Chapter 3 The Scent I Buried

I did not go back to room seven that night. I walked past Silas and his vase of wolfsbane and took the stairs down four flights instead of the elevator, because the stairwell smelled of concrete and floor wax and nothing else.

The flowers were the part I could not stop thinking about. Seven white flowers in a glass vase, set on the windowsill where the parking lot light fell across them, and Silas had said something to me about how the patient liked the window open in summer. He had not mentioned poison. He had not needed to.

By the time I reached my car the sky over the ridge had gone grey. I sat with my hands on the wheel and thought about the mark on my wrist, then drove home, took a cold shower, and slept four hours with the curtains shut.

The next morning I stood in my bathroom and opened the cupboard under the sink.

The wolfsbane was in a brown bottle labeled tincture of monkshood. I had bought it from a woman in a trailer on the far side of the ridge who sold herbal remedies to people who did not want to explain themselves to a doctor. Five drops a day for seven years. Five drops in my coffee, five drops before every shift, and once a week a full dropper in water when the scent was bad enough that I could smell myself.

I measured ten drops. Then I looked at the dropper and measured ten more.

The taste was bitter and green, like a mouthful of dirt. I stood at the sink with my eyes shut and waited for the dimming behind my ribs, the way the world went from sharp to soft. My wolf settled into the dark place where I kept her. She did not like it, but she was used to it, and she went quiet.

I looked at my wrist. The mark was still there, pale and curved, and it had not dimmed with the wolfsbane. If anything it looked brighter.

I put on my coat and drove to the diner on Route 9 and ordered the breakfast special and sat in the corner booth with the cracked vinyl seat and thought about my husband.

His name was Daniel. He had a wide smile and a gap between his front teeth, and he had come into my life when I was twenty-six and working days at the hospital and had no idea what I was. He had found me in the parking lot one night when I was crying in my car because I had smelled a wolf in the emergency room and could not stop shaking. He had tapped on the window and asked if I was all right, and I had looked up and known, the way you know your own face in a mirror, that he was like me.

He had told me about the pack. He had told me about the Alpha, a man named Caleb who had a temper and a good heart and a problem with his brother. He had told me about the mate bond and how it was not always a gift, and he had told me that the two of us were lucky because we had found each other by accident and not by decree. He had never told me he was a Gamma. He had said he was a scout, a runner, a man who did errands for the pack, and I had believed him because I wanted to.

The last morning I saw him he had gotten up before dawn to drive out to the mine road. He had kissed Eli on the head and said something in a language I did not know, and then he had stood in the doorway and looked at me for a long moment.

"Keep him safe," he had said.

"Safe from what?"

He had not answered. He had gone out to the truck and driven away, and the police had found the truck three days later with the driver's door open and the engine cold and no sign of him anywhere.

I finished my eggs and paid and drove to the hospital, because my shift started at seven and I had a son to feed and a life to keep.

The day nurse gave me the report in the hallway outside room seven. The patient had been quiet all morning. The brother had been in and out. The flowers on the windowsill had been removed by housekeeping because they were not allowed in patient rooms.

I went in at eight with the medication cart.

Caleb was lying down again, but his eyes were open, and they followed me across the room the way they had followed me into the corridor. The IV bag was new. I checked the line and checked the pump and then stood with my back to him and my hands on the cart.

"Ten drops," he said.

"What?"

"Your wolfsbane. You usually take five. This morning you took ten." His voice was quiet. "I can smell the difference from here."

I turned around. His face was pale against the pillow and his eyes were the color of a lamp in a dark room.

"You can smell me from this bed with a tube in your arm and a curse in your chest."

"I am an Alpha. I can smell a rabbit in the woods a mile from my border. You are six feet away and you smell like a woman who is trying to hide." He shifted on the pillow. "You do not need the ten drops. I am not going to hurt you."

"You are not the one I am afraid of."

"No," he said. "You are afraid of my brother. You are right to be."

I picked up the blood pressure cuff and wrapped it around his arm, and the skin of his forearm was warm through the fabric of the gown. His pulse was steady and strong, and when I wrote the number on the chart my hand was not shaking, and I was proud of that.

"Did you know my husband?" I asked, without looking up.

"Daniel." Caleb said the name softly. "Yes. I told you that."

"Then tell me why he never told me he was your Gamma."

The room was quiet for a moment. I heard the pump click, and a cart go by in the hallway, and Caleb take a breath.

"Because he was trying to protect you," he said. "The Gamma is the Alpha's right hand and the first wolf to die in a challenge. He did not want you to know what he was, because he did not want you to be a target. He told me once that he had found a woman who made him want to leave the pack. He told me he was going to ask me for permission to go."

"Did he?"

"No. He never asked." Caleb's voice dropped. "He went looking for the heir instead. He went alone, and he did not come back, and I have been lying in this bed for seven years because I did not go with him."

I wrote the number on the chart and capped my pen. My eyes were dry. I had cried for Daniel for a year, and then I had stopped, and I had promised myself I would never cry in a hospital again.

"I need to check your chart for the medication orders," I said.

Then his voice came into my head.

It was not a sound in the room. It was a voice in the space behind my eyes, low and urgent, and it said, "Find Tam."

I dropped my pen. It rolled under the bed and I did not pick it up. I looked at Caleb and his lips had not moved, but his eyes were on mine and they were bright with something that looked like fear.

"Who is Tam?" I said.

"Ask for him at the pack house on Miller's Ridge. He is my Gamma now. He will know what to do." His voice was barely a whisper. "Please. Find him before my brother finds you."

The door to room seven opened. I turned, and Silas was standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and a smile on his face, and behind him was a woman I had never seen before, with dark brown hair and violet eyes, and she was looking at me as if she had been told a secret she had not wanted to hear.

Silas looked at Caleb, and then at me, and his smile widened.

"Nora," he said. "I would like you to meet Ivy. My mate."