Chapter 1
Willa
The gate is new.
That is the first thing I notice. Seventeen years ago there was a wooden cross-arm and a man with a rifle who had to be flagged down with the headlights and a particular pattern of honks, and now there is iron, real iron, a black gate set into a stone wall that climbs up the slope on either side and disappears into the dusk.
There is a camera bolted to a fencepost. There are floodlights mounted high enough to throw a long apron of white over the road.
The Sinners have spent money. They have spent it on keeping people out, which means they have something inside worth keeping.
Della is at the gate. She is standing inside the wall, both hands wrapped around the iron, and when my headlights touch her she lifts her chin and her face does not change and she does not move.
She is not going to run to me. She is going to wait until I am close enough to reach for her, and then she is going to hold on to me, and that is what she does.
She opens the gate herself. She walks to the driver's side.
She opens my door before I have shut the engine off.
She is grey now. Grey at the roots and grey at the crown and the grey makes her look more like herself than the brown ever did.
I get out of the car. I cannot speak.
She does not need me to.
"Oh, girl," she says, and her hand comes up against the back of my head and I am against her shoulder, and her arms are around me, and she smells like cedar and woodsmoke and the lavender soap she has used my entire life, and seventeen years of distance collapses into the bones of my chest. I do not cry.
I have done my crying on the highway. I just lean into her, into the small fierce body of her, and let her hold the part of me that has been alone for too long.
"Callum," I say.
"Show me."
I open the back door.
Della goes very still.
She does not say anything for a long minute.
She is looking at my son in the dome light — at his face, slack in sleep, at the dark hair falling across his forehead, at the jaw that is already getting wide in a way my jaw never did, at the long lashes resting against cheekbones that are not my cheekbones.
She is looking at Ronan. She is looking at the boy I have been hiding inside this boy for seventeen years.
Her hand goes to her mouth.
"Oh," she says, very quietly. "Oh, that boy."
"I know."
"Willa."
"I know, Della."
She takes a breath. Pulls it together. The fierceness comes back into her shoulders. She says, "We need to get him inside. The cabin is open. I had Jo come down — she's waiting."
"Jo who?"
"Jo Halloran. The club surgeon. She's good, Willa. She's better than good. We have a real infirmary now."
I let that information settle. I do not have time to feel the way it makes me feel — that the club kept living, kept growing, kept building things that lasted, while I was hand-mending the same pair of work boots in a kitchen in Maine.
We get Callum into the car. I mean — he is already in the car.
I get the car into the compound. Della rides the running board with one hand on the open window frame, the way she used to ride with Ronan when he was teaching her to navigate the back roads, and the compound rolls past us in the deepening dusk and it is more, it is more than I left, it is a real settlement now.
Houses. Real houses, not just cabins. A two-story clubhouse with light in every window.
A garage I do not recognize. A long low building that might be a school or a dormitory.
The mountain rises behind all of it, dark and indifferent, exactly as I remember.
"The cabin," Della says, pointing.
The cabin.
My cabin. Our cabin.
It is at the edge of the eastern row, where the woods come down close, and there is a porch light on and a curl of woodsmoke coming out of the chimney, and the chimney is the same chimney, and the porch is the same porch, and somebody — Della, it must have been Della — has had it cleaned recently because the windows are too clear to belong to a place that has stood empty for seventeen years.
I stop the car. I do not get out.
"Willa," Della says.
"I can't."
"You can. You have to."
"I can't go in there, Della."
"Your son is dying in the back seat."
It is the cruelest thing she has ever said to me and the kindest thing she has ever said to me, and I make a sound I would prefer not to remember and I get out of the car and I open the back door and I lift my son in my arms — my arms are not strong enough, they are never strong enough, and somehow they always are — and I carry him up the porch steps of the cabin where his father and I slept for the first three years of our marriage.
The door is unlocked. The lights are on.
There is a fire in the woodstove. There is a kettle on the hob.
The blue rag rug I made the winter I was first pregnant is folded at the foot of the bed and somebody has aired the quilts and somebody — Della, it must have been Della — has put a vase of dried mountain laurel on the table because I told her once, when I was twenty-one and stupid with love, that mountain laurel was my favorite flower and she remembered.
