The Pack Calls Him Killer

The fire had burned down to a red pulse by the time Callum's hands found my waist, and the bothy smelled of wet wool and peat smoke and him. He had kissed me once already, on the step outside, a quick hard press of his mouth that I blamed on the cold. Now he was not quick about it. His fingers spread against the small of my back and drew me in until the wool of my jacket met the wool of his, and his mouth came down on mine with a patience I had not expected from a wolf the pack called the quiet one.

I kissed him back. There is no other way to say it. The storm had been beating the shutters for an hour, the road down the glen was a river of mud, and Callum had come in from the deer check soaked through and shivering, and I had given him the place nearest the fire because it was the decent thing to do. Then he had said my name, just "Isla," low and rough, and the decent thing had gone out of my head.

He tasted of rain. His thumb found the corner of my jaw and tilted my face up, and I felt the slow burn of him spreading under my skin like warmth coming back into a numb hand. My wolf rolled over once in my chest, lazy and pleased, and I let her. His mouth moved to my throat, and I heard my own breathing go uneven, and the fire spat a knot of resin and neither of us turned to look.

"Do you want me to stop?" he asked against my pulse.

"No," I said. "I want you to be quieter than that."

He laughed, a warm breath on my neck, and then he was kissing me again, and his weight came onto me, and the bothy wall at my back was rough stone and his hands were not. I had thought about this more than I ever meant to, on the long walks up the hill, in the dark of the gamekeeper's cottage with Mairi asleep in the next room. Now it was happening and my mind went white and simple, and there was only the taste of him and the heat of him and the low sound he made when my fingers found the back of his neck.

I was still trembling from it when the cry came up the glen.

We broke apart. Callum's head came round to the door, and his eyes, green as wet moss, had gone wolfish and flat. "That's the burial bell," he said.

We ran. He shifted on the path and I shifted after him, and for the length of that run there was nothing but the hill and the smell of the night and the bell tolling somewhere ahead. I will not describe the shift. Anyone who has felt it knows it, and anyone who has not would think me mad. My wolf is a good size and her coat is the color of my hair, that pale gold that goes almost cream under the moon. I ran behind Callum's dark shape, and the heather tore at my legs, and the bell kept ringing.

The whole pack was at the cairn by the time we came down. Torches had been set in the ground, and the smoke of them bent sideways in the wind, and Douglas stood at the head of the grave with his grey head bare and his jaw set. Alpha Douglas, who was never anything but Alpha, even standing at his own mate's burial with his hands shaking at his sides. Mhairi was in the ground already, wrapped in the grey cloth, and Rabbie was heaping the last stones. His red beard caught the torchlight, and he was smiling. I saw that smile and I put it away in my mind where I keep things I do not understand yet.

Fiona took the bowl of water from the elder beside her and went round the circle, touching each of us on the brow. Silver hair, silver eyes, hands like a bird's. "Earth to earth," she said, "and stone to stone, and the moon keeps her own."

Then she came to me and stopped.

I do not know what she saw in my face. She held the bowl and looked at me for a long moment, and her mouth did something I did not like. "You will stand at the head of the cairn," she said. "The rites pass to the Luna."

"I am not the Luna," I said. "You are confusing me with someone who wants the job."

"The rites do not care what you want."

So I stood at the head of the cairn, and the pack looked at me, and somewhere off in the birches an owl said its two notes over and over. The wind came down the hill and the torches guttered. Douglas put his hand on the top stone, the one with the crescent carved into it, and said the words for the dead, and his voice broke once in the middle and then went on.

That was when I heard her.

It came in with the wind, close and clear, as if Mhairi had leaned down out of the dark to put her mouth to my ear. I had heard her before. Twice, maybe three times in my life, at the edges of sleep, never a full sentence. This was a full sentence.

"The one beside you is not what you think," she said.

I did not move. My hands stayed folded in front of me and my face stayed still, because a gamekeeper learns to keep her face still when the stag bolts and the long day is lost. Under my ribs my wolf had gone low and silent, her ears flat.

The one beside me. I looked without turning my head. Callum stood at my left shoulder, his auburn hair still wet from the bothy, his hands loose at his sides. Rabbie stood at my right, finishing the cairn with a stone in each palm.

"Did you say something?" Callum asked quietly.

"No," I said.

Fiona was watching me from across the grave. She had the bowl in her hands and she was watching me the way a hawk watches a hen it has not decided about yet, and I understood then that she knew something about me, and that whatever she knew, she was not going to say it in front of Douglas.

I shut my eyes for a moment. "Mhairi," I thought at her, as hard as I could. "If that is you, say it plainly. Who is beside me?"

The wind turned. The torch nearest me went out. And in the dark between one breath and the next, the voice came again, softer, and this time it was not a warning. It was the sound you make when you are trying not to weep.

"Go home, girl," she said. "Go home before he asks you to stay."

The pack began to break up around the grave, and Douglas said the last words alone, and Rabbie put his broad hand flat on the cairn and promised the old Luna's spirit that the pack would have answers. The words were good. The hand was good. I stood in the cold with the pale gold of my hair blowing across my face and my heart going like a hare's, and I said nothing at all.

Callum leaned in. "You are white as the moon," he said. "Tell me what happened."

"Nothing happened."

"Then why is your hand shaking?"

I looked down. It was. I folded it into my sleeve and made my voice steady. "The rites," I said. "Nobody told me they would be heavy work."

He did not believe me. I could see it in his eyes, in the way he had gone still and patient, the way a wolf goes patient before it moves. And behind him, on the far side of the cairn, Rabbie had stopped smiling and was looking at me across the stones with a face I had never seen him wear, as if he had just found something he had been hunting for a long time.

Callum took my wrist. "Come away from here," he said. "We need to talk."

I looked at his hand on my wrist and remembered the bothy, and the fire, and the way he had said my name, and I heard the dead woman's voice telling me to go home. And because I could not think of a single good reason to trust either of them, I let him lead me down the hill toward the pack house.