The inn at Kenai had one good room and I had rented it for the night, which was the first reckless thing I had done in eleven years. The second was the woman in the bed behind me. She was asleep, or pretending to be. The blanket had slipped off her shoulder and I could see the line of her back, pale in the light from the parking lot. Snow ticked against the window. I sat on the edge of the mattress with my socks in my hand and thought about how long it had been since I had done anything without a reason. Her name was Nadia. She had told me that much at the bar downstairs. She had come in off the highway at nine with snow in her hair and a bag she kept between her feet, and she had ordered a coffee and then changed her mind and ordered whiskey instead. I had been sitting two stools away with a beer I did not want. She had asked me if the salmon was any good. I had said the salmon was frozen and the cook was honest about it. She had laughed with her whole face and something in my chest had moved that had no business moving. The wolf in me had known before I did. It usually does. It stood up behind my ribs and paid attention, and I told it to lie down and it told me to go to hell. We had talked until the barman started stacking chairs. She was a doctor. She had driven up from Anchorage on bad tires and she was starting at the clinic on Monday. I told her I worked there, nights, and she looked at my hands and said, "You are the nurse, then," and I said, "I am the nurse," and she said, "Good. I hate working with people who do not know where things are." In the hallway outside my room she stopped and looked at me a moment too long. Her eyes were hazel, almost green in the bad light, with small lines at the corners from squinting into weather. I said something stupid about the storm. She said, "I am not good at this," and I said, "Neither am I," and then she kissed me. She kissed like someone who had decided to do it and was not going to waste time. I got the door open, we got inside, and the rest happened the way it happens when two people have been alone a long time and neither wants to talk about it. She had a small scar on her shoulder blade and warm hands, and she laughed once, quietly, when I fumbled with the lamp, and then she did not laugh anymore. I sat there in the dark with my socks and listened to the snow. That was the sensible thing, to leave before she woke. A man with a secret gets out of the bed, gets into his boots, goes back to his cabin, and pretends the whole thing was a dream. My clothes were on the chair. My coat was on the hook by the door. The clock said one forty in red numbers, and the room smelled of her and radiator dust and the soap from the bathroom. Then the wind shifted. It came through the window frame, a thin cold thread of it, and it brought the parking lot with it, the diesel from a truck, the salt off the water, the wet wool of somebody's coat downstairs. Underneath all that was something else. Something clean, like birch bark peeled back in summer, and like the air after a hard frost, and like a woman standing in a doorway with snow in her hair. The smell was coming from the coat on the hook. Her coat. I did not move. Every hair on my arms had lifted at once. The wolf came up so hard and so fast that I put a hand on the mattress to steady myself, and it did not argue with me this time, it just stood there inside me with its ears up and its whole body shaking. Mate. That is the word. There is no other word for it. It is not a thing you decide. It is a thing that happens to you, the way weather happens, and there is no arguing with weather. I had been in love once, badly, a long time ago, and I had thought that was the same thing. It was not. This was like standing too close to a fire and finding out you had been cold your whole life. The coat was dark green canvas with a hood and a broken zipper pull. There was a badge pinned to the collar, small and silver. I had noticed it at the bar and thought it was a hospital badge. It was not a hospital badge. It was a hunter's badge. I had seen one before. I had worn one myself, once, in another life with another name. Two things happened in my head at the same time, and they did not fit together, and I knew they were both true. She was my mate. She was a hunter. Behind me she turned over. The sheet pulled across her and she made a small sound, the sound of someone coming up out of sleep without wanting to. "Aaron?" Her voice was rough. "Are you awake?" I got my socks on. It took two tries because my fingers were not working properly. "I have to go," I said. She sat up. The blanket fell away and she did not bother to catch it. Her hair was a mess of chestnut brown and her eyes in the red light from the clock were sharp, not sleepy at all. "Now?" "I have a shift. The night man called in sick and Mira will have my head if I am late." "That is a lie," she said. She did not say it angrily. She said it the way she might have told me I had a fever. "You were fine five minutes ago." I got my shirt on. I got my coat on. She watched me the whole time, and the wolf was clawing at me from the inside, screaming at me not to walk out of that door. It wanted me to go back to the bed. It wanted me to put my face against her neck and breathe. "You are the new doctor," I said. "You start Monday." "That is right." "I work nights. We will be working together." "I know." I put my hand on the doorknob. The metal was cold, and her coat was right there next to me, and it took everything I had not to lean into it. "You should request a different clinic," I said. There was a long pause. Then she said, very quietly, "Why would I do that?" I opened the door, went out into the hall, and closed it behind me. The click of it was the loneliest sound I have ever heard. I went down the stairs, through the lobby, and out into the snow, and the wind took the door out of my hands. The clock in my truck said two in the morning. I had twelve hours before my shift. I had a clinic to go to and an Alpha who was dying by inches in the pack house behind the trees. And I had a mate, and she was a hunter, and she was going to walk into my clinic on Monday morning with that badge on her coat. I started the engine and sat there with the heater blowing cold air in my face. I had been lying to my pack for twelve years. I had gotten good at it, the way a man gets good at anything he does every day. I did not know how I was going to lie to her. Halfway home I realized I did not even know her last name, and I had to pull over because my hands would not stop shaking.

