Chapter 2 Silver in My Boot

The man in Damon's coat did not answer me.

He stood on the boardwalk with the lamplight behind him and his hands loose at his sides, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a bill he thought he had already paid. Cora had gone quiet beside him, her basket held against her stomach. A few people on the street had stopped walking. The butcher's boy had disappeared into the shop.

"You're confused," the man said at last. "The road does that. Long miles and bad weather."

"I asked you a question."

"And I'm telling you there's no answer to give." He smiled, and it was a good smile, wide and easy, and it put a finger on something in my chest and pushed. "I'm Damon. I've been Damon all my life. You knew me once, and I know you. That's how it works."

The sour smell under the pine smoke got stronger when he smiled. I had spent four years sleeping beside Damon's wolf, and I could have found him in a dark room by the way the air changed around him. This man smelled like a coat that had hung too long in a damp cellar. It was close enough to fool a stranger. It was not close enough to fool a mate.

I kept my face still. I had learned that in the year after they threw me out, when I had to walk into mining camps and ask for work and pretend I was not a wolf at all.

"Then you won't mind if I stay the night," I said. "I've been on the road a while."

The man's smile did not change, but something behind it moved. "Cobalt Ridge isn't what it was. The pack's got troubles, and strangers make trouble worse. You'd do better to keep moving while the road's still clear."

"I'm not a stranger. You just said so yourself."

Cora laughed, a short nervous sound, and put her hand on his arm. "Let her stay, Sil. One night won't hurt. She's a courier. She's got ore to sell."

Sil. She called him Sil, and the name went through me like a splinter under a fingernail, and I did not let it show. The man's jaw tightened. Then he nodded, once, and stepped back to let me pass, and I walked by him into the general store with my heart going hard and slow in my chest.

The store smelled of coffee and kerosene and dry goods. A big mirror hung behind the counter, framed in oak, and I set my ore sack down and stood in front of it and pulled the silver bullet out of my pocket.

It was a good bullet. I had cast it myself in a miner's shed two winters back, melting down a spoon and a broken locket and a thimble that had belonged to my mother. Silver is not easy to work with. It goes soft and stubborn at the same time, and you have to pour it fast and true or it sets crooked. Mine had set true. A single shot, heavy and bright, with a flat nose so it would not pass through a body and go on to hurt someone standing behind.

I turned it between my fingers. In the mirror my face looked the way it always looks when I am holding something I might have to use: flat, blank, a little tired around the eyes.

I had carried that bullet for three years and never fired it. I had carried it through two winters and a summer of hauling ore and a night I spent in a ditch outside Boise with a broken wrist and no water. I had carried it because there was a man in Cobalt Ridge who had promised me the world and then taken my daughter and my title and my name, and I had decided that one day I would make him answer for it.

Now I was standing in the general store with my old wedding ring on another woman's hand and a stranger wearing my husband's face, and the bullet in my fingers felt like a joke.

The bell over the door rang. I did not turn around. I watched the mirror instead, and the man in Damon's coat came in and walked behind the counter like he owned the place, which he did, and opened the cash drawer and counted something out. His hands were the wrong hands. Damon had scars on his knuckles from a challenge he fought when he was nineteen, two of them, small white lines across the second and third fingers. This man's hands were smooth.

I put the bullet back in my pocket.

"You're still here," he said, not looking up.

"You told me to stay."

"I told Cora to let you stay. That's not the same thing." He closed the drawer. "What's your name again?"

I turned around then. "You said you knew me."

"I know a lot of people." He came around the counter and stopped a few feet away, close enough that the sour smell of him filled my nose and made my wolf want to bare her teeth. "But I'll be honest with you, courier. I don't remember your face. If you were important to me once, then I've had a hard three years and my memory's gone to mud."

I looked at him. I looked at the amber eyes that were Damon's eyes and the mouth that was Damon's mouth, and I made myself smile, because a smile costs nothing and buys you time.

"Ada," I said. "My name is Ada. I used to run ore for the camps. I passed through here a few times."

"Ada." He said it slowly, tasting it. "Well, Ada. One night. And then I want you on the road by first light."

He turned and walked out of the store, and I watched him go. He did not walk the way Damon walked. Damon had a long easy stride that made the ground seem to come up to meet him. This man walked like he was always stepping over something.

Behind me, the mirror showed the street through the window. The man in Damon's coat crossed to the pack house with Cora on his arm, and the pack house door opened, and a small figure came out to meet him, a child in a clean blue dress with her hair brushed and tied back.

My hand went flat on the counter. My breath stopped somewhere in my throat.

Ruth.

She was taller. That was the first thing. She had been five when they took her from me, and now she was eight, and she had grown into her face the way children do, all the softness going out of it and something sharper coming in. She had my green eyes. She had my mother's chin. She was wearing a dress I had never seen and shoes that shone in the lamplight, and she took the man's hand without hesitating, without looking up at his face, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to take a stranger's hand and call him Father.

She did not look toward the store. She did not look for me.

The man bent down and said something, and Ruth laughed, and he lifted her up onto his hip and carried her inside.

I stood there in the general store with the ore sack at my feet and the silver bullet in my pocket, and I heard my own voice come out of me low and flat and strange.

"Count it," I said. "Count it all."

The bell over the door rang again, and I turned, and a man stood in the doorway with snow on his shoulders and grey eyes that went to my face and then away.

"You're the courier," he said. "The Alpha wants you gone by morning. I'm here to make sure you go."

"Who are you?"

"Elias." He stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him. "I'm the Beta of this pack, and I've got a question for you, Ada. What was it you said to him outside, when you asked him what he'd done with Damon?"