The IV pump clicked at three in the morning, and I counted the clicks the way I always did on the long stretch of the night shift, one two three four, before the bag ran dry. Room seven had been my patient for seven years. I knew the sound of his breathing better than my own. I knew the way the sheet settled over his chest, the exact position of his hands on the blanket, the faint line of silver still visible under the skin above his heart where the bullet had lodged and stayed. Nobody at Valley Regional asked why a comatose man had a piece of metal in his chest that no surgeon would remove. Nobody asked why his chart listed no family, no insurance, no next of kin. He was a John Doe who had arrived one autumn night with a hole in him and never left, and I had been the one holding his chart when the ambulance doors opened. I set the fresh bag on the hook and adjusted the drip. The room smelled of antiseptic and old carpet and something else, something warm and dark that I had spent seven years pretending not to notice. It smelled like pine and rain and a forest floor in autumn. It smelled like the inside of my husband's coat. Stop it, I told myself. I had counted thirty-seven of those clicks already. I was tired. I was always tired at three in the morning. His hand moved. I watched it slide across the blanket, slow and deliberate, fingers opening. I told myself it was a reflex, the kind of thing that happened with patients like him, the body finding a new position in its long sleep. Then his fingers closed around my wrist. The grip was not the weak flutter of a man who had been lying in a bed for seven years. It was strong and certain, and it pulled me down until my face was close to his, close enough to see the color of his eyes. They were open. Amber, gold at the edges, and fixed on mine. "You smell like my Gamma," he said. His voice was rough with disuse, but it was a voice, a real one, and the words went through me like a shock of cold water. I tried to pull back and he held on. His thumb moved against the inside of my wrist, slow, searching, and I felt the pulse there jump under his touch. "Let go of me," I said. "Your scent." He breathed in, and his chest rose under the thin hospital gown. "Pine. Wolfsbane. You have been hiding. Why have you been hiding?" I did not answer. My mind had gone blank in a way it never did, not in seven years of codes and crashes and families screaming in the hallway. I could feel the heat of his hand through my skin, and under that heat something else, a pull low in my belly, a stirring in the place where I kept my wolf locked and quiet. She lifted her head for the first time in years and she was not afraid. She was interested. "You know that name," he said. "Gamma. You know it." "I do not know what you are talking about." My voice came out steady. Good. Steady was the only thing I had left. "You have been asleep for a long time. You are confused. I am going to get a doctor." "Seven years." His eyes did not leave mine. "I counted the winters in the pipes. The cold comes through the wall in January. You wear a blue coat in January. You smell like the coat when you come in from the snow." I stared at him. Seven years of night shifts, of walking in from the parking lot with snow in my hair, and I had never once thought that the man in room seven knew I was there. "Who are you?" I asked. "Caleb." The name came out of him in a long breath, as if he had been holding it. "Caleb Rourke. And you are the woman who has been keeping me alive with poison." The word hit me before I understood it. Poison. I looked at the IV bag, at the clear fluid running down the line into his arm, and the floor seemed to tilt under my feet. I had hung that bag. I had hung a hundred of them. "What poison?" I said. "Wolfsbane." His jaw tightened. "It keeps me between forms. It has been keeping me here since the night I fell. Whoever has been ordering those bags does not want me to wake." I thought of the supply closet, of the identical orders that had come down from the office year after year, of the way the bags were always already prepared when I arrived for my shift. I thought of the regent's name on the paperwork, a name I had seen in the file room and never once questioned. "You are saying someone at this hospital has been poisoning you for seven years," I said. "I am saying someone in my pack has been poisoning me for seven years." His thumb pressed against my wrist again, and I felt the mark before I saw it, a warm line of heat that started at the bone and spread up my arm. "And you are the first person who has touched me since it began." I looked down. On the inside of my wrist, where his thumb had been, a faint shape was rising out of my skin, pale and curved, the color of moonlight on water. It had not been there when I came into the room. It had not been there when I checked his pulse an hour ago, and I knew that because I had counted his pulse, thirty-eight beats, and I had looked at my own hand while I did it. "No," I said. I pulled my arm free and stepped back until the foot of the bed hit the backs of my legs. "No. I have a son. I have a job. I have a life, and I am not part of whatever this is." "Your son." His eyes sharpened. "How old is your son?" The question landed in me like a needle. I did not answer. I turned and walked out of room seven, and the door swung shut behind me with a soft click, and I stood in the corridor with my back against the wall and my hand pressed over the mark on my wrist. The corridor was empty. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. At the nurses' station, the phone began to ring. I pushed off the wall and walked toward it, and I told myself that a man waking from a coma could say anything. I told myself that the mark was a burn from the hot water in the sink, that the pull I felt was exhaustion, that the word Gamma had come from the same place a dreaming brain gets faces and names and old dead husbands. I told myself all of it in the time it took to reach the desk. Then I picked up the phone, and the voice on the other end said, "Nora, this is the front desk. There is a man down here asking for room seven. He says his name is Silas Rourke, and he says he is family." I looked down at my wrist. The mark was still there, and it was still warm, and from the direction of room seven I heard a low sound that was not a machine, not a click, not the hum of the lights. It was a growl.

