The freezer door clicked shut behind me at three in the morning, and the cold hit my face like a hand. I had come down from the pack house with a penlight and a bad excuse, and I stood among the hanging salmon and the frost on the steel shelves and told myself I was checking the locks. My wolf knew better. He had been pacing since the Council letter arrived, and the smell in that room pulled me toward the back corner where the old ledger cabinet stood. Wolfsbane. Not much. A thread of it under the fish and the salt. The cabinet was unlocked. The ledger sat on the shelf, the black book the Gamma kept, the one every wolf in the Blackthorn Pack signed at every full moon. I opened it to the last page. My name was there in my own hand, signed beside a lie that had been sitting in my chest for ten years. I tore a blank page from the back and soaked it in the resin jar behind the salt bins. If I burned it, the smell would be gone. If the smell was gone, the audit would not find what I had buried. "You are not as quiet as you think you are." I turned. Nora Vance stood in the doorway with a flashlight in one hand and her coat half buttoned. The light went from my face to the wet page in my fingers and stayed there. "Freezer is closed after midnight," I said. "It is now." She pulled the door to behind her. "The Gamma was down here an hour ago. He stood right where you are standing and sniffed the air like a dog at a table." My wolf came up hard at her scent. It was not the freezer or the fish. It was her, clean and sharp, like cold water over stone, and something in my chest turned over and locked into place. I knew what it meant. I had heard older wolves describe it. I had never believed a word of it until that moment. "You should go back to bed," I said. "Give me the page." "No." She crossed the floor and put her hand out, and I let her take it. Her fingers closed over mine on the wet paper, and the touch went up my arm like a match to dry grass. Her grey eyes widened. She felt it too, and I watched her jaw tighten and decide to say nothing about it. "You are burning evidence," she said. "I am burning trash." "You are burning a page with wolfsbane on it in the one room where the Gamma already smells resin." She pulled the page from my hand and held it to her light. "This is not even from the ledger. It is blank." "It is a test." "It is a stupid test." She folded the page and put it in her coat pocket. "Do you know what happens to an enforcer caught masking his scent before an audit? Doran will not need a challenge. He will have you removed by the Council before the week is out." She had been in the pack four years, and in those four years she had treated my burns, my cuts, and one badly set wrist, and she had never once asked about the night the old Alpha died. That was the thing about Nora. She treated what was in front of her and let the rest alone. "You know what this is," I said. "I know what wolfsbane does." She set the flashlight on the shelf between us. "I know the Gamma keeps the ledger, and I know he has been keeping it close since the Council wrote to us. And I know you have not signed your name in it this month." "I signed it." "You signed a page that was not there two weeks ago." She said it flat, no heat in it. "I know because I look at that book more often than you do." The cold was getting into my hands. I flexed them and heard the frost grit under my boots. "Why do you look at the ledger?" I asked. "Because my brother's name is in it." That stopped me. Elias. Nineteen, sandy-haired, still waiting for his first shift, the kind of boy who flinched when a door slammed. He had been in the pack house since their mother died, and Nora had kept him close, and I had never thought much about it. "Elias signed it," I said. "Elias signed it with a hand shaking so hard the ink ran." She looked at the cabinet, then at me. "He was on the shore the night the Alpha died. He was out past the boundary marker, and he saw something he has never told me about, and since that night he has not slept more than three hours at a stretch. I have been keeping him out of the ledger's way as best I can." "You have been forging pages." "I have been correcting them." Her grey eyes did not move from mine. "There is a difference, and if you are going to turn me in for it, do it now so I can get Elias out of the territory before the auditor arrives." I should have told her to leave. That was the pack answer, the answer an enforcer gives. Instead I heard myself say, "The auditor is already here." Her face changed. Not much. A small tightening around her mouth. "Silas," she said. "The one with the cold eyes." "He came in on