Chapter 3 His Scent in the Ash

I did not open the door.

I told him to meet me at the evacuation center instead, and I said it through two inches of pine board with the fire axe still in my hands, and I heard him exhale on the other side and say, fine, and go back down the stairs. I waited until his truck started up and the sound of it went off along the ridge before I came out. I am not proud of that. But fifteen years is a long time to build a wall, and I was not going to knock it down on a landing in the dark.

By the time I got down to the fairgrounds the parking lot was full of headlights and horses and people standing in knots with their arms crossed. The fairgrounds had been the county's evacuation center since the first week of August. The 4 H barn had been turned into a shelter for dogs and cats and one very unhappy parrot. The grandstand had cots under it. There was a plywood board by the gate with names written on it in dry erase marker, and every morning someone went through it and tried to find out who was still missing.

Tessa found me before I got out of the truck. She had her radio in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other and her dark hair pulled back in a clip that was giving up.

"You went off the air for nine hours," she said. "Nine. I have been calling every unit in the county. I had Bryan out looking for your truck."

"I am sorry."

"Sorry is not a thing that helps me at four in the morning." She looked at my face and her voice changed. "What happened up there?"

"I found something." I took the folded paper out of my pocket and turned it over in my fingers. "Not here. Later. Where is the boy?"

"Missoula. They airlifted him out around noon. He is going to be fine, they think. His mother is with him." Tessa drank some of her coffee and made a face. "There is a man in the grandstand asking about you. Tall, sandy hair, says he runs the smokejumper crew out of the ridge. He has been here for two hours and he has drunk three cups of our terrible coffee, which I am choosing to take as a bad sign."

"His name is Dane."

"You know him?"

"I used to." I started across the lot, and Tessa came with me, because Tessa has never once let me walk into anything alone. "Tess, I need you to pull the fire reports for the whole season. Every one of them. And I need the county archive records for this ridge, going back, say, twenty years."

She stopped walking. "Why?"

"Because the fire that started on the ridge did not start from lightning, and there is a burned windowsill in the old lookout that says somebody lit it, and I want to know who has been up there and who signed off on the reports that said otherwise."

Tessa looked at me for a long moment with her cup halfway to her mouth.

"Rhea," she said. "You know I will do it. But I need you to tell me something. You came out of that canyon this morning with a kid in your arms and a look on your face like you had seen a ghost, and you have been driving around this valley for six weeks telling everyone the fire is normal. Is it normal?"

I thought about the wolf in the smoke. I thought about the howl under my ribs, and the paper in my pocket, and the word nine written in pencil by somebody who had scorched a windowsill.

"No," I said. "It is not normal."

The grandstand was mostly empty at that hour. There was a family asleep in the corner under a blanket, and a woman folding clothes on a bench, and a row of cots with nobody in them. And there was Dane, sitting at the end of the lowest bench with his elbows on his knees, and he stood up when he saw me.

The morning light was coming in flat through the gaps in the roof, and it did nothing to hide him. Sandy hair, longer than he used to wear it, falling over his forehead. The dark line of the fire shelter strap across his chest. He looked like a man who had not slept, and he was looking at me like the whole grandstand had gone quiet.

The wind changed. It came in through the open side of the grandstand, and it carried the ash and the smoke and the smell of horses, and underneath all of it, Dane.

I had forgotten what he smelled like. That is what I told myself for fifteen years. I told myself it was a young woman's foolishness, a crush on the Alpha's son, a summer thing, and that memory had grown fat and soft with time and whatever I had felt had been nothing more than a girl wanting to be wanted.

The smell hit me and my knees nearly went.

It was cut cedar and woodsmoke and something under it, something warm and animal that had nothing to do with smoke or cedar, and it went straight past my nose and into a part of me I had been sitting on since I was twenty six. My wolf stood up behind my ribs and pushed, and I had to put my hand on the bench rail to stay upright.

Dane's jaw went tight. I watched him feel it too, the way a man feels a hand on the back of his neck. He took a breath and let it out.

"Rhea," he said. "It has been a long time."

"Fifteen years." My voice was steadier than I expected. "You look tired."

"I have been fighting a fire." He glanced at Tessa, then back at me. "Can we talk somewhere that is not a grandstand?"

Tessa looked between us and decided, with the wisdom of twenty two years of friendship, that she had paperwork to do. She walked away toward the office trailer with her coffee, and she turned around once and mouthed something at me that I chose not to read.

Dane sat down again and I sat down across from him on the bench, and there were maybe four feet between us and it felt like the width of the county.

"The boy," I said. "What is his name?"

"Wes. Wesley." Dane rubbed his thumb along the edge of the bench. "His mother is human. His father was one of mine. He died two winters ago, a car on the highway at night, and the mother did not know what her husband was until after. She has been raising the boy in Missoula and she has been in touch with Owen, off and on, about what will happen when Wes is old enough."

"How old is he when it happens?"

"Fourteen, usually. Sometimes twelve, if the wolf is strong." He looked up. "Wes is four. He is not going to shift for a decade. But he was born pack, and there is not a wolf in this valley who would not have gone up that slope for him."

"The wolf on the slope was not a wolf," I said. "It was a woman. That is what the boy told the doctor. You told me so yourself."

