The Pack Calls Him Killer

The fire had burned down to a red pulse by the time Callum's hands found my waist, and the bothy smelled of wet wool and peat smoke and him. He had kissed me once already, on the step outside, a quick hard press of his mouth that I blamed on the cold. Now he was not quick about it. His fingers spread against the small of my back and drew me in until the wool of my jacket met the wool of his, and his mouth came down on mine with a patience I had not expected from a wolf the pack called the quiet one.

I kissed him back. There is no other way to say it. The storm had been beating the shutters for an hour, the road down the glen was a river of mud, and Callum had come in from the deer check soaked through and shivering, and I had given him the place nearest the fire because it was the decent thing to do. Then he had said my name, just "Isla," low and rough, and the decent thing had gone out of my head.

He tasted of rain. His thumb found the corner of my jaw and tilted my face up, and I felt the slow burn of him spreading under my skin like warmth coming back into a numb hand. My wolf rolled over once in my chest, lazy and pleased, and I let her. His mouth moved to my throat, and I heard my own breathing go uneven, and the fire spat a knot of resin and neither of us turned to look.

"Do you want me to stop?" he asked against my pulse.

"No," I said. "I want you to be quieter than that."

He laughed, a warm breath on my neck, and then he was kissing me again, and his weight came onto me, and the bothy wall at my back was rough stone and his hands were not. I had thought about this more than I ever meant to, on the long walks up the hill, in the dark of the gamekeeper's cottage with Mairi asleep in the next room. Now it was happening and my mind went white and simple, and there was only the taste of him and the heat of him and the low sound he made when my fingers found the back of his neck.

I was still trembling from it when the cry came up the glen.

We broke apart. Callum's head came round to the door, and his eyes, green as wet moss, had gone wolfish and flat. "That's the burial bell," he said.

We ran. He shifted on the path and I shifted after him, and for the length of that run there was nothing but the hill and the smell of the night and the bell tolling somewhere ahead. I will not describe the shift. Anyone who has felt it knows it, and anyone who has not would think me mad. My wolf is a good size and her coat is the color of my hair, that pale gold that goes almost cream under the moon. I ran behind Callum's dark shape, and the heather tore at my legs, and the bell kept ringing.

The whole pack was at the cairn by the time we came down. Torches had been set in the ground, and the smoke of them bent sideways in the wind, and Douglas stood at the head of the grave with his grey head bare and his jaw set. Alpha Douglas, who was never anything but Alpha, even standing at his own mate's burial with his hands shaking at his sides. Mhairi was in the ground already, wrapped in the grey cloth, and Rabbie was heaping the last stones. His red beard caught the torchlight, and he was smiling. I saw that smile and I put it away in my mind where I keep things I do not understand yet.

Fiona took the bowl of water from the elder beside her and went round the circle, touching each of us on the brow. Silver hair, silver eyes, hands like a bird's. "Earth to earth," she said, "and stone to stone, and the moon keeps her own."

Then she came to me and stopped.

I do not know what she saw in my face. She held the bowl and looked at me for a long moment, and her mouth did something I did not like. "You will stand at the head of the cairn," she said. "The rites pass to the Luna."

"I am not the Luna," I said. "You are confusing me with someone who wants the job."

"The rites do not care what you want."

So I stood at the head of the cairn, and the pack looked at me, and somewhere off in the birches an owl said its two notes over and over. The wind came down the hill and the torches guttered. Douglas put his hand on the top stone, the one with the crescent carved into it, and said the words for the dead, and his voice broke once in the middle and then went on.

That was when I heard her.

It came in with the wind, close and clear, as if Mhairi had leaned down out of the dark to put her mouth to my ear. I had heard her before. Twice, maybe three times in my life, at the edges of sleep, never a full sentence. This was a full sentence.

"The one beside you is not what you think," she said.

I did not move. My hands stayed folded in front of me and my face stayed still, because a gamekeeper learns to keep her face still when the stag bolts and the long day is lost. Under my ribs my wolf had gone low and silent, her ears flat.