the morning boat and he has been in the Gamma's office since noon." I picked up the resin jar and set it back behind the salt. "If Doran smells wolfsbane on me, it will not be the page that hangs me. It will be the jar, and the jar has your brother's scent on the lid." She went very still. "Elias has never touched that jar." "Someone in this pack has." I turned the jar so the lid faced her. "And if the auditor finds it, he will trace it, and he will find the last wolf who handled it, and that wolf will be answering questions about the night our Alpha died." Nora took a slow breath. Then she reached past me, took the jar off the shelf, and put it inside her coat, against her ribs, where the smell would sit against her own skin and cover itself. "What are you doing?" I said. "What you should have done an hour ago." She buttoned her coat over it. "The Gamma will smell wolfsbane on me now, and he will assume it is because I am a healer who handles it for wounds. He will not assume I am carrying his evidence out of his own freezer." "You do not know what you are carrying." "I know it is the reason you came down here at three in the morning with a penlight and no gloves." She picked up her flashlight. "Walk me to the clinic. If we are seen together, it will look like I am treating your hands, and your hands are raw enough to make that true." I looked down at them. The cold had cracked the skin over my knuckles. She was right, and I hated that she was right. We went out through the back door and along the shore path with the wind coming off the bay, and the moon was a thin white line over the water. She walked fast with her hands in her pockets, and I kept half a step behind her, and my wolf would not stop turning toward her, would not stop naming her, would not stop telling me what I already knew. At the clinic door she stopped and turned. "The Gamma smelled resin on you tonight," she said. "Not on the page. On you. He stood in the freezer and asked me if the enforcer had been down here, and I told him I had not seen you since dinner." "You lied to him." "I bought you one night." She opened the door and held it. "Tomorrow he will ask again, and he will ask the Beta, and he will ask Maggie, and one of them will tell him the truth. So you need to decide what you are going to do before then, Rafe." "I am going to find out what your brother saw." She looked at me for a long moment. The light from the clinic doorway fell across her face and her grey eyes and the strong line of her jaw, and I felt the pull again, steady and patient, like a hand closing around my ribs. "Then come inside," she said. "Because I have been waiting four years for someone in this pack to say that, and I am not going to waste the night."

The clinic smelled of iodine and cedar shavings, and Nora went straight to the sink to wash her hands. I stood by the door with my back to the wall and watched her. She had taken the resin jar out of her coat and set it in the steel cabinet where she kept her tinctures, behind a row of brown bottles, and she had not said one word about the mate bond or the touch in the freezer. Neither had I. That suited me fine. I had spent ten years not saying things, and I was good at it. "Sit," she said. "I do not need treatment." "Your knuckles are split. Sit." I sat on the exam table. The paper crinkled under me. She came over with a tin of salve and took my right hand and turned it to the light, and the moment her fingers touched mine the bond pulled again, sharper this time, and my wolf came up behind my ribs and said one word, clear as a bell. Mine. I pulled my hand back. She did not react. She simply reached out and took it again and went on dabbing salve into the cracks. "You feel it," she said. "I do not know what you are talking about." "You do, and it is going to be a problem." She worked the salve in with her thumb. "I am not asking you to do anything about it. I am telling you that Doran has a nose, and if he catches the two of us in a room together twice in one night, he will not think we are talking about fish." "He will think I am sick." "He will think you found your mate and did not tell him." She looked up. Her grey eyes were steady. "Which is the truth, so we should decide what we are going to say." I looked at the wall behind her, at the shelf of jars and the chart pinned beside it. My chest felt too tight for the room. "Nothing happened," I said. "Something happened. I am not going to pretend it did not, because pretending is how people get killed in this pack." She finished with my right hand and started on the left. "But I will keep my mouth shut about it if you keep yours shut about the