Mira was already at the front desk when I came in at seven, which was wrong, because Mira worked days and the clinic was not open until eight. She had a mug in one hand and a stack of folders in the other, and when she saw my face she set both down. "You look like a man who slept in his truck," she said. "I slept in my truck." "On purpose?" "On accident." I hung my coat on the hook behind the door and did not look at her. "The night man called in sick. I told you." "You told me at four in the morning, which is a strange hour to be making phone calls." She pushed the mug toward me. It was coffee, and it was the bad kind, and I drank half of it standing up. The clinic was three rooms and a waiting area with a fish tank nobody cleaned. The reception desk had a bell on it that Mira had bought at a yard sale, and the bell had a crack in the top that made the ring flat. There was a poster about handwashing on the wall and a clock above the door that ran four minutes fast, and I had never fixed it because the extra four minutes had saved me more than once. At eight the door opened and Nadia walked in. She had her hair tied back and a canvas bag over one shoulder and the same dark green coat with the broken zipper pull. She looked at me the way a person looks at a stain on a good shirt. Then she looked at Mira and smiled, and the smile was real, and something in me turned over. "You must be Mira," she said. "I am Nadia. I am the new doctor." "I know who you are," Mira said. "You are early." "I am always early. It is a character flaw." I took the files from Nadia's hands before she could ask where to put them. She let me. She did not say thank you. She walked the length of the clinic and looked at the treatment room, the supply cabinet, the back door with the deadbolt, and she made a small sound at the deadbolt, like she approved of it, and I had to turn away and pretend to be very interested in the filing cabinet. The wolf had not been quiet since the moment she came through the door. It was pacing behind my ribs, and every time she moved the pacing got worse. Her scent was all over the room now, that frost and birch smell, and there was nothing I could do about it except breathe through my mouth and keep my hands busy. At ten, after the first two patients, she came out of the treatment room and sat down at the desk across from me. "The night records," she said. I looked up from the chart I was not really reading. "What about them?" "There are none. There is a gap from August to November, and then nothing at all until last Tuesday. A clinic cannot run without records, Aaron. Somebody has to sign off on what was given to whom." "Maybe somebody spilled coffee on them." She did not laugh. She had a pen in her hand and she turned it over once, and her eyes were on my face and not on the empty file drawer behind me. "I checked the drawer. There is a water stain and no records. That is not the same thing." "Then maybe the night man was lazy. He was lazy. I told you he called in sick. He also never filed a thing in his life." "You work nights," she said. "You are the night man." "I am the nurse. He was the other night man." She leaned back in her chair. Her badge caught the light from the window and I saw it properly for the first time, and my mouth went dry. It was not a hospital badge. It was a small silver shield with a design stamped into it that I knew the way I knew my own name. A hunter's badge. A Kenai hunter's badge, the old kind, from the family that had signed the treaty with us before I was born. My wolf stood up and did not lie back down. "Aaron," she said. "Are you all right?" "Never better." I picked up the chart again. "Let me check that again." "You said that already." "Did I?" "You did." She was watching my hands. My hands were steady, which was a small mercy. "You also said you were the nurse, and that the night man was the other night man, and you have not answered a single question I asked you." "I am not good with questions before lunch." "Then we will talk after lunch." She stood up and smoothed her coat. "I am going to look at the supply cabinet. If the records are gone, the inventory will tell me what was taken and when. Somebody wrote the orders somewhere." She went into the back room. The moment the door shut behind her, Mira leaned over the desk and spoke in a low voice. "You are going to have to be better at this." "I know." "She is not stupid. She is going to find the gap in the silver account, and when she does, she is going to ask why a clinic on the Kenai needs