Chapter 2 The Naked Man

I woke up in the dirt with a headache like a horseshoe nail driven into the back of my skull and a naked man lying half across my legs.

The first thing I did was reach for the fence post. The second thing I did was get my boot under his shoulder and push him off me, hard, and roll away into the wheat, and I came up on my knees with my knife out and my wolf already halfway through my skin. She wanted out. She wanted out badly, and she was not making any noise about it.

He did not move.

I stayed on my knees in the wheat with the knife in my hand and my breath going hard, and I looked at him. He was face down in the dirt, and he was tall; even lying flat I could see he was longer than the fence posts, and his back was broad and pale in the dark. He was barefoot. He had no clothes on at all. His hair was the color of wheat when it has been standing too long in the sun, and there was grain in it. Actual grain. I could see the little pale kernels caught in the strands above his ear.

I waited for him to get up and try again. He did not. His hand twitched once in the dirt, and then nothing.

The mill road was empty, and the wheat was quiet, and the only sound was my own breathing and a cow somewhere off to the west. I got up slowly, keeping the knife out, and walked around him in a wide half circle until I could see his face.

He was not young, or not as young as I had thought. There were lines at the corners of his eyes, and his jaw was covered in three or four days of stubble, and his mouth was pressed tight even with his face in the dirt. His eyes were closed. His skin was cold-looking, blue at the lips, and I could see him shivering even though he was not moving. The night air was not that cold. September in the Palouse stays warm till midnight.

My nose found the scent again, and this close to him it was not a faint thing at the fence or a moving thread in the dark. It was him. Pine and cedar and warm skin and something else I could not name that made my throat ache. My wolf went still. She went so still that I put my free hand flat on my own chest to feel her there, and she was pressed against the inside of my ribs, her head down, her whole body quiet.

I do not trust quiet. In my experience, quiet means a thing is waiting.

"Hey," I said. "You. Wake up."

He did not wake up. I crouched down beside him and put two fingers under his jaw, and the touch went through me like a nail through a board. Not a shock, not a spark, nothing like the stories I had heard from the older wolves at pack bonfires. It was heat. It was a slow, deep heat that started at my fingertips and went up my arm and into my chest and sat there. His skin under my fingers was cold and his pulse was slow, and I felt my own pulse answer it, and I pulled my hand back so fast I nearly fell over.

"Nope," I said out loud, to nobody. "Nope. Get up."

Then I saw his back.

There was an old scar there, low on the left shoulder blade, a curved thing about the length of my thumb. Pale. Healed a long time ago. I looked at it for a while in the dark and I told myself it was nothing, and then my eyes found the other one at the base of his neck, a small round one like a burn mark, and the fence post behind me started to go out of focus.

Owen had a scar like that. My brother had a scar on his left shoulder blade from a fall off the co-op truck when he was nineteen, and he had a round burn on the back of his neck from a welding spark when he was twenty-three, and he had both of them in the exact same places.

I do not know how long I crouched there. Long enough that the cow out west stopped making noise and the wind shifted and something in the mill creaked.

He groaned.

I was up and back with the knife out before his eyes opened. He turned his head in the dirt and blinked slowly, and then he saw me, and he went very still, the way an animal goes still when it thinks you have not seen it yet.

His eyes were amber. Not brown. Amber, like a jar of honey held up to the sun, and in the dark they caught what little light there was and threw it back.

"Do not move," I said. "Do not move, and tell me who you are."

He swallowed. It looked like it cost him something. "You are a wolf," he said. His voice was rough and low, like he had been shouting or not using it at all.

"I asked you a question."

"Elias," he said.

"Elias what?"

"Just Elias." He got his elbows under him and tried to push himself up, and his arms gave out and he went down again with his face in the dirt. I did not help him. I watched him do it a second time and fail, and then I watched him lie there with his breath going in and out of him, and my wolf pressed against my ribs so hard I felt it in my teeth.

"Where are your clothes?"

"Gone."

"Gone where?"