Jo Halloran is standing in the kitchen.
She is younger than I expected. Mid-thirties, maybe, with cropped dark hair and a leather doctor's bag at her feet that has the worn look of a tool that gets used. She does not introduce herself. She says, "Put him on the table. I need light."
I put him on the table.
She works. She works the way Della used to skin rabbits — fast, methodical, no waste.
She lifts Callum's eyelids and looks at his pupils and then at the gold underneath.
She presses two fingers to the pulse at his throat and counts.
She uncurls the half-shifted hand and lays it flat on the table and runs her thumb along the splitting nail beds and the second knuckle that should not be there, and she does not flinch and she does not make a face.
She says, over her shoulder, "How long since the first episode? "
"This morning. Nine, nine-thirty."
"Has he been conscious since?"
"In and out. Mostly out. He drank some water at a rest stop in New Jersey."
"Did the hand reform any further?"
"No. It's been like that. Stuck."
She nods. She lifts Callum's lip with her thumb and looks at the canines.
She lifts his shirt and looks at the long line of his sternum and at the discoloration spreading along his ribs in a pattern I have not seen before — a kind of bruise that is not quite a bruise, dark and matte, like something is pressing up from inside.
"Della."
"Here."
"He's a Moran."
"Yes."
"You knew."
"I suspected."
Jo straightens. She wipes her hands on a cloth and turns to me. She is direct. I appreciate it.
"Your son is mid-transition," she says. "His wolf is up.
The body started the shift and the body couldn't finish it, which means he doesn't have what's called a pack anchor — he doesn't know how to land.
Without an anchor, partial shifts can keep cycling.
The flesh keeps trying to finish what the wolf started.
He's been doing it all day, slowly, while you drove.
That bruising on his ribs is internal pressure.
If we don't get him anchored within about twenty-four hours, we're going to start seeing permanent damage.
Organ involvement. Bone deformity in the limbs that have already partially shifted. Eventually neurological."
"Eventually he dies."
"Yes."
I sit down on the edge of the bed. Della puts a hand on the back of my neck.
"What does anchoring look like?" I ask.
"An alpha. A strong one. He needs to pour his wolf into Callum's wolf and walk him through the rest of the shift — completing it cleanly, then bringing him back to human. Done right, it takes about an hour. Done by the right alpha, it takes less."
"The right alpha being who."
Jo looks at me. She is choosing her words. She is looking at Della. Della is looking at me. They have already had this conversation. They have already arrived at the answer. They are waiting for me to arrive at it on my own.
"Conrad's the strongest," Jo says. "He could do it. He'd do it tonight if you asked him."
"But."
"But the strongest isn't always the best for the first shift.
The wolf responds better to blood. To the closest related alpha available.
Conrad would force the shift through, and it would work, but the wolf would resist him and Callum would feel that resistance for the rest of his life.
A blood alpha — that's a settling, not a forcing. The wolf opens for blood."
I close my eyes.
I know what she is going to say. I have known since the kitchen in Maine. I have known since I dialed Della. I have known since the day Ronan looked at me across a different breakfast table and said, if our boy ever goes gold, and I have spent seventeen years not knowing it.
"Kael," Jo says. "Kael is the closest blood. Kael is the right call."
The cabin is very quiet. The fire pops in the woodstove.
I open my eyes. I look at my son on the table.
His hand. His face. The cheekbones that are not mine.
The mouth that is not mine. The boy I have spent seventeen years building out of one man and protecting from another, and now I am being told that the protection ends here, that the only road from this cabin to my son's eighteenth birthday goes directly through Kael Moran's office.
"Give me an hour," I say.
"Willa —"
"One hour, Jo. I need to write something down. And I need to walk over there. And I need to say it the way I'm going to say it, not the way I'd say it if I went over there right now."
Jo looks at Della. Della nods.
"One hour," Jo says. "If he gets worse before then, I'm sending Della to fetch him whether you've finished your letter or not."
"Fair."
They go.
I sit at the table.
The table is the same table.