Chapter 2 His Hand on My Wrist

The pack house corridor smelled of wet dog and candle wax. Someone had propped the side door open to let the smoke out of the kitchen, and the draft came down the passage with the smell of the moor in it, cold and clean. I was walking fast. Callum was walking faster.

"Slow down," he said. "You are going to break your neck on the stairs."

"I know these stairs better than you do."

He caught my wrist. Just that, his fingers closing round the bone, and the bothy came back to me in a rush so hard I had to put my free hand on the wall. The heat went up my arm like a lit fuse and settled somewhere under my ribs, and my wolf came awake and pressed her shoulder against the inside of my skin, wanting out, wanting him.

"Let go," I said.

"Not until you listen."

"I am listening. You are the one who has not said anything worth hearing."

We were alone. The corridor ran past the kitchen door and the cold pantry and the door to the warriors' wing, and every door was shut, and the loudest thing in the house was the fire settling in the grate downstairs. Callum's hair was still dark with rain at the ends. There was a smear of peat ash on his jaw, and a scratch on the back of his hand from the heather, and he was looking at me as if I were a word he had been trying to read all night.

"I have known you since you were a girl trailing your mother round the estate," he said. "I have never once seen you scared. So do not tell me nothing happened at that grave."

"People are allowed to be cold, Callum."

"Your hand shook."

"Hands shake. It is a thing hands do."

His fingers tightened on my wrist. I could feel his pulse through the skin, or I could feel mine, and I could not tell the difference, and that frightened me more than the ghost had. He was not a fool. He had been watching me all night the way he watched the deer, patient and quiet, and if I gave him one more piece of anything he would take it apart in his hands until he found the shape of it.

"Where were you that night," I said. "The night she died."

He went still. The firelight from the stairwell moved over his face and his eyes went the color of the moss under the birches, and he did not answer.

"Tell me," I said. "Because the pack is already telling itself a story, and I would like to know whether I should be listening to it."

"The pack is telling itself a story," he said, "and it is not the one you think."

"Then give me a better one."

"I cannot."

"Callum."

"I cannot." He let go of my wrist and stepped back, and the cold came back into my arm where his hand had been. "My father asked me to do something that night. I did it. That is all I can tell you."

"Your father is the Alpha."

"Yes."

"And you are his son."

"Yes."

"So the two of you have an answer between you, and neither of you is going to give it to me." I pulled my cuff down. I was angry now, properly angry, which was better than frightened. "That will not last long. Rabbie is already putting that answer together in his head, and he will have it out of the pair of you before the frost."

Callum looked at me then with something in his face that I did not have a name for. "Rabbie," he said slowly. "What did Rabbie say to you at the cairn?"

"Nothing. He was too busy being the grieving warrior."

"He was not grieving."

"No," I said. "I noticed that."

"Then you are more careful than half this pack, and I will thank you to stay that way." He took a step toward me, then stopped himself. "Isla. I need you to know that whatever else is said about me before the moon turns, I did not harm Mhairi. She was kind to me when nobody else in that house was. I would not have touched a hair on her head."

"I never said you did."

"Not to my face. Give it time."

There was a step on the stair. Ewan came up into the corridor with his coat still on and his soft brown hair full of the wind, and he had been crying, and he did not bother to wipe his face. The old Luna's son, the forester who kept the estate's woods and always had a word for everyone, and he stood in the corridor looking from me to Callum with his hands hanging open at his sides.

"I saw you come down the hill," he said. "I wanted to say, about the rites. The cairn rites. She would have chosen you, my mother. She would have been glad it was you."

I did not know what to say. There was something wrong about the way he said it, the words going down smooth and easy and his face not matching them at all. "I did not know her well," I said. "I am sorry, Ewan. Truly."

"She thought well of you." His eyes slid to Callum. "Both of you."

"Go to bed, Ewan," Callum said, not unkindly. "Tomorrow is soon enough."

Ewan nodded and went on past us and up the far stair, and I watched him go and thought about his mother saying go home before he asks you to stay, and I wondered what he had to do with any of it.

At the foot of the attic stair Callum stopped me again, but he did not touch my wrist this time. He put his hand flat on the wall above my head, and his voice came out low, and if I had not been so angry I might have felt that pull of his a bit more than I wanted to admit.

"Stay inside the house tonight," he said. "Do not go back to that cairn alone."

"Why would I go back?"

"Because you are a gamekeeper and you will want to know what spooked you, and I am asking you not to." He was very close, and his breath smelled of the same rain as the bothy, and the warmth of him was a thing I could feel on my face. "Please. For the sake of the one good thing I have going for me right now, do not go near that grave until you have told me first."

I should have asked him why. I let it go.

"Fine," I said. "I will stay where I am put."

"Thank you."

"Do not thank me. I am not doing it for you."

He almost smiled. It was a small, tired thing, but it was there, and he stepped back and let me go up to my own rooms, and I shut the door and stood in the dark with my hand still warm where he had held it.

I waited an hour, listening to the house settle. Then I put on my coat and went down the back way, out through the laundry door and across the wet grass, with the moon behind a cloud and the birches creaking, and I went up to the cairn.

The wind had not touched it. Every stone was where Rabbie had laid it, and the crescent stone was at the top where Douglas had put it, and the earth smelled of the dead woman and nothing else. I knelt down and put my palm flat on the stone, and I said, low, "It is me. It is Isla. Tell me the rest or tell me nothing, but do not play with me."

The cloud moved off the moon.

The voice came out of the ground under my hand, and it was weeping again, and it was as clear as the bell that had called the pack.

"Isla," it said. "He was in my room that night. He was the one who sat beside me. Ask him why he wore your brother's coat."