Chapter 2 My Alpha in the Rain

Dietrich's hand stayed on my shoulder while the six wolves around us waited, and I could smell every one of them. Anger from the tall one on my left, something sour and eager from the short one behind me, and from Dietrich himself a scent so clean and steady that my wolf did not trust it for a moment. Grief has a smell. I have knelt beside widows and orphans in this territory and I know what grief smells like, and Dietrich smelled of nothing at all.

"Her name was Liesel," I said. "She said she was a healer on the road. She took a room above the taproom and I took it with her."

The tall wolf made a noise in his throat. Dietrich raised one hand and the noise stopped.

"You were with her all night."

"I was. She was asleep when I left the room. The boy knocked, and I came out here, and I have not seen her since."

Dietrich nodded slowly. His black hair had dried into flat strands across his forehead and he kept pushing them back, and his coat was still buttoned wrong, and I found myself staring at that buttoned-wrong coat more than at the body.

"Then we have a problem," he said. "The pack will want a name, and the only name we have is hers."

"The pack will want the truth," I said.

"The pack will want a body on the grass and someone to answer for it. You know the law as well as I do, Konrad. You have carried it out often enough."

He was right, which was the worst thing about it. I had been enforcer for nine years. I had dragged wolves to the border stone and read out their sentences. I had never once stood on this side of the question, and the grass under my boots felt colder than it should.

I knelt again.

It was not a thing I decided to do. My knees went down and my hands went into the wet grass beside Reinhard's body, and I told myself I was looking at the wound for the pack's sake, for the report I would have to give. The wound was beneath his ribs, one thrust, and the edges were clean and dark, and I put my fingers near it without touching.

Then I saw the glint at his collar.

A small thing, silver, half caught under the fold of his coat. I pinched it out between two fingers and turned it over in the grey light. A wolf's tooth, cast in silver, no longer than my thumbnail, with a hole bored through the root of it where a cord had once passed.

My wolf went still. It is hard to explain what that feels like, an animal inside your chest that has been pacing and growling all morning and then simply stops. I held the tooth in my palm and it was cold, and it carried a smell. Silver always smells of itself, that hard metallic sting that werewolves learn to fear young. Beneath the sting was something else, something faint and warm, and I knew it at once. I had breathed that smell against a pillow a few hours before.

Liesel.

I closed my fist around the tooth and did not move for a moment.

"Konrad." Dietrich's voice came from behind me, patient and soft. "What have you got there?"

I turned my head. He was standing over me with the mist behind him and the sun on his face, and his brown eyes were fixed on my closed hand.

"Grass," I said. "And blood. I am looking at the wound."

"Show me what you picked up."

I opened my hand. The tooth lay in my palm, and Dietrich leaned down and looked at it, and his eyebrows drew together.

"A token," he said. "The mining clans use silver tokens. If this is one of theirs, then we are not looking at a rogue at all. We are looking at the Bosbach wolves sending us a message."

"That is one reading," I said.

"What other reading is there?"

I did not answer. I put the tooth in my coat pocket and stood up, and I brushed the grass from my knees, and I looked down at my Alpha's face. He had been a hard man, Reinhard, hard in the way that stone is hard, and he had never once told me a kind word that I could remember. He had made me enforcer when I was twenty nine and had never explained why. I owed him a debt I had never been able to name, and now I was standing over him in a meadow with his killer's scent in my nose and a silver tooth in my pocket and a Beta at my back asking me questions.

"Cover him," I said. "We carry him back to the pack house. The law says the body goes to the stone before the sun sets."

The tall wolf and the short one came forward with a blanket from the inn. I watched them wrap Reinhard in it and lift him, and I walked behind them up the road toward the pines, and Dietrich walked beside me with his hands behind his back.

"The woman," he said as we walked. "If you are right and she is innocent, then she has nothing to fear from the pack. Bring her to the stone and let her speak."

"I do not know where she is."

"That is a pity." He stepped over a fallen branch and did not look at me. "Because if you do not find her, the pack will decide you were her accomplice. I will not be able to stop them. I am only the Beta."

The road curved, and the pack house came into view above the pines, grey stone and a steep black roof with the smoke already rising from its chimneys. Wolves were gathering in the yard. I could see them from the ridge, a dozen and more, and the wind brought me their voices.

Dietrich stopped on the road and turned to face me. His eyes were dry now. The wetness I had seen in the meadow was gone, and in its place was something calm and careful, and he put his hand on my arm.

"One more thing," he said. "The Council will send someone to look into this. When they come, they will ask who was the last wolf to see the Alpha alive. And they will ask who found the body. Try not to be both, Konrad. It saves a great deal of explaining."

He walked on ahead of me, up the road, into the yard where the pack was waiting, and his voice rose warm and grieving as he told them what had happened.

I stopped at the edge of the pines and took the tooth out of my pocket. The silver was warming now, and the smell on it was faint enough that a wolf who did not know it would never have caught it. I brought it to my nose and breathed in, and my wolf rose up behind my ribs and threw itself against them, howling.

My mate. My fated mate had held this tooth against my Alpha's throat.

The wind changed, and the fine hairs on my arms lifted. Somewhere out in the pines, far past the border, a wolf was running, and the sound of it carried to me clear and small and heading away from the pack house, and every instinct in my body turned toward that sound like a compass needle to the north.

I put the tooth back in my pocket and started walking toward the trees, and behind me Dietrich's voice called my name twice, and I did not turn around.