The wind came off the ridge in sheets, and the hiker's blood soaked through my jacket before I reached the first switchback. I had him over my shoulder in a fireman's carry, his good arm hooked around my neck, his bad leg dangling. His name was Peter. He had told me that much before the pain took the rest of his words. Forty-two years old, a schoolteacher from Ohio, in Colorado for a week of hiking he had saved for three years to afford. His boot had found a patch of ice where the trail narrowed above a two hundred foot drop, and the rest was gravity and rock. The radio had gone dead six minutes into the climb. I knew the trail by feel now, by the shape of the snow under my boots and the way the pines leaned away from the wind. My fingers had stopped hurting somewhere around the last ridge, which was a bad sign I did not have time to think about. Ash stirred in my chest. He had been silent for most of the climb, watching through my eyes, and now he pressed forward with a low, uneasy growl. Something is wrong, he said. Not the man. Something below. I did not answer him. I had learned to keep my mouth shut around my own wolf. The ambulance was parked where the access road ended, a red and white shape smeared by the falling snow. Two paramedics were wrestling a stretcher out of the back, and a woman in a dark green jacket stood between them with her hands already gloved, her hair pulled back, her face turned up toward the trail. I saw her before she saw me. That was the first thing. The second thing was the scent. It hit me at thirty yards, carried on a gust that should have brought me nothing but pine and diesel. Snow, cold and clean. Antiseptic, sharp and faintly sweet. Coffee gone stale in a paper cup. And under all of it, something warm and living that made my knees slow down without asking my permission. Ash stood up in my chest, every hair on him bristling, and he made a sound I had not heard from him in two years. There, he said. That one. I knew what he meant. I had heard older wolves describe it, and I had always filed it away with the other stories they told around the pack house fire. The scent that finds you. The one the moon picks out of a whole world of people and sets in front of you. I kept walking. There was a man bleeding on my shoulder. Whatever the moon had decided could wait. "Bring him here," the woman called. Her voice cut through the wind without effort. "Stretcher, now." I laid Peter down as gently as I could. He groaned, and his hand caught at my sleeve. "Don't leave," he said. "I'm not going anywhere," I told him, and I meant it, and I hated how easily the lie sat in my mouth when I realized she was watching me. She crouched on the other side of the stretcher and put two fingers against Peter's throat. Up close her eyes were green, a shade darker than the pines, and there was a small white line at the corner of her mouth where she had been biting her lip. She smelled of snow and antiseptic and that warm thing underneath, and my hands, which had not shaken on the cliff, shook now. "Pulse is fast and thin," she said to the paramedics. "Get the tourniquet above the knee. I need a line in his left arm and I need it now." One of the paramedics, a heavyset man named Dale who had ridden with me twice before, leaned in. "Doctor, his leg is a mess. We should get him to the hospital before we start." "He won't make the hospital if we don't stop the bleeding here," she said. No heat in it. Just the flat certainty of someone who had done this before. "Tourniquet." I pulled my gloves off with my teeth and put my hands where she pointed. The wound ran from Peter's knee to the middle of his shin, a deep tear where the rock had opened him up. I pressed down on the artery above it and felt the blood push back against my palm, warm and insistent. She looked at my hands and then at me, and something in her face changed. "You came down that trail with him on your back," she said. "Yes." "The trail's been closed since noon. The station said no one was going up." "Someone had to." She held my eyes for a moment longer than the situation required. Then she turned back to Peter and started giving orders again, and the world narrowed to blood and gauze and the sound of the wind. We worked for eleven minutes. I know because I counted, the way I count things when the ground feels unsteady. At some point she put her bare hand over mine to show me where to press, and the touch went through me like a struck wire. Her fingers were cold and steady, and where her skin met mine there was a small bright shock that had nothing to do with static. She felt it. I saw her blink and draw her hand back half an inch. She did not say anything. She looked at my face, at my eyes, for a beat too long, and then she went back to work as if nothing had happened. Ash had gone very still. Mine, he said. No, I told him. "Get him in the bus," she said at last, and the paramedics lifted Peter onto the stretcher and slid