that much silver nitrate in a year." "It is a supply order." "It is a paper trail," Mira said. "And it is in your handwriting." I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. Through the wall I could hear Nadia moving things around in the cabinet, the small clink of glass, the scrape of a box being pulled off a shelf. She was methodical. She had been in there four minutes and she had not once called out to ask where anything was. The wolf pushed at me again, and this time it pushed with a picture, the way it sometimes did. Not words. Just the sense of her standing close and the smell of her in a place that was mine. It wanted me to go into that back room. It wanted me to shut the door. I got up and went outside instead. The cold hit me in the face and cleared my head for about six seconds, and then the door opened behind me and Nadia came out with a clipboard in her hand. "There is a discrepancy in the silver account," she said. "Fourteen ounces in October that do not match any patient record, and a signature that is not yours." I turned around slowly. The snow had stopped and the sky was the color of old pewter and the water beyond the cannery was flat and gray. "Whose signature is it?" I said. She looked at the clipboard, then at me, and there was something new in her face. Not suspicion. She had been suspicious of me since the inn. This was worse. She looked like a woman who had found a piece of a puzzle on the floor and had just realized the picture was bigger than the box. "It says Silas," she said. "That is your Alpha, isn't it?" I did not answer. "Aaron." She took a step closer, and her voice dropped. "Why would an Alpha sign for silver nitrate? And why does the amount match the dose that would kill a man?" Behind her the clinic bell rang flat, and a fisherman in a soaked jacket stumbled up the steps with his hand wrapped in a rag, and Nadia turned to him the way a doctor turns, and I stood there in the snow with my heart going like a hammer. She had the paperwork now. She had a name on it. And the name was the man I would die for.

Silas came to the clinic on Thursday, which he never did. He sent for me when he was sick. He had done it that way for years, a phone call from the pack house and a walk through the trees with my bag, and the arrangement suited us both, because the clinic had paper and paper had a way of remembering things. But Nadia had the silver account now, and she had asked about the signature, and I had spent two days not answering her. So on Thursday morning I walked up the track behind the pack house with my bag in my hand and found him sitting on the porch in a coat that was too thin for the weather, and he did not argue when I told him he was coming with me. "You look like hell," he said. "I have been sleeping badly." "Since when?" "Since Monday." He got into the truck without help, which cost him something. His hands were shaking by the time he got the door shut. Silas was sixty-nine years old and had been Alpha of the Kenai Pack for thirty-one of those years, and in all that time I had never seen him shake. At the clinic I put him in the back room and pulled the curtain and listened to his chest. His breathing was wet at the bottom. There was a gray cast under his skin that the fluorescent light did not flatter, and the pulse at his wrist was thin and fast. "The same as before," he said. "Worse than before." "A little worse." "Silas." I sat down on the stool beside the examination table. "The last dose did not hold. You are not absorbing it anymore." He looked at the ceiling. He had white hair, cut short, and amber eyes that had gone cloudy at the edges, and he looked at the ceiling the way a man looks at a sky he does not expect to see again. "Then we try a larger dose." "A larger dose will kill you faster." "Everything kills me faster, Aaron." The curtain rings scraped behind me and I turned and Nadia was standing there with a chart in her hand. She had come in at six that morning and she had not said more than ten words to me all day, and now she looked at Silas and then at me and said, "Is this a patient or a friend?" "Both," Silas said. "You must be the new doctor. I have heard about you." "I have heard about you too." She came in and pulled the curtain closed behind her. "Roll up your sleeve." Silas looked at me. I nodded, and he rolled up his sleeve, and Nadia took his arm in both hands and turned it to the light. There was a scar on his forearm the length of my thumb, old and pale and slightly raised, and three more on his shoulder