Dane was quiet for a moment. Outside the grandstand a truck went past and somebody laughed, and the paper cup in my hand buckled a little at the seam.

"His mother told me what he said. He said the grey wolf had the face of a lady." Dane looked at the floor between his boots. "He is four years old and he was choking on smoke. Children see what they need to see."

"And you do not believe that."

"I believe I have been the Alpha of the Bitterroot pack for eleven years, and I have never known a wolf who could carry a four year old child out of a fire and not be burned." He looked at me. "The boy had one burn on his wrist. One. The whole canyon was on fire."

I thought about my hands on his small chest. I thought about the way the wolf had set him down at my feet, and the sound in my head.

"Silver," I said.

Dane went very still.

"It is what my sister told me," I said. "That silver could hold it back. She said there was a way to stop a wolf from shifting if you wanted to, and she said she had a way of doing it that did not hurt anybody. I never asked her what she meant. I did not want to know."

"You are talking about the clinic," he said, and there was something new in his voice, something careful and hard. "Your sister's clinic."

"Yes."

Dane stood up. He walked three steps to the end of the grandstand and stood with his back to me and one hand on the roof post, and I watched the muscles in his shoulders move under his shirt.

"Rhea," he said. "I need to tell you something, and you are not going to like it. When your sister died, there was a fire at that clinic. The county called it an accident. There were two bodies in the building and one of them was your sister and the other one was a wolf from my pack who was supposed to be on patrol on the ridge. The Council sent a man down from Denver to look into it and the man said it was an electrical fire and the case closed."

"I know all of this. I was there."

"No." He turned around. "You were not there. You ran. I came to the clinic at dawn and the building was still burning and you were gone, and I did not hear one word from you for fifteen years. I have been trying to find out what happened in that building since before I could shave, and every door I open has a man in Denver standing behind it. Then a wolf carries a child out of a canyon fire and puts him down at your feet and there is a scorched windowsill in a lookout that has been closed since I was a boy."

He came back toward me. The smell of him came with him and I sat very still on the bench.

"I know what you are," he said. "I have known since I was twenty four and I put my hand on your arm in the pack house and everything in me went quiet. You are my mate, Rhea. You have been my mate since before your sister died and you will be my mate when the last of this valley has burned down to the rock. Do you understand what I am telling you?"

My mouth was dry. "I understand that you are saying it."

"I am saying that I will not let you run this time. Not from me and not from whatever is in that lookout. There is a man from Denver arriving in this valley in two days and he has the power to sign my pack out of existence. And I think the two of us, you and I, are the only people in this valley who know that the fire is being used."

"And if I tell you I do not want your bond?"

"Then I will put the bond aside," he said. "And I will still need your maps and your evacuation routes and your arson investigation. The pack has forty two wolves and there are children in the den. I am not too proud to beg a county officer for help."

"Everybody begs a county officer for help," I said. "Eventually."

That surprised a breath out of him. It was not a laugh. It was close.

Then he moved. He put one hand on the bench beside mine and leaned down, and the smell of him filled my head, and I did not pull away and neither did he, and the whole grandstand, the sleeping family, the radio on my hip, the fire season, all of it went out of my mind like a match. I leaned up and he met me, and his mouth was warm and tasted of terrible coffee, and he kissed me as though he had been waiting fifteen years and had decided on the walk over that he was done with waiting.

I kissed him back. My hands came up and one of them went to the back of his neck and held on. He made a low sound against my mouth and pulled me closer, and the county jacket and the arson and the word nine were very far away.

The radio on my hip squawked. We broke apart and I grabbed it before my brain had caught up with my hands.

"Unit seven," I said. "Go ahead."

It was Bryan, at the north station. His voice was flat and fast.

"Rhea, you need to come up to the ridge road. Somebody left the gate open at the pack's firebreak, and there is a truck up there that does not belong. And Rhea, there is a family living in the old bunker. A woman and two kids, and they say they have been there for a week."

I looked at Dane. His face had gone the way a wolf's face goes when it hears a sound in the trees.

"I will be there in twenty minutes," I said.

I turned the radio off and stood up, and Dane stood up with me, and I put my hand flat on his chest for a moment before I could think better of it. He covered it with his own.

"There is a bunker under the ridge," I said. "I found it today. Or I found the door of it, anyway. It was open and there was a camera inside pointed at the pack house and a cot and a safe."

"And now there is a family in it."

"And now there is a family in it."

Dane picked up his fire shelter bag off the bench and slung it over his shoulder. "Get in my truck," he said. "Yours is running on empty and I know a shortcut."

"That shortcut is not on any county map."

"I know," he said. "That is the point."

We were halfway across the lot when Tessa came out of the office trailer with a folder in her hand and her face gone white, and she called my name, and I turned.

"Rhea," she said. "I pulled the fire reports like you asked. The report from the first week of August, the one that says lightning started it on the ridge. The signature at the bottom is not the district ranger's."

I looked at the folder. "Whose is it?"

Tessa held the page up. In the handwriting I had been looking at an hour ago in a dry erase board and a thousand times on a hundred county forms, was a signature I would have recognized anywhere.

"Yours," she said. "It is your name on the report, Rhea. Signed the night the fire started."