ledger." "That is a bargain I cannot make." "It is a bargain you already made in the freezer." She wrapped a strip of cloth around my knuckles. "You could have turned me in. You did not." I let her finish the wrapping. Then I said, "Tell me about the missing page." Her hands stilled. "Which page?" "Chapter seven in the ledger. The moon before last. The entry for the Beta's warrior, the one called Tomas. It was there when I signed my name in the spring, and it was gone when I checked tonight." I nodded at the cabinet in the corner where she kept her records. "I checked the copy in the office. Someone tore it out clean, with a knife, and left the stub." Nora finished tying the cloth and let go of my hand. She went to the cabinet and took out a cardboard folder and set it on the table between us. "I did not tear it out," she said. "I copied it first, and then I took it out and burned it." My wolf went quiet. That was worse than anger. "Say that again." "Tomas was on the shore that night. His scent is on the page, and the page is on the ledger, and the ledger goes to the auditor in three weeks." She opened the folder. Inside were loose sheets in her narrow handwriting. "If Silas reads that page, he will ask Tomas what he was doing on the shore, and Tomas will say he was on patrol, and then Silas will ask who sent him, and Tomas will say the Gamma. And then the auditor will have Doran's name in his book before Doran has had a chance to put his own name in it first." I picked up the top sheet. It was a copy of the ledger entry, Tomas's signature, the time of his patrol, the wolf who signed him out. At the bottom, in her hand, a note: says he was at the north marker. North marker is nine miles from where the body was found. "How long have you been doing this?" I asked. "Since the spring." "Which pages?" "Six." She folded her hands on the table. "Six pages, six wolves, all of them on the shore that night, all of them signed out by Doran. I did not burn them to protect him. I burned them because the moment the auditor reads them, Doran will know who has been reading the book before him, and he will come looking for me, and then Elias will be alone in this pack with no one to keep him safe." I set the sheet down. The wind pushed at the clinic window and rattled it in its frame. "You have been rewriting the ledger for months, and you did not think to tell the enforcer." "You are the Gamma's nephew." She said it without heat. "You eat at his table. You sign his book. You go where he sends you. I have watched you for four years, Rafe, and I have never once seen you say no to that man." The words landed where she meant them to land. I did not argue, because there was nothing to argue with. "Tomas," I said instead. "Where is he now?" "On the north patrol until Thursday." "And the page stub?" "In the fire." She closed the folder. "I am telling you this because you asked, and because I need someone in this pack who knows the book better than I do. I am not telling you because I trust you. I am telling you because you are the only wolf in the Blackthorn Pack who has a reason to want that night dug up." I looked at the folder, then at her. Her coat was still buttoned over the place where the jar had been, and her hair had come loose from behind her ear, light chestnut in the lamplight, and she was watching me with those grey eyes that missed nothing. "Do not copy any more pages," I said. "If you need one, tell me, and I will sign it out myself." "That is not the same as burning it." "No. It is better. It puts my name on the page instead of yours." I stood up. "If Doran finds a forged page, he hangs the healer. If he finds an enforcer's signature on a page that should not be there, he has to explain why he let an enforcer sign it in the first place." She considered that. Then she took the folder and put it back in the cabinet and turned the key. "You should go," she said. "The morning shift starts in two hours, and Maggie will be in the cannery kitchen by five." I went to the door. My hand was on the frame when she spoke again. "Rafe." I turned. "When you came down to that freezer tonight," she said, "you were going to burn a blank page so the auditor would find nothing missing. That means you knew something was missing before you opened the book. That means you went looking for something specific." I did not answer. "What did you smell on that page?" she asked. The wind rattled the window again. I looked at her grey eyes and the strong line of her jaw and I thought about the ten years I had spent filing that night away in a drawer in my head. "Ask me on Thursday," I said. "When Tomas comes back from the north marker."