him inside. She stripped her gloves off and dropped them in the red bag, and her hands were shaking now, just slightly, the way hands shake after the adrenaline leaves. She turned to me. "You're coming too. Your fingers are the color of a fish belly and you have a cut on your forehead you haven't noticed." "I'm fine." "You're hypothermic and you're bleeding. Get in the bus." I looked at the ambulance, at the red lights turning the snow pink, and every instinct in me said to walk away up the trail and not look back. The mate bond was a pack law matter. A human who got close to a wolf got hurt, and I had already hurt enough people by standing too near them. "Doctor," I said, "what's your name?" "Clara," she said. "Clara Reyes. Get in the bus, Elias." I had not told her my name. It was stitched on my jacket, I realized, in the same white letters as the station logo. Of course it was. I got in the bus. She worked on Peter the whole way down, and I sat on the bench across from her with a foil blanket around my shoulders, watching her hands. The ambulance swayed, and the sirens were loud, and at one point she reached into her jacket pocket for a pen and something small and silver came out with it and fell on the floor. I picked it up before she could. It was a vial. A small glass vial with a gray stopper and a smear of dark red inside, and a handwritten label that read No. 4, Ridge, 11/02. She took it from my fingers, and her face did not change, and she slid it back into her pocket. "It's nothing," she said. "Old sample." She went back to Peter. I sat with my back against the wall of the bus and listened to the tires hiss through the slush and did not ask her what kind of sample needed to be kept in a jacket pocket. But I knew what I had seen on that label. I knew the ridge, and I knew the date, and I knew what had been found up there three weeks ago, because I had been the one to report it to the pack and to the sheriff both. Ash's ears had gone flat. She kept it, he said. She kept the blood. The ambulance turned into the hospital lot, and Clara looked up at me across Peter's stretcher, and her green eyes held a question she had not asked yet. I should have gotten out at the door and walked away. Instead I stayed where I was, and that was the first mistake of the rest of my life.

The hospital lights were the kind that made everyone look half dead. I sat on the edge of a treatment table in a curtained bay with my boots dripping onto the tile, and Clara pulled a metal cart up beside me and snapped on a fresh pair of gloves. "You first," she said. "Then I'll check on Peter." "He's the one who fell." "He's the one who's already in surgery. You're the one sitting in front of me." She held out her hand. "Give me your left." I put my hand in hers. The cut across my palm had opened again on the climb down, and the knuckles were split where the rock had caught them. She turned my hand over and made a small sound through her teeth. "You didn't feel this?" "I felt it." "You walked a mile and a half with a man on your back and a cut to the bone." "It's not to the bone." She looked up at me. Her eyes were green and steady, and there was a small crease between her brows that I would come to know very well. "You're going to argue with the doctor about your own hand?" "No," I said. "I'm going to let you stitch it." She cleaned the wound with something that stung, and I watched her work. She had good hands, quick and certain, and she talked while she worked, which I learned later was how she handled her own nerves. "You're with the rescue station up on the east ridge," she said. "I've seen your name on the call sheets. Elias." "Yes." "Two years now, Dale said. Before that?" "Before that I was on the western side of the range." "Doing the same thing?" "The same thing." I watched her thread the needle. "Rescue work." "You don't talk much about yourself." "There isn't much to say." She put in the first stitch. It pulled, and I kept my face still, and she glanced at me and then away. "Most people flinch," she said. "I've had worse." "I'm sure you have." She tied off the stitch and started the next one. "Peter's leg. The tear in his calf. I've seen rock cuts before, and that wasn't one." The words landed softly, the way a person says something they have been turning over for a while. I kept my breathing even. "It was a fall," I said. "Part of it was a fall. The tear has edges that don't match the rock. They're too clean, and they curve." She finished the second stitch and reached for the scissors. "I've been in this hospital for six years, Elias. I've seen four of these since October. Hikers coming down off the ridge with wounds that don't match the story they tell." "People lie about how they got hurt. They don't want to look foolish." "Some of them don't remember. That's what makes it strange." She tied off the third stitch and looked at me with her hands still. "Peter had four curved marks on his calf under