Chapter 34
New Beginnings
Roan
Six months later, on a Tuesday morning in May, I wake to the sound of Phoebe arguing with a cat.
The argument is one-sided. Biscuit, Maggie’s ginger tom, has taken up residence on our kitchen windowsill and is refusing to vacate despite Phoebe’s increasingly creative negotiations.
I can hear her from the bedroom, her voice shifting between the firm professional tone she uses in the surgery and the softer, slightly pleading register she reserves for animals who are testing her patience.
“You have a perfectly good home next door. Maggie feeds you actual cat food. I am not opening a tin of tuna at seven in the morning because you’ve decided you live here now.”
Biscuit, from the sound of it, disagrees.
I lie in bed and listen, and the smile on my face is the kind that would have alarmed me a year ago. The stupid, unreasonable happiness of a man who got everything he didn’t know he wanted by doing everything he swore he wouldn’t.
The cottage is different now. Not structurally.
Phoebe would never allow structural changes to a building she considers architecturally sound.
But the surfaces have accumulated the evidence of two lives overlapping.
My jacket on the hook beside hers. My boots by the door, caked with mud from last night’s patrol.
Books I’ve been reading stacked on the arm of the sofa next to her veterinary journals.
The kitchen table, which used to hold her clinical notes and a single mug, now holds two mugs, a patrol schedule and a notebook full of her observations on supernatural healing rates that she’s threatening to turn into a paper if she can find a journal that would publish it without having her committed.
I pull on jeans and a T-shirt and walk barefoot into the kitchen. Phoebe is standing at the window in one of my shirts, her hair loose, holding a standoff with Biscuit through the glass. The cat stares at her with the implacable dignity of an animal who has never lost a negotiation.
“He’s won,” I say.
“He has not won. I am establishing boundaries.”
“You’re opening the tuna drawer.”
She is, in fact, opening the tuna drawer. She sets a saucer on the windowsill with the resigned efficiency of a woman who knows when she’s beaten, and Biscuit accepts his tribute without acknowledgement.
“Your patrol was late last night,” she says, filling the kettle. Not an accusation. An observation, filed alongside the other data points she collects about my movements with the thoroughness of someone who spent her career tracking animal behaviour.
“Lewis picked up a scent on the northern boundary. Deer, not wolf. Tracked it to the river to be sure.”
“And?”
“Deer.”
“Thrilling.”
I wrap my arms around her from behind and rest my chin on her head, and she leans back into me with the automatic ease of someone whose body has learned that this is where it fits.
The morning sun is warm through the window.
The village is waking up outside, the familiar sounds of Mistwood finding its rhythm: a car on the high street, the church bell marking the hour, Maggie’s back door opening as she starts her rounds of the garden.
This is my life now. Patrols that are mostly uneventful.
A surgery that smells of antiseptic and wet dog and the particular herbal note of Phoebe’s supernatural case files.
Dinners at the main house that I attend voluntarily, which still surprises my father every time.
Mornings in a kitchen with a woman who argues with cats and writes academic papers about impossible biology and makes me feel like the ground beneath my feet is solid for the first time in my life.
I’m head of security. We don’t call it that because calling it that would mean my father won, and I’m not giving him the satisfaction of a title.
But the patrols are mine. The tactical planning is mine.
The boundary maintenance, the threat assessment, the coordination with the two neighbouring packs whose territories border ours, all mine.
Rebecca calls it leading. I call it helping out.
She calls me stubborn. I call her a pain in the arse. We’ve reached an understanding.
Phoebe’s practice has become something neither of us anticipated.
The surgery at Ivy Cottage handles the ordinary business of a rural veterinary practice: vaccinations, dental checks, the endless parade of arthritic Labradors and overweight tabbies that constitute the bread and butter of country practice.
But the back room, the one with the locked cabinet and the separate case files, handles something else entirely.
She’s the only vet in the region, possibly the country, who treats supernatural patients with full knowledge of what they are.
Pack members come for injuries sustained during shifts and patrols.
Maggie sends her clients whose animals have been affected by proximity to hedge magic.
A family from the next valley, shapeshifters of a kind I’d never encountered before, Phoebe identified them through scent alone, bringing their children for check-ups that no human GP could provide.
She documents it all. She always documents everything.
The notebooks have multiplied, filling a shelf in the surgery, and she’s begun cross-referencing healing rates across different supernatural species with a methodical rigour that would be publishable if the subject matter weren’t classified as impossible.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, handing me tea. The words that precede every significant development in our lives.
“About?”
“The healing rate variations between wolf and non-wolf supernaturals. The data suggest a common mechanism with species-specific expression. If I could get a larger sample size…”
“You want to recruit more supernatural patients.”
“I want to offer my services to a wider community. There are people in these hills who are managing conditions they don’t understand, treating injuries with methods that don’t account for their actual biology. I could help. If they’d trust me.”
“They’d trust you. You’d need a bigger surgery.”
“I’d need funding. And possibly a partner.” She sips her tea and looks at me with the expression that means she’s three steps ahead and waiting for me to catch up. “Someone with connections to the supernatural community. Someone who could vouch for me.”
“You want me to be your receptionist.”
“I want you to help me build something.”
I walk to The Wren at half ten for the coffee that’s become a daily ritual. The café is quiet between the morning rush and the lunch crowd, and June is restocking the pastry case with the fresh batch of cinnamon rolls that Phoebe maintains are the primary reason she moved to Mistwood.
Nell is behind the counter. She pours my coffee without being asked, sliding it across with the minimal interaction that characterises all our exchanges.
Nell doesn’t waste words. She serves coffee with the focused efficiency of someone whose mind is always somewhere else.
In six months of daily visits, I’ve learned almost nothing about her except that she’s quiet, she’s observant, and she carries herself with a stillness that reads as deliberate rather than natural.
She’s Beta. Steady, grounded, unremarkable in the way that Betas often are: the scaffolding that holds the structure up without drawing attention to itself. I’ve never given her much thought beyond that.
The café door opens, and a man walks in. I’ve never seen him before, which in Mistwood is notable in itself. He’s tall, lean, wearing a jacket that’s seen too many miles, with the wary posture of someone who’s used to scanning exits. His scent reaches me a second later, and my wolf goes still.
Wolf. Packless. The sour, lonely undertone of a man who’s been on his own for a long time, overlaid with something else. Something bruised and careful, like an animal that’s been hurt enough times to expect it.
He approaches the counter. Nell looks up.
She goes completely still. Not the usual stillness I’ve seen from her before.
Something deeper. Something involuntary.
Her hand freezes on the coffee machine, and her eyes widen, and the colour drains from her face, and for one unguarded second her expression holds something I recognise with absolute certainty.
Recognition.
The lone wolf is staring back at her. His hand, halfway to his wallet, has stopped moving. His careful, wary posture has dissolved into something stunned and open, as if someone has reached into his chest and rearranged the contents.
The moment lasts three seconds. Then Nell blinks. Her composure returns. “What can I get you?” Almost steady. The man orders a black coffee, pays, sits at the table by the window. Neither of them looks at the other again.
But I saw it. I know what it looks like. I know exactly what just passed between a quiet woman behind a counter and a packless wolf who walked into the wrong café on a Tuesday morning in May.
I pick up my coffee and leave, and I don’t say anything to anyone, because it’s not my story to tell.
Some things arrive when they’re meant to. Maggie told me that once.
I walk home to my mate, and the village hums around me, and the forest hums at its edges, and Mistwood keeps its secrets the way it always has.
One at a time.