Chapter 3 A Tracker at My Door

I did not open the bag. I stood in the road with the hum of the wires above me and looked at the worn strap, and Calder watched me the way a man watches a trap he has just set.

"Bring it inside," I said. "Not to the pack house. My cabin."

"Your cabin." He picked the pack up. "That's a strange place for a Luna to hold a meeting."

"My cabin is the only place in this territory where nobody walks in without knocking twice. And you are not staying past midnight."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

He followed me up the road. I walked in front so I would not have to keep looking at him, and I kept my breathing even because the scent of him was doing something I did not like. It was not the way a strange wolf smells, not the sourness of a rogue or the old-cellar smell of a man who had been living alone too long. Under the pine and the snow it was warm and sharp and it came into my head like a hand slipping under a door. My wolf turned over again, and I had to stop for a step and set my boot down hard on the packed snow.

"You all right, Luna?"

"Keep walking."

The cabin was cold when I opened the door. I had left it at dawn with Aldric's coat still on the hook and his boots in the corner, and I had not thought about what it would be like to bring another wolf through that door. I set a match to the lamp and saw Calder look at the boots and then at the empty chair by the table, and he did not say anything, which I counted in his favour.

He set the pack on the table and stepped back. "Before I open it, you should know what I want."

"You want reinstatement."

"I want my sister."

"You were exiled for something you did to the pack."

"I was exiled for something the pack decided I did." His jaw moved. "There's a difference, and you've been standing in front of wolves long enough to know it."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer I've got tonight." He pulled the pack open and drew out something wrapped in oilcloth tied with twine. The cloth was stiff with frost. He put it down and undid the knots, and the smell hit the back of my throat before the lining came clear.

It was a pelt. Grey brown, coarse, thick enough that it held the shape of the animal's shoulders. Stitched inside the fold was a square of black leather the size of a playing card, and pressed into the leather was a seal I knew. The Council of Alphas used it on orders that had to travel between packs. A circle, a crescent cut through the middle, and five small marks in the ring.

I stood over the table and did not touch it.

"Where did you get this?"

"Three nights ago. I was tracking a wounded elk up the east fork and I found a man in a clearing. He was already dead. The pelt was over his shoulders with the fur side in, like a coat." Calder leaned against the back of the chair. "He was not a hunter. He had good boots and clean hands, and a steel case with a Council seal in it. I took the seal off his case and the pelt off his back and left the rest where it was."

"And you did not come to the pack."

"No." He met my eyes. "A month ago a Council man came through here asking about my sister. Two weeks later I'm living out past the ridge and nobody in the pack will say my name. So I took what I found and I kept it, and now Aldric is dead on the same landing where Wren's patrol ended, and I want to know what your pack has been doing up that road."

"The tag," I said.

He turned the pelt with two fingers and showed me a small brass tag sewn at the shoulder, the kind the mill used on bales of pelts that went out on the trucks. A name was burned into it with a nail.

"Aldric had a man named Vester doing his boundary runs," I said. "Vester is in the ground two winters now."

"Then somebody has been using a dead man's tag, or somebody has been wearing a dead man's name." Calder folded his arms. "I've brought this to you because you're the only wolf in this territory who has a reason to want the truth more than a story. Say the word and I'll take it to Kellan, and we can all find out how that goes."

"You don't threaten me in my own cabin."

"I'm not threatening you. I'm telling you what happens if we do it the slow way."

I wanted to send him out into the dark. I wanted to be a woman in a house with a dead husband and a cold mark and no stranger in her kitchen telling her about corpses in the trees. Instead I stood there and looked at the Council seal, and my wolf pressed against my ribs, and I could smell him, and I hated that I could smell him.

"You sleep in the mill camp," I said. "Not the pack house. There's a bunk room behind the office with a stove, and nobody will think to look for you there tonight."

"That's generous."

"It's practical. If Kellan finds you on my road at midnight I'll have two dead wolves to explain and no time to do it." I pulled the oilcloth over the pelt and folded the corners in. "Tomorrow I want the rest of it. Where the body was. What he carried. You will tell it to me and Dara, and if your story has holes in it I'll put you back across the ridge myself."

Calder studied the bundle. "You're not going to ask about the tag."

"I'm going to look up the tag. Tonight, in the archive, and if it matches what I think it matches, then tomorrow you and I are going to have a longer conversation." I set the bundle under the table and straightened. "Now go."

He put his coat on. At the door he stopped with his hand on the latch and the cold coming in around his boots.

"I'm sorry about Aldric," he said. "I knew him a little. He gave me three days to leave when the pack voted me out, and he did not look at me while he said it." He pulled the collar of his coat up. "There was a woman asking about him in town this morning. She had a car with Council plates and she was buying coffee at the store, asking whether the Alpha had any family left in the territory."

"What did she look like?"

"Black hair. Grey eyes. Wore a grey coat like a uniform." He opened the door. "I told her I was a trapper and did not know anything about the pack, and she wrote something in a little notebook and drove off north, toward the ridge road, not south toward the city."

The door shut behind him. I stood in the middle of my kitchen with the pelt under the table and the lamp burning, and I thought about a Council woman driving the wrong way on the wrong road on the day after my husband was killed.

I should have told him to stay. Instead I waited for the sound of his boots to fade, put on my coat, and went down to the archive to find out whose name was burned on that tag.