The memory of her mouth was still on mine when the alarm went off. I had spent the evening in Carnmouth with a woman whose name I never learned, a visitor from Inverness with wind-burned cheeks and a laugh that carried across the harbor. She had pulled me into the shelter of the fish market's closed stalls, and for an hour I had forgotten the plant, the pack, the corrosion in the pipes. Her hands had been warm against the cold coming off the water. When she kissed the side of my throat I had felt the low growl start somewhere behind my ribs, and I had pressed my palm flat against the wooden post to keep from shifting right there among the crates of haddock. Then her fingers found the mark beneath my collar, and she stopped. "What is that?" she asked. "Nothing," I said. "An old burn." She had looked at me for a moment too long, and I had made some excuse about the night shift. I walked her to the guesthouse, kissed her once at the door, and left before she could ask anything else. The alarm was still ringing when I reached the plant. The tide was out, the turbines running slow and patient in the dark, and the security panel above the main door flashed red for the lower intake hall. I had a torch in one hand and my radio in the other. "Magnus," I said into it. "Intake hall. Someone's inside." The radio hissed. "On my way. Do not go down there alone, Alasdair." I went down alone. The stairwell smelled of salt and wet iron. Water dripped somewhere behind the walls, a sound I knew as well as my own heartbeat, and the concrete steps were slick with the tide's leavings. Halfway down I caught it. A scent cutting through the salt, copper and rain and something green underneath, like crushed ferns after a storm. My wolf woke. Not a growl, not a word, just a shift of weight behind my ribs, the way a sleeping animal lifts its head. I had not felt that in four months. I stopped on the landing and listened. Below me, metal scraped against metal. A valve turning. I took the last flight quietly, keeping to the wall, and came out into the intake hall with the torch off. The lower hall was a cathedral of pipes and darkness. The intake grates stood open to the sea, and beyond them the low water lay flat as a sheet of pewter under the moon. In the middle of it all, on her knees beside the main corrosion valve, was a woman with copper-red hair tied back in a knot that had come half undone. She had a wrench in her hand and a canvas bag at her feet. She was breaking my plant. "Put it down," I said. She did not startle. That was the first thing I noticed about her, the way she simply stopped, set the wrench on the floor, and turned her head to look at me over her shoulder. Her eyes were sea-green, and in the light from the intake grate they caught the moon and held it. "You're the security chief," she said. "I thought you'd be taller." "Hands where I can see them." She raised them, slowly, and got to her feet. She was tall enough, and she moved like someone used to being found and never caught. "You have rust in this valve," she said. "More than rust. Something's eating it from inside. Has been for years." "I know what's in my plant." "You don't. That's the trouble." She nodded at the valve. "Look at it." I looked. The valve housing was crusted orange and flaking, and the pipe below it had gone the color of old blood. I had signed off on that pipe three weeks ago, and it had been sound then. I stepped closer, and my boot came down on something that crunched, and I saw the floor was dusted with rust that had not been there when I locked up. "Whatever's in the water is getting worse," she said. "I slow it down. That's all I do." "You break my equipment." "I break the parts that are already dead. It buys time." She tilted her head. "You're not listening to me. You're looking at my hands." I was. Her right hand was bare, and there was a ring of pale skin on her wrist where a cuff had been, and I wanted very badly to know why I could smell her from six feet away when the hall smelled of nothing but salt. "Who sent you?" I asked. "Nobody you'd want to meet." She smiled, and it was not a friendly smile, though it was not cruel either. "I'm going to walk out of that door now, and you're going to let me, because if I don't come back at the next low tide, this pipe will split before the weekend and the reservoir will take the taste of iron into every tap in Carnmouth. Then you'll have more than a saboteur to explain to your Alpha." I moved to block the door. She sighed. "You're one of those." "One of what?" "One of those wolves who thinks standing in a doorway solves a problem." The word landed like a slap. I had not told her what I was. No human in Carnmouth knew what walked among them, and the pack had kept it that way for three generations. I