Chapter 2 A Wolf in the Wreck

I did not sleep that night. I sat on the floor of the boathouse with my back against the hull of the old dinghy and the tin in my lap, and I listened to the harbor breathe until the fog thinned and the sky over the point went grey.

The seal was still whole. I had turned it over a hundred times, and the mark of the Tidal pack came up the same way every time, the crescent and the three waves stamped deep into the wax. Every crate that left the dockmaster's office wore that mark. My father's mark. Yusuf pressed it himself with the brass stamp he kept in his desk drawer.

Someone had shipped wolfsbane out of Tidal Bay under my father's name. I knew exactly what the Council would do with that if they found out, and I knew what Cal would do with it, and neither of those things was going to happen while my father was still breathing.

I heard the ladder creak an hour before dawn.

I was up and at the door with the boat hook in my hand before I had decided anything, and Roan came through it with his coat over his arm and his hair still wet and his boots making a wet sound on the boards. He stopped when he saw the hook.

"You slept with that in your hand?" he said.

"I slept with it near me." I set it down against the wall. "You came back."

"I had nowhere else to go." He hung his coat on the nail by the door and looked around the boathouse. The old dinghy, the coils of rope, the shelves of tar and paint. "This is yours?"

"It was my mother's. She kept her charts in here." I did not know why I told him that. I had not told anyone that in years.

He nodded slowly, as if I had given him something he had been looking for. Then he turned and put his hand out flat toward the little iron stove in the corner. "Do you mind?"

I minded a great deal. I sat on the bench by the window and watched him build a fire in my mother's stove with the kindling I had stacked there in the spring, and I told myself that the moment he was warm I would send him up the hill to the Council myself.

He crouched in front of the fire with his hands out, and the light came up over his face, and I looked at him properly for the first time. His hair was drying in pale streaks. His eyes were the color of tea, with a ring of darker brown around the iris. The half smile had gone. Without it his face was harder and older than it had looked in the water.

"You are staring," he said, without turning around.

"You are sitting in my boathouse."

"Fair." He stood and brushed off his knees. "Let me see the tin."

"No."

"It is my tin."

"It carries my father's mark. That makes it mine until I say otherwise." I kept my voice flat. "You said someone moved the channel. How would you know that? You are not from this harbor. You could not read this water with a map and a lamp."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he crossed the floor and sat down on the bench beside me, close enough that I could smell the salt on him and the woodsmoke from the stove and, under both, something warmer that my wolf leaned toward before I pulled her back.

"Three years ago a schooner came into the Bay of Fundy with a cargo of wolfsbane," he said. "She was not mine. She belonged to an Alpha I never met. He was bringing the crates to a buyer in this harbor, and he believed the channel was deep because a tide reader in Tidal Bay had charted it for him."

"That is a lie. No one in my pack would chart a rogue into the bar."

"Your pack did not do it. The chart came from your dockmaster's office, and it was signed by a reader who was not you." He watched my face. "I know because the Alpha on that ship was my father. His name was Ewan, and he drowned when the hull opened on the rocks three miles from this wharf. I was nineteen. I pulled eleven men out of that water, and then I went looking for the wolf who sent him there."

My mouth had gone dry. "You are Ewan's son."

"You knew his name."

"Everyone in Tidal Bay knows his name. The pack calls it the winter of the wolf who could not read a chart." I heard how ugly it sounded in my own voice. "My father said he was a smuggler who tried a channel too narrow for his hull. There was a hearing. The Council ruled it an accident."

"The Council ruled it what your dockmaster told them to rule." His voice had not risen, and that was worse than shouting. "My father was not a smuggler. He was carrying medicine to a pack that had been poisoned, and he carried it in crates marked with wolfsbane to keep the wrong wolves off it. Someone in this harbor wanted him on those rocks, and the chart in his cabin was the knife."

I got up from the bench. The stove was too hot, and the boathouse was too small, and the smell of him was everywhere in it now. "You are telling me this so I will help you."

"I am telling you this so you know what the tin is worth." He did not get up. "I have been looking for that chart for three years. You have been standing on it."

"I am not giving you anything."

He looked up at me then, and something passed over his face that I could not name. He stood, slowly, and took one step toward me.

"Then tell me why you came out onto the bar last night," he said. "The tide was wrong and you knew it, and you went anyway."

I opened my mouth to answer him and nothing came out. He reached out and put his hand on my arm, above the elbow, his fingers light.

The floor went out from under me. Not the way a floor gives way under weight. The way a floor gives way under a wave. It came up my arm and into my chest and filled every corner of me with heat, and my wolf rose up in me so hard I heard her howl behind my eyes, and his eyes went wide and dark and I knew he was feeling it too, because his hand tightened on my arm and did not let go.

I could smell him properly now, the way a wolf smells her mate. Sea salt and cedar and a thread of something sweet under it, like the inside of a barrel. The air between us had gone warm.

I pulled my arm free and stepped back into the shelf of paint tins and knocked three of them onto the floor.

"No," I said.

He stood exactly where he was. His chest was moving too fast, and his hand was still open where he had been holding me, and his face had the look of a man who had been struck by something he could not see coming.

"No," I said again. "You are a rogue. You are a smuggler, and the Council has a price on your head, and you are standing in my dead mother's boathouse. Whatever that was, I want none of it."

He closed his hand. "You think I do?"

"You had better not."

We stood there in the small hot room with the fire ticking and the paint tins on the floor between us, and I heard the first gulls of the morning come in from the point, and I was shaking and my hands would not stop.

Then someone knocked on the boathouse door.

Three slow knocks, the way a wolf knocks when he knows he is welcome. Through the small window beside the door I saw the chestnut brown of Cal's hair caught by the harbour light, and the broad line of his shoulders, and the sea green of his eyes looking straight in at me.

"Nell," he called, mild as milk. "Your father is asking where you were all night."