The one beside me. I looked without turning my head. Callum stood at my left shoulder, his auburn hair still wet from the bothy, his hands loose at his sides. Rabbie stood at my right, finishing the cairn with a stone in each palm.

"Did you say something?" Callum asked quietly.

"No," I said.

Fiona was watching me from across the grave. She had the bowl in her hands and she was watching me the way a hawk watches a hen it has not decided about yet, and I understood then that she knew something about me, and that whatever she knew, she was not going to say it in front of Douglas.

I shut my eyes for a moment. "Mhairi," I thought at her, as hard as I could. "If that is you, say it plainly. Who is beside me?"

The wind turned. The torch nearest me went out. And in the dark between one breath and the next, the voice came again, softer, and this time it was not a warning. It was the sound you make when you are trying not to weep.

"Go home, girl," she said. "Go home before he asks you to stay."

The pack began to break up around the grave, and Douglas said the last words alone, and Rabbie put his broad hand flat on the cairn and promised the old Luna's spirit that the pack would have answers. The words were good. The hand was good. I stood in the cold with the pale gold of my hair blowing across my face and my heart going like a hare's, and I said nothing at all.

Callum leaned in. "You are white as the moon," he said. "Tell me what happened."

"Nothing happened."

"Then why is your hand shaking?"

I looked down. It was. I folded it into my sleeve and made my voice steady. "The rites," I said. "Nobody told me they would be heavy work."

He did not believe me. I could see it in his eyes, in the way he had gone still and patient, the way a wolf goes patient before it moves. And behind him, on the far side of the cairn, Rabbie had stopped smiling and was looking at me across the stones with a face I had never seen him wear, as if he had just found something he had been hunting for a long time.

Callum took my wrist. "Come away from here," he said. "We need to talk."

I looked at his hand on my wrist and remembered the bothy, and the fire, and the way he had said my name, and I heard the dead woman's voice telling me to go home. And because I could not think of a single good reason to trust either of them, I let him lead me down the hill toward the pack house.

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."

My brother's coat.

I knelt at that cairn with my hand on the stone and the wind pulling at my hair, and I could not make the words sit still in my head. Mairi was eleven. He had one coat that fit him, a dark blue padded thing with a tear at the elbow that I had mended twice and would have to mend again before the snow. He slept in it when the cottage was cold. He wore it to the village school. He had worn it to the burial and stood at the back of the pack with his hands in the pockets, because I had told him to stay near the back where the adults would not tread on him.

Callum in my brother's coat. It made no sense at all, and the senselessness of it caught me worse than any accusation could have.

"Say it again," I said to the ground. "Slow. Who was in your room?"

The voice did not come at once. When it did it had changed, thinner, as if the wind were going through it. "The one beside you."

"That is not an answer. I have had that answer already."

"He sat with me. He held my hand. He said it would be quick."

I stayed very still. "Who?"

The moon went behind the birches and the cairn went grey, and in the dark under my palm the voice said, quite clearly, "Callum."

Then it said, "No."

Then it said, "Do not make me say it. I have said enough. The girl is listening, and she will carry it to the wrong ear."

I took my hand off the stone as if it had burned me. The wind came round the cairn and the birch tops rattled, and there was no more voice, only the ordinary night, the heather moving, a sheep somewhere down the glen complaining about the dark.

I sat back on my heels and made myself go through it the way I would go through a broken fence. First post, second post, where the strain came from.

The first whisper had come at the burial with the whole pack standing there. The one beside you is not what you think. The second had come when I asked, and it had told me to go home. The third had come just now and named Callum, then taken it back, then refused to say more because the girl was listening. Who was the girl? Me. I was the girl. She had been talking to me and then she had been frightened of me, and that was not the way the dead were supposed to behave.

I have heard the dead maybe a dozen times in my life, always at the edge of sleep, always a fragment. My mother told me once that the gift ran in her line and that it was a thing to keep quiet about, and then she had died before she could tell me anything else about it. The voices I had heard before were thin and far off, like someone calling across a loch. Mhairi's voice was not like that. Mhairi's voice was in the room with me.