I set the phone back in its cradle and did not move for a moment. The front desk clerk was still talking, her voice tinny and far away, asking if I wanted her to send the man up or have him wait in the lobby. "Tell him to wait," I said. "Tell him the patient is not stable." I hung up before she could answer and walked back down the corridor toward room seven. The growl had stopped. The door was closed and the light above it was steady, and I stood outside with my hand on the handle and counted my breaths, one two three four, the way I counted everything. The truth was that I had known something was wrong with room seven for years. I had known it the way you know a storm is coming from the pressure behind your eyes, without being able to point at the sky and say there. I had known it every time I hung an IV bag and felt my wolf turn away from the smell of it, every time I walked past the door and caught that pine and rain scent and had to press my palm flat against my thigh to keep from reaching for it. I had told myself it was nothing. I had told myself a lot of things. I opened the door. Caleb was sitting up in bed with his back against the headboard and his hands flat on the blanket, and the amber of his eyes had gone darker, closer to brown, like a lamp turned down low. His dark gold hair was a mess against the pillow, and the hospital gown hung open at the collar, and I could see the pale line of the scar above his heart, the one the surgeons had never been able to explain. "You came back," he said. "I have questions." "Then ask them quickly. My brother is in the building." I stepped inside and let the door close behind me. "Silas Rourke." "You know him." "I know the name on the supply orders." I crossed my arms over my chest, mostly so I would not keep looking at my wrist. "I know that every bag that has hung on that pole for seven years was prepared in an office with his signature on the paper. I know that I have been the one hanging them." Caleb's jaw worked. "Then you understand why I cannot walk out of this room and have a conversation with him in the lobby." "Then tell me what you are." "I am an Alpha." He said it plainly, without pride. "Of the Rourke pack. My territory is the hollows east of here, the ridge and the old mine road and the stretch of forest the county maps call Miller's Ridge. My brother has been running it since I fell." "And the bullet?" "Silver. It went in here." He touched the scar. "It has not moved since. It will not move until the curse is broken, and the curse will not break while I am lying in this bed being fed wolfsbane through a tube." I had heard the word curse before. My husband had used it once, late at night, when he thought I was asleep. He had said it to someone on the phone in a low voice, and when I asked him about it the next morning he had told me it was nothing, a story from the old country, and he had kissed my forehead and gone to work and never mentioned it again. "What does the curse do?" I asked. Caleb looked at me for a long moment. His eyes had that strange amber light in them again, and I could feel it on my skin, a warmth that had no business being there. "It keeps me between forms," he said. "I cannot shift back. I cannot walk. I have been a wolf in a man's body for seven years, and every time I try to move the silver pushes back. Your husband knew that. He was the one who found me after the bullet went in." The room went very still. I could hear the IV pump click, one two three four, and I could hear my own heart in my ears. My husband had been dead for seven years. He had been a quiet man with a wide smile and hands that smelled of engine oil, and he had worked nights too, and one morning he had not come home. The police had found his truck on the old mine road and nothing else. I had buried an empty coffin and told my son that his father was in the ground, and I had moved into a small apartment near the hospital and taken every night shift I could get, because nights were the only hours where the grief did not catch me. "You are lying," I said. "I am not." "My husband was a mechanic. He fixed trucks and he came home smelling of grease and he never once told me he was a wolf." "Then he lied to you too." Caleb's voice was not unkind. "But he was my Gamma, and he was the best of us, and on the night I fell he pulled me out of the rain and put a hand on my chest and swore he would find a way to break the curse. He went looking for the heir. He never came back." I thought of the way my husband used to stand at the kitchen window at night with his hand against the glass, looking east. I thought of the way he had said my name sometimes, as if he were checking that I was still in the room. I thought of the last