack has a woman standing in front of them with a cold mark on her neck, and every wolf in that hall could smell the lie." He stepped closer, and his shoulder blocked the light from the kitchen door. "I have known you four years. I have never once seen that mark glow. Not at the ritual. Not at midwinter. Not when he touched you in front of the pack, and he did that often enough." "Careful, Kellan." "I am being careful. I am the only one being careful." He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "If the Council auditor comes and asks to see the bond proved, what will you do? Stand there and hope the moon is in a generous mood?" "If the Council asks, I will answer the Council." He looked at me a long moment. Something behind his eyes had been waiting there since the landing. "Aldric was my friend before he was your mate," he said. "I want the man who killed him found. If I have to go around you to do it, I will." He walked off toward the mill office. I stood in the passage until my hands stopped wanting to shake, then went to find Dara. She was at her table with the trap reports spread in rows. Dara was thirty-eight, her copper braids wound twice around her head, and she had the flat grey eyes of a woman who had read too many ledgers to be surprised by anything. "You lied to them," she said without looking up. "I told them the bond is mine." "You told them nothing and let them hear what they wanted." She turned a page. "I have been here since four. The trap reports for two winters have signatures I cannot account for. Men signing who were already in the ground. And there is a page missing from the pelt ledger. Cut out with a knife, clean along the gutter." "The pelt ledger is a hundred years old." "Which is why nobody cuts a page out of it for the fun of it." She looked at me then, and her eyes went to my collar and stayed. "You know what a missing page means." "It means someone wanted the numbers gone." "It means someone has been selling pelts out of this territory and does not want the count seen." She drank from my cold coffee without asking. "I told Aldric that in the autumn. He said the Council's business was the Council's business and the pack should keep its nose in its own traps." I set the cup down. "He said that." "A month later a wolf tore his throat out on his own landing." She gathered the reports into a stack. "I am going to keep reading. If you want the truth, Luna, you will have to come and get your hands dirty with the rest of us." I walked back to the cabin at dusk. Halfway up the road I stopped under the wires and tipped my head back. The hum came down through the cold into my breastbone, steady as a finger tapped on glass. My mark was cold. It had always been cold. But standing there under the humming line, something low under my ribs turned over, slow and heavy, like a dog shifting in its sleep. My wolf. Four winters I had called to her and never once had an answer. Now she moved, and I stood still with my hand on my chest until she settled. Then I smelled him. The scent came up the road from the ridge, snow and pine resin and a wolf, with something older underneath, like a coat kept too long in a closet. I turned. A man was walking down out of the trees, tall and unhurried, his platinum blond hair pale in the last of the light and a pack on his shoulder that sat heavier than it should. He stopped ten feet away. Blue grey eyes, freckles across his nose, and when he smiled it showed the gap between his front teeth. "Luna," he said. "I heard about Aldric. I came to say I'm sorry, and then I came to say the other thing." "You're not welcome here, Calder." "Nobody ever is." He shifted the pack. "I need to talk to you about the pelts. And about my sister. I think you'll want to hear it before Kellan does, because the last wolf who came down that ridge road at night left your name on the ice." "You were seen on that road." "I was seen on it three nights ago, which is not the same as last night, and I can prove where I was." He let the pack down off his shoulder and set it in the snow between us. "But I didn't walk eleven miles in the dark to argue about my whereabouts. There's something in this bag that a Council man died for, and I would rather you opened it than Kellan." The wires hummed above us. The pack sat in the snow, and the strap was worn pale where a hand had gripped it many times, and I did not reach for it. "What's in the bag, Calder?" He looked at me, and the teasing went out of his face. "A pelt with a Council seal stitched into the lining. And a name burned on the tag. It's not mine, and it's not my sister's, and I need you to tell me why a wolf from your pack was wearing it when I found him."