And it had lied. Or it had not lied, and it had been made to say a thing it did not want to say. Either way, the whisper was not a witness. That was the first useful thought I had had all night, and I held on to it.

I got up and went round the cairn with my nose down, the way I would track a wounded stag. Cold iron. Wet stone. The dead woman's cloth, faint under the stones, and peat, and the sour green smell of the moss. And there, on the lee side where the wind did not reach, a smell that did not belong to any of it. Something sharp and mineral, like a struck match, and under it a faint trace of silver.

Silver.

I knelt and put my face close to the grass. The smell was strongest by the second stone from the bottom, and when I put my fingers to the join I found a fine grey dust in the moss, the kind you get when someone has been filing a blade and has not swept up after themselves. I did not touch it more than I had to. I wiped my fingers on the heather and sat back.

Someone had been at this cairn before me. Someone had been at it with silver on their hands.

"Isla."

I nearly went over backwards. Rabbie was coming up the path from the birches with a lantern in his hand and his red beard catching the light, and he was alone, and he was not hurrying. He stopped a good ten feet off and held the lantern up so it lit my face.

"You are out late," he said.

"So are you."

"I could not sleep. It is a hard thing, a burial." He looked past me at the cairn, and his voice was gentle, and the gentleness of it made my skin crawl. "I saw a light on the hill and thought it might be the young one wandering. Mairi. He is at the age for wandering."

"Mairi is asleep in the cottage."

"Good. Good." Rabbie came a step closer. "And you are here because?"

I thought about the grey dust in the moss and the voice saying he sat with me and the girl is listening. "I could not sleep either," I said. "She was kind to me when I first came to this estate. I wanted to say a word to her on my own."

"That is decent of you." He set the lantern down on a flat stone, and the light threw his shadow long across the heather. "You know, there is talk in the house already. About the glove. About Callum."

"There is always talk."

"There is. But this talk has a shape to it." He looked at me steadily. "The Alpha is not a well man, Isla. You have seen it. I have seen it. If this pack has to choose between a dying Alpha and a son who cannot say where he was on the night his Luna died, it will not be a long choosing. Somebody sensible needs to be standing at the front of the hall when that happens."

"Somebody sensible," I said. "That would be you."

"I did not say so." He smiled, and it was the easy smile from the burial, warm and open, and I remembered him smiling at the grave with the stones still in his hands. "I am only saying that you are the new keeper of the cairn rites now, and what you say will carry weight. If you were to say the wrong thing, or the right thing, the pack would follow you."

The wind moved through the birches. I looked at the lantern and the grey dust and Rabbie's broad, patient face, and I understood that he had come up this hill to find out what I knew, and that I had to give him something or he would not go down again.

"Callum walked me to the house," I said. "He told me not to come up here alone. That is all I know, Rabbie, and it is not worth a lantern."

"Not worth a lantern," he repeated. Then he picked the lantern up. "Go down and get some sleep, Luna. The Alpha will want to see you in the morning. He has been asking for you since the burial."

I waited until his light was a small yellow dot among the birches. Then I took the last clean corner of my handkerchief and scooped a pinch of the grey dust into it, and I folded it small and put it in my coat pocket, and I went down the hill the long way round so that Rabbie would not hear me on the path.

The kitchen was still warm when I came in. Fiona was sitting at the table with a cup of tea gone cold in front of her and her silver hair loose over her shoulders, and she did not look surprised to see me.

"You went up to her," she said.

"Yes."

"Did she speak to you?"

I stood in the doorway with the dust in my pocket and the cold coming off my coat. "Why do you ask that?"

Fiona pushed the cold tea away and folded her hands. "Because she spoke to me the night she died," she said. "She told me a thing I have not been able to say aloud since. And I think, before this house gets any darker, that you and I need to have a talk about what that cairn is really for."