took a step toward her, and she took one toward me, and we met in the middle of the hall under the moon with our boots in the rust. "Say that again," I said. "You heard me." She looked up at me, and her face was close enough that I could see the small scar in her left eyebrow. "You have the mark on your throat. Your eyes are the wrong color for a human in this light. And your scent is doing something to mine that I don't like." I reached for her wrist. I told myself I was arresting her, and my fingers closed around the warm skin above her cuff, and the hall went quiet. The rust beneath her boot receded. I saw it happen, the orange crust thinning along the pipe, the metal beneath going grey and clean as the corrosion pulled back from her the way the tide pulls back from the sand. My wolf rose up inside me with a sound I had not heard in four months, a long, shaking howl that rattled through my skull and out into the hall. She felt it. Her eyes went wide, and her breath caught, and her free hand came up and pressed flat against my chest. "No," she said. "No, not you." The radio on my hip crackled. "Alasdair. I'm at the top of the stairs. What's happening down there?" Her hand was still on my chest. I could feel her heartbeat through her palm, fast and strong, and mine had gone slow and heavy the way it does before a shift. "Nothing," I said into the radio, and my voice came out strange. "A valve blew. I have it." "You have it," she repeated quietly, and pulled her wrist free of my hand. Then she stepped back, and the rust began to spread again along the pipe behind her, crawling over the clean metal like frost forming on a window, and she was already moving toward the intake grate, and I was still standing there with the ghost of her heartbeat in my palm. "You can't go out that way," I said. "The tide's coming in." "I know," she said, and pulled the grate open, and the cold sea air came rushing into the hall and took her scent with it. Magnus's boots sounded on the stairs behind me. I closed my fist around nothing. "Alasdair," Magnus said from the doorway, and I heard the question in it before he asked it. "Why is the main valve clean?" I turned around. The rust was creeping back along the pipe, slow and patient, and I could still feel my wolf where it had woken, pacing and circling and wanting something I was not going to give it. "Logically," I said, and the word tasted like a lie, "it was the pressure change."

Magnus came down the last steps with his torch swinging, and the beam cut across the intake hall and found the open grate. "Tell me you did not let whoever that was walk into the sea," he said. "She went out through the intake. The tide's still low enough to wade the first hundred yards." I picked up her wrench from the floor. The handle was wrapped in electrical tape gone tacky with salt. "We can follow the channel or we can secure the plant. I chose the plant." "You chose wrong." He took the wrench from me, sniffed the tape, and his broad shoulders went still. "Rogue." "You can smell that?" "I can smell something. Copper and rainwater. Not a MacRae scent." He handed the wrench back. "Not a Carnmouth scent at all." I put it in my coat pocket before he could ask for it again. Magnus walked the length of the main pipe with his torch held low, and he stopped where the rust had thinned. He crouched, ran his thumb along the clean metal, and looked back at me. "This was orange when I did the rounds at six." "Pressure change. The tide dropped fast tonight." "The tide does not scrub rust off a pipe." He stood and wiped his thumb on his trousers. "What did she look like?" "Tall. Red hair. She had a wrench and a bad attitude and she was gone before I could get my hands on her." "You had your hands on her. There's a mark on your wrist." I looked down. Four small crescents where her nails had pressed when I grabbed her. I put my hand in my pocket beside the wrench. "She pulled free. I'll catch her at the next low tide." "Will you." His radio chirped and he silenced it without looking at it. "The Alpha wants a report by morning. I'll write it. You go home, and when you come back, you come back with an answer about this pipe that isn't the tide." He went up the stairs first, and I followed, and on the third step my right hand began to shake. It started in the fingers, a fine tremor like a struck wire, and climbed to the wrist. I closed that hand around the rail and leaned on it until the shaking passed up my arm and stopped. "Alasdair." "Coming." I waited until his torch beam vanished around the turn, then sat down on the cold step and held my hand out in the dark. It was steady now. It had been steady for three days. The first time was six weeks ago, in the shower, and I had blamed the cold water. The