the tear. Evenly spaced. I measured them." "He hit a rock." "Rocks don't have four curved points." She went back to work on my hand. "The sheriff's office says animal attack. The forest service says the same. But there's no animal in this state that leaves marks like that, and the tracks your station reported three weeks ago didn't match a mountain lion either." Something cold moved down the back of my neck. The station reported the tracks because I had written the report myself. I had kept the description vague on purpose. "What did the tracks look like?" I asked. She glanced at me. "You'd know better than me. It's your station." "I'm a technician. I don't do the wildlife reports." "Someone there does." She pulled the fourth stitch tight and reached for the bandage roll. "Whoever wrote it said the prints were too large for a wolf and too deep for a dog. The forest service filed it under inconclusive." I said nothing. Ash had been quiet since the ambulance, but I could feel him listening, his ears turned toward her voice. She wrapped my hand in gauze and taped it down, and then she took my right hand and turned it over. The knuckles there were split too, and she started cleaning them without asking. "The man in the ambulance," she said. "You called me doctor before I told you what I was." "Your jacket says Telluride ER. And you were giving orders." "That's fair." She dabbed at the split knuckle. "You were up on that trail after the closure. The station radioed that no one was going up. So either you disobeyed a direct order or you heard something on a channel the rest of us didn't." "I heard Peter's radio call. He got it out before the signal died." "And you went alone. In a blizzard. Without waiting for a team." "There wasn't time to wait." She set the gauze down and looked at me, and the question was already in her eyes before she asked it. "How did you find him? The trail's a mile and a half long and the snow was coming down thick enough to blind anyone. How did you know where he was?" The truth was that I had smelled him. Blood carries on the wind for a wolf, and Peter's blood had been in the air from the moment I stepped out of the station. The truth was that I had run the first half mile on four legs through the trees before I shifted back at the treeline. "I know that trail," I said. "I've walked it a hundred times." "That's not an answer." "It's the one I have." She held my eyes for a long moment. Then she finished wrapping my knuckles and smoothed the tape down with her thumb. Her glove was off on that hand. I don't know when she had taken it off. Her bare thumb pressed against the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse, and the spark came again, stronger this time, a bright warm shock that ran up my arm and settled somewhere behind my ribs. She felt it. I know she did, because her breath caught and she did not pull her hand away. "What was that?" she said. "Static." "There's no carpet in here." She was still holding my wrist. Her thumb moved, just slightly, and I felt my pulse jump under it. "Your skin is hot." "The blanket." "You're not under the blanket." She let go of my wrist and stepped back, and I saw her hands were not quite steady. She pulled her gloves off and dropped them in the bin and turned to the cart, and she did not look at me for a full five seconds. Then she did. "Where are you staying tonight?" she asked. "The station bunk room." "Not with that hand. You can't drive and you shouldn't be alone. The cut's deep and if it gets infected you'll lose the use of two fingers." She pulled a card from her pocket and wrote something on the back with a pen from the cart. "This is my number. Call me in the morning. If the swelling gets worse, call me tonight." She held out the card. I took it, and our fingers brushed, and the spark came a third time, small and sure as a struck match. She pulled her hand back fast. "You felt that," I said. "I felt something." She picked up the cart and pushed it toward the curtain. Then she stopped with her back to me. "There's something else. When Peter came in, the surgeon found a second wound. On his shoulder, under his jacket. He didn't fall on that one, and he doesn't remember how he got it. It's already healing. It shouldn't be healing this fast." She turned around. "Four marks on his calf. One on his shoulder. A man who can't remember how he got either. And a rescue technician who found him in a blizzard when no one else could." She let the curtain fall open. "If you know something about what's on that mountain, Elias, you should tell me. Because I've got a sample in my pocket that's going to a lab in Denver next week, and when the results come back, I don't think the sheriff's office is going to like what they say." She walked away down the corridor, and I sat on the table with my bandaged hand in my lap and Clara's card between my fingers. Ash's voice was low and certain. She is going to find out. Yes, I said. She is.