morning, when he had kissed Eli on the top of the head and said something in a language I did not know, and I had asked him what it meant and he had said, nothing, just something my mother used to say. "Why did your eyes open tonight?" I asked. Caleb was quiet for a while. Then he said, "Because you touched me." "I touch you every night. I take your pulse every two hours." "You take my pulse with two fingers and you do not linger. Tonight you straightened the sheet. You put your hand on my chest to check the line, and you left it there for a moment longer than you meant to, and I smelled you through the wolfsbane for the first time in seven years." He tilted his head. "You smell like my Gamma, but you are not my Gamma. You smell like the place he came from. You smell like the person he was protecting." The mark on my wrist had begun to ache, a dull warmth that spread up my arm and into my shoulder. I pressed my other hand over it. "There is something on my wrist," I said. "It was not there before tonight." Caleb closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the amber had gone bright and hard, and his voice was lower. "The mark," he said. "That is the bond. It means the moon has chosen you for me, and it means my brother will kill you the moment he learns of it." I stepped back toward the door. "I want nothing to do with your bond or your brother or your pack. I have a son. I have a life." "Your son." Caleb's eyes did not move from mine. "The boy with the champagne hair who leaves the drawings on your desk. The one who dreams of the ridge." I stopped with my hand on the door handle, and the whole corridor outside seemed to go silent. "How do you know about my son?" I said. Caleb did not answer. He was looking past me at the door, and his face had changed, the way a man's face changes when he hears the first crack of thunder far off. Then the door opened behind me, and a voice I had never heard before said, "Well. Look at this. The sleeper wakes, and the night nurse is holding his hand." I turned. The man in the doorway had black hair and grey eyes, and he was smiling, and he was wearing a coat that cost more than my car. He looked past me at the bed and his smile widened. "Hello, brother," Silas said. "I brought you flowers." In his hand was a small glass vase, and in the vase were seven white flowers, and every one of them was wolfsbane.

I did not go back to room seven that night. I walked past Silas and his vase of wolfsbane and took the stairs down four flights instead of the elevator, because the stairwell smelled of concrete and floor wax and nothing else. The flowers were the part I could not stop thinking about. Seven white flowers in a glass vase, set on the windowsill where the parking lot light fell across them, and Silas had said something to me about how the patient liked the window open in summer. He had not mentioned poison. He had not needed to. By the time I reached my car the sky over the ridge had gone grey. I sat with my hands on the wheel and thought about the mark on my wrist, then drove home, took a cold shower, and slept four hours with the curtains shut. The next morning I stood in my bathroom and opened the cupboard under the sink. The wolfsbane was in a brown bottle labeled tincture of monkshood. I had bought it from a woman in a trailer on the far side of the ridge who sold herbal remedies to people who did not want to explain themselves to a doctor. Five drops a day for seven years. Five drops in my coffee, five drops before every shift, and once a week a full dropper in water when the scent was bad enough that I could smell myself. I measured ten drops. Then I looked at the dropper and measured ten more. The taste was bitter and green, like a mouthful of dirt. I stood at the sink with my eyes shut and waited for the dimming behind my ribs, the way the world went from sharp to soft. My wolf settled into the dark place where I kept her. She did not like it, but she was used to it, and she went quiet. I looked at my wrist. The mark was still there, pale and curved, and it had not dimmed with the wolfsbane. If anything it looked brighter. I put on my coat and drove to the diner on Route 9 and ordered the breakfast special and sat in the corner booth with the cracked vinyl seat and thought about my husband. His name was Daniel. He had a wide smile and a gap between his front teeth, and he had come into my life when I was twenty-six and working days at the hospital and had no idea what I was. He had found me in the parking lot one night when I was crying in my car because I had smelled a wolf in the emergency room and could not stop shaking. He had tapped on the window and asked if I was all right, and I had looked up and known, the way