second time was at the pack house dinner, and I had blamed the wine. The third time was last Tuesday, at my desk, and I had no one left to blame but myself. My wolf did not speak. That was the worst of it. Six weeks ago he had gone quiet, and quiet was not something he had ever been. He had opinions about everything, about the way Magnus chewed his food, about the smell of new paint in the corridors, about every woman who crossed my path and whether she was worth the trouble. Now he lay somewhere behind my ribs like a stone in a riverbed. Except tonight. Tonight he had howled. I finished the climb, and by the time I reached the gatehouse the wind had come off the sea and taken the mist with it. She was standing on the seawall. I saw her from the gatehouse window, a thin figure in a dark coat with the copper-red hair loose now and blowing across her face. The moon was behind the clouds, and the sea beyond her was black and moving, and she was not running. She was watching the plant. I went out. I did not run. I walked down the path with my hands loose at my sides, and when I reached the seawall she turned her head and watched me come the way she had in the intake hall, without any fear in her at all. "You came back," I said. "I never left." She nodded at the plant. "Your pipe is holding. It will hold until Thursday, maybe Friday, and then it won't. You should have someone look at the junction beneath the reservoir." "You should come with me to the pack house and explain that to my Alpha." Her mouth curved. "Would that go well for me, do you think?" "Not especially." "Then I'll stay out here." She turned to face me fully, and the wind pulled her hair back, and I could see the small scar in her eyebrow and the cold red of her cheeks. "You're shaking." I looked down. My left hand was trembling at my side, and I had not noticed it start. "It's cold," I said. "It's not cold." She stepped closer. "How long since your wolf went quiet? How long since the first tremor? Because I have seen this before, and it does not get better on its own. The curse in your water gets into the wolves who drink it. It gets into their shifts. It gets into their bones." "Curse." I said the word flatly. "You're standing on a seawall in the middle of the night telling me my plant is cursed." "I'm telling you your plant is drowning in a debt that was cast into the water before you were born, and I am the only person on this coast who knows how to slow it down." She pulled her sleeve back, and there on her forearm, pale in the moonlight, was a mark like a crescent moon. "My name is Eilidh. I am not a rogue, whatever your Beta smells. I came here to break the thing that is killing your pack, and I have been breaking your valves every few nights because it is the only way to keep it from reaching your reservoir." The wind changed. It came off the headland and carried the smell of her straight into my lungs, copper and rain and crushed ferns, and my wolf rose up behind my ribs and pressed against my skin. "You have the mark on your throat," she said. "The crescent. I saw it in the intake hall. I have the same one, and mine has been burning since I touched you, and I do not believe in coincidences." She took another step, and her hand came up, and I caught her wrist before her fingers reached my collar. The touch went through me like current through a wire. She felt it too. I saw it in her face, the way her eyes lost their focus and her breath went shallow. "Thursday," she said, very quietly. "I'll come back on Thursday with a tool that can reach the junction. Do not let anyone sign off on the reservoir inspection until then." "Who are you?" I said. "Not your name. Who are you to my pack?" Her hand was still in mine. She looked at it, then at me, and pulled it free slowly. "Ask your healer," she said. "Ask Isla what happened thirty years ago, and why your father's name is on a ledger in the Council archive. Ask her tonight, before the inspector's letter arrives, and see what she tells you." She walked along the seawall into the mist, and this time I let her go. I stood there until the cold had gone through my coat and into my bones. Then I went back to the gatehouse, picked up the telephone, and dialed the pack house. Isla answered on the fourth ring. "Healer's cottage." "It's Alasdair. I need to ask you something, and I need you to tell me the truth." There was a long silence. I heard her breathe in, and the small clink of a kettle set down on a stove, and when she spoke again her voice had changed in a way that made the hair rise on my arms. "Not on the telephone," she said. "Come to the cottage. Use the back path, not the road. And Alasdair, before you come, look at your hands." "I've looked at my hands." "Look again," she said, and hung up.