The station sat at the end of a gravel road that the plow gave up on in December, a low building of gray timber and frosted windows with a radio mast bolted to the roof. My truck was the only vehicle in the lot. Nina's Jeep was gone, which meant she was either on a call or asleep in the dispatcher's office with her boots on the desk. I came in through the equipment bay and left my jacket on the hook where the melted snow could drip onto the mat. The building smelled of diesel, wet wool and the coffee Nina burned every afternoon. Under all of it, faint as a fingerprint on glass, I could smell Clara. Her scent had followed me out of the hospital and into the truck and it was still in my nose now, snow and antiseptic and that warm thing underneath. Ash had not stopped pacing since the trail. We should go back, he said. She is alone in that hospital. She has a whole floor of nurses. She is not alone. She is alone in the way that matters. You know what I mean. I did know. I told him to shut up. The bunk room was dark. I lay on my back in the bottom bunk with my boots off and my bandaged hand resting on my chest, and I stared at the slats of the bunk above me and tried to think about anything else. The roof groaned under the weight of the snow. The radiator ticked. Somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed. I thought about the vial in her pocket. Number four, Ridge, the eleventh of February. Three weeks ago a hiker had come down off the eastern slope with a wound on his forearm that would not close. He had told the sheriff a dog had bitten him. I had been on the call, and I had seen the wound, and I had known within a breath that the bite was not from a dog. The teeth were too wide and the angle was wrong, and the hiker's eyes had gone glassy when I asked him where exactly he had been. He had died two days later. The hospital called it an infection. The blood in Clara's vial was from that man. I was almost sure of it. She had drawn it before the end and kept it, and if a lab in Denver ran it against a human baseline they would find markers that no human blood carried. I sat up in the bunk and put my feet on the cold floor. Ash stirred. Where are you going? To see whether Nina's awake. Her office was at the front of the building behind a glass partition, and the light was on. She was in her chair with her red hair pinned up with a pencil and her feet on the desk exactly as I had guessed, and she had a paperback open against her knee. Nina Carver had been the station's dispatcher for four years and the pack's Beta for three, and she could hear a man's mood in the way he opened a door. "You're supposed to be in the hospital," she said without looking up. "I was in the hospital." "You were supposed to stay in the hospital." "I don't like the food." She turned a page. "How's the hand?" "Eight stitches." "Eight." She closed the book and set it on the desk. "And the hiker?" "Surgery. He'll keep the leg." "Good." She swung her feet down and leaned forward, and her sharp amber eyes went over me the way they went over a weather map. "So. What happened up there?" "I carried him down." "You carried him down through a closed trail in a whiteout after the radio died." She said it flatly. "That's what the log says. That's what I'll tell Marcus." "Thank you." "Don't thank me yet." She picked up her mug, found it empty, and set it down again. "There's a doctor at the hospital who's been asking about the animal attacks. She's been asking for months. She filed two reports with the sheriff and one with the forest service and she keeps a folder in her desk that her administrator has told her twice to close." "I know." Nina's eyes narrowed. "You know." "I met her tonight." "You met her." She said the words slowly, as if she were tasting them for something wrong. "And?" "She's sharp. She's already made the marks on the hiker. She asked me how I found him in the snow." "And what did you tell her?" "That I know the trail." Nina leaned back. She was quiet for a while, and I could hear the wind pushing at the window behind her. "You smell different," she said at last. "Did you know that? You came in that door and I smelled it before I saw your face. It's all over your jacket and your hands and it's not a scent I know." "It's the hospital." "It's not the hospital." She stood up and came around the desk. She was shorter than me by a head, and she stopped a foot away and tilted her face up and breathed in, and her expression changed by slow degrees. "Elias. Tell me that's not what I think it is." "Nothing happened." "I didn't ask what happened. I asked what it is." Her voice had dropped. "The moon doesn't make mistakes, but she doesn't do this either. Not to a human. Not to a doctor who's already sniffing around our border with a folder full of questions." "She doesn't know anything." "She knows enough to keep a sample." Nina said it before I had said a word about the vial, and I felt my face change, and I saw her see it. "So it's true. Marcus heard a rumor from the hospital and sent me to check it. There's a sample of wolf blood in that woman's pocket and she's sending it to a lab." "Who told Marcus?" "That's the question, isn't it." She stepped back and folded her arms. "The Council has an observer in Telluride. He arrived last week. He's been asking the station for its call records and the sheriff for its incident reports, and Marcus has been smiling at him all week like they're old friends." "Oliver." "You know his name." She looked at me for a moment. "You need to stay away from her. That's not me being cruel. If the Council finds out a Ridgeback enforcer has a human mate, they won't ask whether you claimed her. They'll ask what she knows, and then they'll ask what you told her." "She's a doctor. She's not a threat to the pack." "She's a witness." Nina's voice was quiet. "That's worse." I went back to the bunk room and lay down again, and I did not sleep. The radiator ticked and the roof groaned and Ash paced and paced. Somewhere around four in the morning I heard a vehicle come up the gravel road and stop outside the bay, and a door open, and boots on the concrete. I knew those boots. I had known them since I was twelve years old. Marcus came into the bunk room without knocking and stood at the foot of my bunk with his silver hair damp from the snow and his grey eyes catching the light from the hallway. He was smiling. "Elias," he said. "Get up. There's a doctor in this town who needs watching, and I've decided you're the one to do it." I sat up slowly and looked at him. "Watching how?" "Watching close." His smile did not move. "She's been asking questions about our mountain. I want to know every question and every answer. I want to know who she talks to and where she goes after her shift. And I want you to tell me all of it." He put a hand on the bunk frame and leaned in. "Unless," he said, "you'd rather tell me why her scent is all over your jacket."