The tide was out when I got to the south shore, and the rocks were black and slick, and the wind carried the smell of kelp and old diesel from the cannery pumps. I had walked this stretch of beach every week for ten years. I knew where the sand went soft and where the rusted oil drum marked the boundary line. I knew the exact flat stone where the old Alpha had been found, and I stopped in front of it and made myself stand still. Ten years ago I had been twenty four years old and new to the pack, and I had come down here on a call from the night watch and found the Alpha face down in the shallows with the water pulling at his coat. I had knelt beside him. I had smelled the air. I had smelled wolfsbane, and I had smelled something else underneath it, and I had told the pack I smelled nothing at all. My wolf remembered. He had never stopped remembering. He had simply stopped telling me, and that was a different thing. I crouched by the stone and put my hand in the cold water and tried to let the memory come up. The smell came first. Wolfsbane, sharp and oily. Then the salt. Then, under both of them, a wolf's scent, old, fading, like a coat left in a closet for a year. I did not know that scent. I had told myself for ten years that I did not know it. "You are going to freeze your hand off." I turned. Nora came down the beach path with her coat collar up and a canvas bag over her shoulder, and she stopped a few feet away with the wind pulling at her hair. "The morning shift does not start for an hour," I said. "I know. I saw you leave the pack house." She looked at the water, then at the stone. "Is this where he died?" "Yes." "Elias has never told me exactly where he was standing that night." She set the bag down. "I know he was past the boundary marker. I know he was out here when it happened. He came home with sand in his boots and he would not eat for two days." "Did he say anything at all?" "He said the moon was out and the water was loud." She crouched beside me, and her coat brushed my arm. "Then he said he wanted to go back to the mainland and live with our aunt, and I told him we could not afford the fare, and he did not speak to me for a week." I looked at the flat stone. The water pulled back from it and left a skin of foam that broke and slid away. "Tomas signed out at eleven that night," I said. "The Gamma signed the page. Tomas said he was at the north marker, and the north marker is nine miles from this stone, and I have walked nine miles along this shore and I know how long it takes." "And?" "And if Tomas was at the north marker at midnight, he did not kill our Alpha." I took my hand out of the water and dried it on my coat. "But someone did, and whoever it was left a smell on this beach that I have been carrying in my head for ten years." Nora was quiet for a moment. The wind came up off the bay and pushed her hair across her face and she did not move it. "You were here that night," she said. "I was the one who found him." "You were the first wolf on this beach after he died." She said it slowly, working it out. "You smelled the body before anyone else did. Before the Beta, before the Gamma, before the night watch got down here." "Yes." "So when the pack asked what you smelled, you had the only answer that mattered." She turned her head and looked at me. "And whatever you said, it was not the truth." The water pulled at the stones. I did not say anything. "Rafe." Her voice was low. "I have been a healer for nine years. I know what a wolf looks like when he is carrying something he cannot put down. You have been carrying it since before I came to this pack." "It does not matter now." "It matters because the auditor is here, and because the moment Silas reads the ledger he will ask you the same question the pack asked ten years ago, and if you give him the same answer, he will know you are lying. He is very good at that." I stood up. My knees ached from the cold. I looked out at the bay and the grey line of the far shore and the cannery lights still burning on the point. "I smelled wolfsbane," I said. She did not move. "Go on." "And under the wolfsbane, there was a wolf." I made myself say the rest of it. "An old scent. Fading. Like a coat left in a closet. I did not know it then. I know it now." Nora got to her feet and stood beside me. She did not ask the obvious question. She waited, and the waiting was worse than being asked. "It was not a stranger," she said finally. "No." "Was it a wolf from this pack?" I looked at the flat stone and the foam sliding off it. "Some of it," I said. "Part of that smell belongs to someone in this pack. I do not know who. I have been smelling the pack for ten years and I have never found the match, and that frightens me more than knowing would." Nora picked up her canvas bag. She was pale under her coat collar, and her grey eyes were very steady. "Then we find the match," she said. "Before Silas does." She started up the beach path. I stood where I was for a moment, and then I followed her, and we walked back toward the cannery in the grey morning light with the gulls crying over the water. At the top of the path, where the beach met the gravel lot, Doran was standing by the cannery door with his hands in his pockets and a cup of coffee in one hand, and he smiled when he saw us. "Enforcer," he said. "Healer Vance. Up early." "Checking the tide line," I said. "On the south shore." Doran took a sip of his coffee. His silver hair was combed back and neat, and his sharp eyes went from my face to Nora's and back again. "The south shore is a strange place to check the tide line before breakfast." "It is where the boundary marker is," Nora said. "I was checking the marker for storm damage and the enforcer was good enough to walk me out." Doran looked at her for a moment longer than was polite. Then he smiled again and stepped aside from the door. "Then you should both come in and get warm," he said. "I have been meaning to speak with the enforcer about the audit. There is a great deal to arrange, and not much time to arrange it." He held the door open and we went in past him, and I felt his eyes on the back of my neck the whole way.