when she pushed the sleeve higher. She did not say anything about them. She put her fingers on his wrist and counted, and then she pulled the stethoscope off her neck and listened to his chest and his back, and she asked him to breathe in and out, and she did it all without once looking at me. "Silver," she said at last. Silas did not answer. "There is a gray line at the base of your fingernails and your gums are pale and your heart is working too hard." She set the stethoscope down. "I have seen one case of this. It was a man who worked in a photographic lab in Anchorage and breathed the salts for fifteen years. He did not look like you. He was not built like a lumberjack." "I have always been big," Silas said. "He was not healing the way you are not healing." She looked at the chart, then at me. "Who is prescribing his doses?" "I am," I said. "Then you know what he is taking." "I know what he is taking." "And you know it is not working." I stood up and went to the sink and turned the water on and washed my hands, which did not need washing. The water was cold. Behind me I could hear Silas breathing and Nadia writing something on the chart, the pen scratching, and the wolf was up again, standing behind my ribs, watching her the way it always watched her. "We will start him on a different course," Nadia said. "A lower dose, more often, and a chelating agent to pull the silver out. It will be slow and it will make him sick, but it will not kill him in a week." Silas laughed. It turned into a cough. "Doctor, I have been sick for two years. A week is not the problem." "Then we agree." She handed the chart to me. "I will want to see him every second day. And I will want to know who has been supplying him, because fourteen ounces in October is not a dose. That is a stockpile." She went out. The curtain rings scraped and then it was quiet. Silas let out a long breath. "She is good." "She is a hunter." "I know what she is. I smelled it on her when she came through the door." He pulled his sleeve down over the scars with slow fingers. "I also know what she is to you. You have been standing in this room for ten minutes with your back to her and your shoulders up around your ears." I turned around. "It does not matter what she is to me." "It matters more than anything that has happened to you in twelve years." "Silas." "Listen to me." He sat up straighter and his voice was quiet and rough. "You think you can hold it in. You think because you have held everything else in for twelve years that this will be the same. It will not. The bond does not care about your promises. It does not care about the treaty. It will pull at you every day and every night and one day you will be tired and it will pull you all the way to her door." I sat down on the stool again. My hands were on my knees and my knees were cold. "What do I do?" I said. "You tell her the truth." "She will kill me." "She might." He said it without flinching. "That is the chance you take. The other way is worse. You lie to her and she finds out from someone else, and then she will not even give you the chance to explain." The door of the clinic opened and the bell rang flat and a voice I did not know said, "Is this the Kenai clinic?" I got up and pushed the curtain aside. The man in the waiting area was tall and silver-haired and wearing a coat that had never been near a fish. He had pale blue eyes and a smile that did not reach them, and he was holding a leather case in one gloved hand and a letter in the other with a wax seal on it. "Victor," Silas said behind me. His voice had gone flat. "You are early." "Am I?" The man looked at his letter as if it had the date on it. "The Council of Alphas does not like to be kept waiting, Silas. You know that." Nadia had come out of the back room with a box of gloves in her hand. She stopped when she saw him. "Victor," she said. "You said you would come in the spring." "The situation has changed." He looked past her at me, and his pale eyes went over my face and my hands and the badge on my coat, and he smiled again. "And who is this?" "The nurse," I said. "The nurse." He said it slowly, as if he was tasting it. "How convenient. I was hoping to speak with someone who knows the clinic's records." He set the letter on the desk and slid it toward me. The wax seal on it was the seal of the Council of Alphas, and under it, in careful black ink, my own name was written. Not Aaron. The other one. The name I had not used in twelve years. "Read it," Victor said. "I think you will find it interesting."