The Rogue Who Was Mine

The rain had been falling since noon, and by the time I found her it was coming down in sheets that turned the logging road into a ribbon of black mud. I had been tracking her for three days. Her scent was faint, deliberately so, layered with crushed pine needles and river water, but a tracker learns to read a trail the way other wolves read a face, and hers had a rhythm I could not shake: she moved at night, she crossed water whenever she could, and she never doubled back on her own tracks.

That last part told me she was either very smart or very tired. Probably both.

I crouched behind a stand of hemlock and watched her through the branches. She was kneeling at the edge of the Cedar River, filling a canteen, and the rain plastered her bright golden hair to her head and shoulders in loose waves. Her ranger coat was dark with water, and her boots were caked to the ankle. She had broad shoulders for a woman, and when she turned her head to check the tree line I caught the pale grey-blue of her eyes and the long golden lashes darkened by rain.

The file Vance had given me said she was dangerous. It said she had killed two trackers in the northern territory and that she had been seen near the massacre site three months ago. None of it matched the woman I was looking at, but I had learned a long time ago not to trust my eyes over my orders.

I stepped out from the trees.

She heard me before she saw me. Her hand went to her belt, and a knife came up, and she rose from the water in one smooth motion. The river rushed behind her, loud enough to cover small sounds, and she had positioned herself with her back to it, which meant she was either brave or she had nowhere left to run.

"Council tracker," she said. Her voice was flat, almost bored. "You people are persistent. I will give you that."

"Put the knife down." I kept my hands loose at my sides. "I am not here to fight you."

"Then you are the first one who is not." She did not lower the knife. Rain ran off the blade in a thin line. "You have got about ten seconds before I decide you are lying."

"I am not lying."

"You are breathing like a wolf who has been running for three days. Trackers do not run unless they are hunting." She tilted her head. "So which is it? Are you hunting me, or are you lost?"

I took a step forward. She took a step back, and her heel found the soft mud at the river's edge, and for a moment her balance wavered. I moved before I thought about it, one hand out to catch her arm before she went into the water. My fingers closed around her wrist.

The world went white.

It was not pain. It was worse than pain. It was the feeling of a door slamming open inside my chest, and behind the door was everything I had spent twelve years refusing to feel. My wolf surged up hard enough that I felt my bones shift under my skin, and a sound came out of my throat that I had never made before, low and broken and desperate. Her eyes went wide. Her knife fell into the mud. She did not pull away. That was the strangest part. She stood there with my hand around her wrist and the rain coming down on both of us, and I watched something move behind her eyes that looked exactly like the thing tearing through me.

Mate.

The word arrived whole, the way a scent arrives. I knew her. I did not know her face or her voice or where she had come from, but some part of me older than language recognized her down to the bone. My wolf pressed against my ribs, howling, and every instinct I had trained told me to hold on and never let go.

"Let go of me," she said.

Her voice was quiet. It was not the flat, bored voice from before. It was thin, and it shook at the end, and I realized she felt it too. She had to. The bond did not work one way. That was the whole terrible point of it.

I did not let go.

I should have. I had a job to do, and the job was standing in front of me with mud on her boots and rain in her hair, and the Council had given me a name for what she was. Rogue. Killer. Threat. The words felt like stones in my mouth.

"You are shaking," I said.

"So are you." She looked down at my hand on her wrist, and then back up at my face, and her jaw tightened. "What did you do to me?"

"I did not do anything."

"You touched me and my wolf went silent. She has not been silent in four years." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she pulled her arm free with a sharp twist. I let her. The moment our skin separated I felt the loss of it like a blow, and my wolf clawed at the inside of my skull, and I had to close my eyes for a second to keep from reaching for her again.

When I opened them, she had the knife back in her hand. She was holding it low, not pointed at me, and her eyes kept darting to the trees as if she expected more of us to come out of them.

"How many of you are there?" she asked.

"Just me."

"Trackers never hunt alone."

"I am not hunting you."

She laughed. It was a short, ugly sound with no humor in it. "You have been on my trail since Tuesday. I have been smelling you on the wind for two days. Do not tell me you are not hunting me."

I should have lied. A good tracker would have lied. But the bond was still ringing in my chest, and every word of the file Vance had given me was turning to ash, and I found that I could not look at her and say the thing I had been sent to say.

"I was sent to find you," I said. "That part is true."

"And then?"

The rain filled the silence. She watched me the way a wolf watches a stranger at the edge of the territory, patient and ready, and I understood that whatever I said next would decide everything that came after it.

"And then I was supposed to kill you," I said.

She did not flinch. She looked at me for a long moment, and then she nodded slowly, as if I had confirmed something she already knew.

"Of course you were," she said. "That is what the Council does. They send a wolf with a sad face and a clean knife, and the wolf goes home and tells himself he had no choice." She wiped the rain from her eyes with the back of her hand. "So what are you waiting for?"

I looked at the knife in her hand, and at the mud on her boots, and at the pale grey-blue eyes that had gone hard and bright. My wolf was still howling. I could feel the shape of the truth pressing against my teeth, and I knew that if I said it out loud, the Council would have my head for it.

"I do not know," I said.

She blinked. Whatever she had expected, it was not that.

"Then you are a worse tracker than you look," she said.

She turned and walked into the river, and the current caught her at the knees, and she did not look back. I stood on the bank and watched her go, and my hand was still warm where her wrist had been, and the bond pulled at me like a rope tied to my ribs.

"Wait," I called. "What is your name?"

The river was loud, and the rain was louder, and for a moment I thought she had not heard me. Then she turned her head just enough that I could see her profile in the grey light.

"Wren," she said. "And you should know, tracker, that the Council is lying to you. About me. About all of it." She climbed the far bank and disappeared into the trees. "Ask them what happened at the ridge twelve years ago."

The rain kept falling. I stood there until the cold got into my bones, and then I turned and walked back to my truck, and all the way down the logging road I could hear her voice saying the thing I had spent twelve years trying not to think about.

The ridge.