you know your own face in a mirror, that he was like me. He had told me about the pack. He had told me about the Alpha, a man named Caleb who had a temper and a good heart and a problem with his brother. He had told me about the mate bond and how it was not always a gift, and he had told me that the two of us were lucky because we had found each other by accident and not by decree. He had never told me he was a Gamma. He had said he was a scout, a runner, a man who did errands for the pack, and I had believed him because I wanted to. The last morning I saw him he had gotten up before dawn to drive out to the mine road. He had kissed Eli on the head and said something in a language I did not know, and then he had stood in the doorway and looked at me for a long moment. "Keep him safe," he had said. "Safe from what?" He had not answered. He had gone out to the truck and driven away, and the police had found the truck three days later with the driver's door open and the engine cold and no sign of him anywhere. I finished my eggs and paid and drove to the hospital, because my shift started at seven and I had a son to feed and a life to keep. The day nurse gave me the report in the hallway outside room seven. The patient had been quiet all morning. The brother had been in and out. The flowers on the windowsill had been removed by housekeeping because they were not allowed in patient rooms. I went in at eight with the medication cart. Caleb was lying down again, but his eyes were open, and they followed me across the room the way they had followed me into the corridor. The IV bag was new. I checked the line and checked the pump and then stood with my back to him and my hands on the cart. "Ten drops," he said. "What?" "Your wolfsbane. You usually take five. This morning you took ten." His voice was quiet. "I can smell the difference from here." I turned around. His face was pale against the pillow and his eyes were the color of a lamp in a dark room. "You can smell me from this bed with a tube in your arm and a curse in your chest." "I am an Alpha. I can smell a rabbit in the woods a mile from my border. You are six feet away and you smell like a woman who is trying to hide." He shifted on the pillow. "You do not need the ten drops. I am not going to hurt you." "You are not the one I am afraid of." "No," he said. "You are afraid of my brother. You are right to be." I picked up the blood pressure cuff and wrapped it around his arm, and the skin of his forearm was warm through the fabric of the gown. His pulse was steady and strong, and when I wrote the number on the chart my hand was not shaking, and I was proud of that. "Did you know my husband?" I asked, without looking up. "Daniel." Caleb said the name softly. "Yes. I told you that." "Then tell me why he never told me he was your Gamma." The room was quiet for a moment. I heard the pump click, and a cart go by in the hallway, and Caleb take a breath. "Because he was trying to protect you," he said. "The Gamma is the Alpha's right hand and the first wolf to die in a challenge. He did not want you to know what he was, because he did not want you to be a target. He told me once that he had found a woman who made him want to leave the pack. He told me he was going to ask me for permission to go." "Did he?" "No. He never asked." Caleb's voice dropped. "He went looking for the heir instead. He went alone, and he did not come back, and I have been lying in this bed for seven years because I did not go with him." I wrote the number on the chart and capped my pen. My eyes were dry. I had cried for Daniel for a year, and then I had stopped, and I had promised myself I would never cry in a hospital again. "I need to check your chart for the medication orders," I said. Then his voice came into my head. It was not a sound in the room. It was a voice in the space behind my eyes, low and urgent, and it said, "Find Tam." I dropped my pen. It rolled under the bed and I did not pick it up. I looked at Caleb and his lips had not moved, but his eyes were on mine and they were bright with something that looked like fear. "Who is Tam?" I said. "Ask for him at the pack house on Miller's Ridge. He is my Gamma now. He will know what to do." His voice was barely a whisper. "Please. Find him before my brother finds you." The door to room seven opened. I turned, and Silas was standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and a smile on his face, and behind him was a woman I had never seen before, with dark brown hair and violet eyes, and she was looking at me as if she had been told a secret she had not wanted to hear. Silas looked at Caleb, and then at me, and his smile widened. "Nora," he said. "I would like you to meet Ivy. My mate."