"Wherever they go." He turned his head again and looked at me with one eye, since the other was half in the dirt. "I wake up like this. Every time. It is not my favorite part of the arrangement."

I lowered the knife a little. Not much. "You are the rogue."

"Is that what they are calling me?" He almost smiled. It was a tired thing, and it went away fast. "I have been called worse by better people."

"There is a dead calf in Harold's yard with four blade cuts in its side. Was that you?"

His face changed. Something went out of it, and he put his forehead down on the ground and breathed. "No. It was not."

"A wolf would eat what it killed."

"A wolf would," he said into the dirt. "And so would I, if I were hungry. I am not. I have not killed anything in this county except a rabbit in July, and I did not use a blade to do it."

I stood there with the knife in my hand and the wheat around my knees and the dark mill behind him, and I believed him. I did not want to believe him. I did not trust the wanting.

"You are shaking," I said.

"I am cold." He said it plainly. "I have been in the field since Tuesday, and the nights are getting longer, and I do not have a coat, on account of the clothes problem."

"Tuesday was five days ago."

"Yes."

I looked at the road. The road was empty both ways. I looked at the mill, which was dark, and at the wheat, which was quiet, and I thought about Dale and his two licensed hunters out of Spokane, and about the Council man with his leather folder and his gray eyes.

"Can you walk?" I said.

He lifted his head. "I can try."

"Then try."

He got to his hands and knees and then to one foot, and I did not help him. He leaned on the fence post and the fence post bent, and he got up straight, and he was taller than I had guessed. Much taller. He kept one hand on the post and he did not look at me while he steadied himself, and I saw the way his ribs showed under his skin.

"There is a coat in the co-op," I said. "It is my brother's. It is not a gift, and I want it back."

"Understood."

"And you do not speak to anyone, and you do not step off the co-op floor, and if you try anything, I will put this knife in your ribs before you finish standing up. Do you understand me?"

He looked at me then. Amber eyes, tired and steady, and something in them that I could not read. "I understand you," he said. "I have not been understood this well in a long time."

We walked along the fence line to the co-op road, and he kept pace with me better than a man who had been lying in a field for five days should have. He did not ask me my name. I did not offer it. The co-op yard was dark and the loading dock was empty, and I unlocked the side door with the key I keep on a bootlace and took him in.

The office smells like burlap and diesel and the coffee June burns every morning. There is a cot in the back for when Harold sleeps off a double shift, and I took the army coat off the peg and handed it to him. He put it on and it hung on him, and he did up the buttons with fingers that were still shaking.

"Sit," I said, and he sat on the cot, and it creaked.

I got the lamp lit and turned it low and looked at him properly for the first time, and that was a mistake. He was not handsome the way Dale was handsome, with his clean shirt and his smile. He was something else. His face had been put together with a lot of straight lines, and his jaw was square, and his eyes were amber under the wheat-colored hair falling over his forehead, and there was grain still in it. I wanted to reach out and take it out.

I did not.

"The scar on your back," I said. "The one on your shoulder blade."

He went still again. "What about it?"

"Where did you get it?"

"I fell off a truck when I was nineteen," he said. "It is an old thing. I do not remember it well."

I sat down on the desk. My hands were cold and my head hurt and I was suddenly very tired, and I said, "My brother had that scar. Right there, in that place. And a burn on the back of his neck."

Elias did not say anything. He looked at me, and his jaw worked, and then he looked down at the floor.

"Owen," he said.

I got off the desk so fast the lamp rocked. "How do you know his name?"

"Because I knew him," Elias said. "And I have been trying to find you for four months."

The lamp was the only light in the co-op and it was not much of one, and his shadow went all the way to the loading dock. I had my knife out again and I did not remember taking it out.

"Say that again," I said.

"I knew your brother," he said. "I was there the night he died."

Outside, a truck started up on the co-op road, and the headlights swung across the loading dock and through the office window and over both of us, and through it all Elias sat on the cot in my brother's coat with the grain still in his hair and looked at me like a man who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time.