I did not go to Isla's cottage that night. I told myself it was because I needed to see the valves in daylight, and that was true, and it was also a coward's excuse. I went home to my rooms above the gatehouse, slept badly, and was back at the plant before six with a torch and a notebook. The tide was out again, and the intake hall looked different in the grey morning. Smaller. The pipes I had walked past for nine years were crusted white with salt at every joint, and when I ran my thumb along the nearest flange it came away gritty. I opened my notebook and started with the main corrosion valve. Her marks were everywhere. Not the wrench. The wrench had been a decoy, or a tool she had left behind on purpose. What she had done was subtler. On the underside of the housing, where nobody would look unless they were lying on the floor, she had scraped away the worst of the rust and packed the gap with something grey and waxy that smelled of tallow and ash. I dug a little out with my fingernail and rolled it between my fingers. It held its shape. It did not dissolve in the water. I sat back on my heels. Whatever it was, it had stopped the corrosion where it touched. The pipe above her patch was still clean metal. The pipe below it was orange. "You're on the floor." I looked up. Rowan stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and his sandy blond hair still flat from sleep. He was nineteen and built like our father, broad through the shoulders, and he had our mother's bright blue eyes, which were watching me with an expression I did not like. "I'm inspecting a valve." "You're lying on the floor of an intake hall at six in the morning inspecting a valve." He came down the steps. "Magnus says you chased a woman out of here last night." "Magnus says a lot of things." "He says you had your hands on her." Rowan grinned. "Was she pretty?" "Rowan." "That's a yes." He crouched beside me and looked at the pipe. "What's that grey stuff?" "Something that shouldn't be there." "Then why is it the only part of the pipe that isn't rotting?" He reached out to touch it, and I caught his wrist. His skin was hot. Not warm from the climb, not warm from the morning. Hot, the way a fever is hot, and I let go of him faster than I meant to. "Your hands," I said. "What about them?" "Are they steady?" He looked at me for a moment. Then he stood up, and he put his hands behind his back, and he gave me the smile he used when he wanted me to stop asking questions. "Steady as anything," he said. "You should have seen me at training yesterday. Magnus said I nearly took his shoulder off." "Magnus would say that if you tripped over a bucket." "You're funny in the mornings. I forgot that." He walked back to the steps. "Isla's in the pack kitchen, by the way. She's been up since four making something that smells like a bog. She asked if you'd been to see her." "Did you tell her no?" "I told her you were busy being mysterious." He paused at the top of the stairs. "Alasdair. If something's wrong, you can tell me. I'm not a child." "You're nineteen." "That's not the same thing." He went up and out, and his boots faded along the corridor, and I sat on the cold floor with the grey wax on my fingers and the rust creeping back around the edge of it. I finished the inspection in an hour. I found her marks on four valves and a junction beneath the turbine housing, all of them the same. She had been inside my plant for months, and she had done nothing except slow the rot down. She could have opened a gate, dropped a bolt into a turbine, killed half the pack in their beds. She had chosen to pack wax into my pipes instead. I put the notebook in my coat and walked up to the pack house. Isla was in the kitchen as Rowan had said, and the kitchen did smell like a bog. She had a pot on the stove and a wooden spoon in her hand, and her black hair was braided so tight it pulled at the skin of her temples, and when she saw me she did not smile. "Sit," she said. "I'll stand." "Sit down, Alasdair." Her sharp dark eyes went to my hands, and I put them behind my back before I could stop myself. "That's what I thought." "What do you know?" She stirred the pot twice and set the spoon down on a saucer. "I know the water in this town has been wrong for longer than you've been alive. I know three wolves in this pack have failed to shift in the last year, and I know what it looks like when it starts, because I saw it in your father." My mouth went dry. "My father died in the sea. That was an accident." "That was the story we told you." She looked at the pot. "Your father's hands shook for six months before he walked into the water. He was fifty-one years old and he could not hold a pen. He did not drown because the tide took him, Alasdair. He drowned because he could not shift, and a wolf who cannot shift in this pack is a wolf the Council will take." I did not move. The kitchen clock ticked above the stove. "Why didn't anyone tell me?" "Because you were twenty-two and angry and you would have gone straight to the Council, and then you would have been the one they took." She picked up the spoon again. "Drink this. It won't cure anything, but it will keep your hands steady for a few days." I looked at the pot. "What's in it?" "Wolfsbane and sea salt, and before you say anything, the dose is small enough that it won't burn your wolf. It will simply make it harder for the curse to find him." "Curse." There it was again, the same word Eilidh had used. "You both use that word. What curse?" Isla put the pot on the table and set a cup down beside it. She did not pour. "Thirty years ago a debt was cast into the water at this plant," she said. "It was meant to bring this pack to its knees, and it has been doing exactly that, slowly, one pipe and one wolf at a time. I know who cast it. I have known since before you were born. And I have done nothing about it because I was paid to keep my mouth shut." She looked up at me. "There is a letter on its way here from the Council. It will arrive today. When it does, you will understand why I am telling you this now and not ten years ago." I opened my mouth to ask what she meant, and the front door of the pack house banged open, and Rowan's voice came down the corridor, loud and bright and a little too high. "Alasdair! Magnus wants you in the Alpha's study. There's a man at the gate with a silver pin on his coat." Isla's hand closed around the cup. "Cup, Alasdair," she said quietly. "Drink it now, before you go in there, or your hands will shake in front of the whole Council and there will be no hiding what you are."