I did not open the bag. I stood in the road with the hum of the wires above me and looked at the worn strap, and Calder watched me the way a man watches a trap he has just set. "Bring it inside," I said. "Not to the pack house. My cabin." "Your cabin." He picked the pack up. "That's a strange place for a Luna to hold a meeting." "My cabin is the only place in this territory where nobody walks in without knocking twice. And you are not staying past midnight." "Wouldn't dream of it." He followed me up the road. I walked in front so I would not have to keep looking at him, and I kept my breathing even because the scent of him was doing something I did not like. It was not the way a strange wolf smells, not the sourness of a rogue or the old-cellar smell of a man who had been living alone too long. Under the pine and the snow it was warm and sharp and it came into my head like a hand slipping under a door. My wolf turned over again, and I had to stop for a step and set my boot down hard on the packed snow. "You all right, Luna?" "Keep walking." The cabin was cold when I opened the door. I had left it at dawn with Aldric's coat still on the hook and his boots in the corner, and I had not thought about what it would be like to bring another wolf through that door. I set a match to the lamp and saw Calder look at the boots and then at the empty chair by the table, and he did not say anything, which I counted in his favour. He set the pack on the table and stepped back. "Before I open it, you should know what I want." "You want reinstatement." "I want my sister." "You were exiled for something you did to the pack." "I was exiled for something the pack decided I did." His jaw moved. "There's a difference, and you've been standing in front of wolves long enough to know it." "That's not an answer." "It's the only answer I've got tonight." He pulled the pack open and drew out something wrapped in oilcloth tied with twine. The cloth was stiff with frost. He put it down and undid the knots, and the smell hit the back of my throat before the lining came clear. It was a pelt. Grey brown, coarse, thick enough that it held the shape of the animal's shoulders. Stitched inside the fold was a square of black leather the size of a playing card, and pressed into the leather was a seal I knew. The Council of Alphas used it on orders that had to travel between packs. A circle, a crescent cut through the middle, and five small marks in the ring. I stood over the table and did not touch it. "Where did you get this?" "Three nights ago. I was tracking a wounded elk up the east fork and I found a man in a clearing. He was already dead. The pelt was over his shoulders with the fur side in, like a coat." Calder leaned against the back of the chair. "He was not a hunter. He had good boots and clean hands, and a steel case with a Council seal in it. I took the seal off his case and the pelt off his back and left the rest where it was." "And you did not come to the pack." "No." He met my eyes. "A month ago a Council man came through here asking about my sister. Two weeks later I'm living out past the ridge and nobody in the pack will say my name. So I took what I found and I kept it, and now Aldric is dead on the same landing where Wren's patrol ended, and I want to know what your pack has been doing up that road." "The tag," I said. He turned the pelt with two fingers and showed me a small brass tag sewn at the shoulder, the kind the mill used on bales of pelts that went out on the trucks. A name was burned into it with a nail. "Aldric had a man named Vester doing his boundary runs," I said. "Vester is in the ground two winters now." "Then somebody has been using a dead man's tag, or somebody has been wearing a dead man's name." Calder folded his arms. "I've brought this to you because you're the only wolf in this territory who has a reason to want the truth more than a story. Say the word and I'll take it to Kellan, and we can all find out how that goes." "You don't threaten me in my own cabin." "I'm not threatening you. I'm telling you what happens if we do it the slow way." I wanted to send him out into the dark. I wanted to be a woman in a house with a dead husband and a cold mark and no stranger in her kitchen telling her about corpses in the trees. Instead I stood there and looked at the Council seal, and my wolf pressed against my ribs, and I could smell him, and I hated that I could smell him. "You sleep in the mill camp," I said. "Not the pack house. There's a bunk room behind the office with a stove, and nobody will think to look for you there tonight." "That's generous." "It's practical. If Kellan finds you on my road at midnight I'll have two dead wolves to explain and no time to do it." I pulled the oilcloth over the pelt and folded the corners in. "Tomorrow I want the rest of it. Where the body was. What he carried. You will tell it to me and Dara, and if your story has holes in it I'll put you back across the ridge myself." Calder studied the bundle. "You're not going to ask about the tag." "I'm going to look up the tag. Tonight, in the archive, and if it matches what I think it matches, then tomorrow you and I are going to have a longer conversation." I set the bundle under the table and straightened. "Now go." He put his coat on. At the door he stopped with his hand on the latch and the cold coming in around his boots. "I'm sorry about Aldric," he said. "I knew him a little. He gave me three days to leave when the pack voted me out, and he did not look at me while he said it." He pulled the collar of his coat up. "There was a woman asking about him in town this morning. She had a car with Council plates and she was buying coffee at the store, asking whether the Alpha had any family left in the territory." "What did she look like?" "Black hair. Grey eyes. Wore a grey coat like a uniform." He opened the door. "I told her I was a trapper and did not know anything about the pack, and she wrote something in a little notebook and drove off north, toward the ridge road, not south toward the city." The door shut behind him. I stood in the middle of my kitchen with the pelt under the table and the lamp burning, and I thought about a Council woman driving the wrong way on the wrong road on the day after my husband was killed. I should have told him to stay. Instead I waited for the sound of his boots to fade, put on my coat, and went down to the archive to find out whose name was burned on that tag.