A sample from
And I Know You
Eight years ago, on a black rock at the edge of Lake Superior, the man her wolf had chosen stood in front of sixty of the pack and said he didn't know her. Nine hours from Minneapolis, the last two in the dark, the lake a black gap on her right whenever the road swung close to the shore.
She had come up through the peninsula with the heater going and the windows sealed, past Mohawk and Phoenix and the old mine buildings standing black against the sky, and through town without stopping. Main Street lit end to end and nobody on it. The Drift's windows warm. The pasty shop dark. The clinic dark, with Joan's light on in the back room where she would be reading the county journal and waiting for a phone call about a leg.
Kirsten Hakala killed the engine under the lodge's porch light and sat in the quiet a moment. The cold found the door seals at once. October cold. The working kind.
In the truck bed, strapped under the tonneau, rode a cooler of plates and screws on ice packs and the instrument roll she had signed out of the supply room like a library book. Nine hours was time enough to plan an osteotomy three ways. She had picked one.
She was thirty-three years old, final year of a trauma and surgical critical care fellowship at a level-one center that did not know what she was, and she had ten days of leave to fix a man no hospital in Houghton could open. Ray Carew. Sixty-four. Pinned under a shifted log load at the yard on Sunday, femur and pelvis, four days into healing crooked at the speed his kind healed.
Every day of that four was work she would have to undo.
Ten days. She was due back on the schedule on the Monday after next, and her program director had signed the leave with a look that said the weeks had better be worth it. They would be. A malunion was a malunion. Bone did not care whose son was standing in the room.
She got out into the wind. It came straight off Superior and flattened her braid against her spine. The lodge stood above the lawn, log and stone, the great room's windows lit yellow toward the water. People waiting in there. Joan. The elders, maybe. Him.
She was not ready to be looked at.
So she did the thing she had told herself on the interstate she would not do. She left the cooler in the truck and took the path down to the Ledge.
The basalt was the same. That was the insult of the place, that it kept nothing, no mark of any of it, only black rock shelving flat to the water with the waves breathing against the low end and the iron fire ring cold at the center.
She stood where she had stood. She was good at this. It was the one talent the fellowship had sharpened instead of dulling, the keeping of an exact record. Dates. Positions. Words.
Eight years. She had been twenty-five. The elders at the high end with their backs to the lake, five of them in dark coats. The fire in the ring. The pack in its loose half-circle, sixty of them, and the wind coming off the water just like this, and nobody warm.
She kept the positions, same as the words. Ray Carew at the center of the elders, upright on two good legs then, his white head bare to the cold. Joan near the path with her arms folded. Her own people at the left of the ring, her mother gripping her father's sleeve like a rail. And Seth, a yard closer to the fire than anyone, where the light could find him.
She had stood up out of that ring and said it clear, because she had carried the recognition for a month by then and it had never once occurred to her to be afraid of saying it aloud. Before the pack, I know you.
And Seth Carew, twenty-seven and broad and beautiful in his dark coat, standing where the firelight could find him, had looked straight at her and answered.
I don't know you.
The elders had said what the elders say. The pack heard.
Then the path, and the long climb, and the custom that nobody touched the refused one going up, a kindness that had felt like being already buried. Not one hand on her all the way to the top. She had driven back to Minneapolis that same weekend and built a life with no room in it for any of this, and the life was good, and she had kept score of that too.
She had left his brass check on the rock before she went. The summer she was twenty-three he had pressed it into her palm, 214, his great-grandfather's number off the tally board, and she had carried it two years like it meant what it said. She had set it down on the basalt in the dark and walked away from it with everything else.
The wind pushed. The lake kept at the rock.
She had not come back for this. She had not come back for him. She had come back because Joan Maki called her on Tuesday and said the alpha's leg was setting wrong, and there was nobody within four hundred miles who could be told why it had to be fixed here, in the lodge's back kitchen, off the books.
"Kirsten."
Her name came up the path behind her, low, in a voice her body answered before her head did.
Then the wind turned.
It brought him to her all at once, full strength, eight years folded into a single breath. Woodsmoke. Sawdust. Wool and cold lake air, and under all of it the thing that was only Seth, that her wolf knew like a hand knows its own glove. The pull went through her knees and her chest and the pit of her stomach, exactly where it had always gone, as if the years had been nothing but distance and the distance was closed.
She did not turn around. That much she could control.
"You're not supposed to be down here," she said.
"Neither are you."
His steps on the basalt. He stopped short of her, far enough that she could not feel his heat, near enough that her wolf stood up and pressed against the inside of her skin. She kept her eyes on the water.
"I'd have come up to the lodge," he said. "I saw your truck. Then I saw where you went."
"You saw right."
"Kirsten. Look at me."
She turned.
Eight years had done what eight years do to a man who works timber. Broader through the chest and shoulders than the twenty-seven-year-old in her record, heavier in the arms, a close dark beard that was new, the nose still a fraction off true from some old break. Thirty-five now. He filled his canvas coat the way the yard had built him to, collar up against the wind, and he stood easy on the rock like the cold was furniture. The porch light was too far up the hill to reach them, and there was no moon, but the lake threw back what starlight there was, and his eyes caught it.
Amber. The wolf right under the surface.
Hers answered. She felt her own eyes go and hated it a little and let it be what it was.
"You shouldn't be here," she said.
"I know."
"Your father's leg is setting wrong. I'm the surgeon. That's the whole of it."
"I know that too." He had his hands in his coat pockets. He took them out and put them back, and she registered it with distant interest: Seth Carew not knowing what to do with his hands. "I need to say something before you go up there. Before Joan and the elders and my father and all of it. While it's just you."
"There is no just you and me."
"There is right now."
The lake worked at the rock. She let the silence stand, because the silence was hers, and he let her have it. That went in the record.
"Say it, then," she said.
He took a breath. She watched him decide not to dress it up.
"On this rock, I said I didn't know you." His voice was low and it did not shake. "I knew you. I knew you the way my own blood knew me, and I stood in front of sixty people and said the other thing, and the pack heard me, and you walked up that hill alone. There's no reason I can give you that makes it smaller. I was wrong. I was a coward about it, and I've been sorry every day since, and being sorry in private is worth nothing. I know what it's worth. I'm saying it anyway, because you're owed it. Whatever you do with it."
He stopped there. He did not say her name again. He did not ask for anything.
The pull ran under her ribs like current under lake ice. She stood in it. She did not move. Some part of her she'd thought long dead got up and strained toward him until it hurt in her throat.
She took her own vitals out of habit. Heart up. Breathing shallow. Pupils gone, probably, the amber up in hers same as his. Hands steady. The hands were always steady. She had built a whole career on the hands, and they did not care what the rest of her was doing.
Eight years she had kept the exact words of the refusal. Now she had these ones too, all of them, said into the dark with nobody to hear but her and the water.
That was the trouble with them.
"You're right about one thing," she said. "Being sorry in private is worth nothing."
"I know."
"Sixty people heard you refuse me. You want to know what an apology weighs?" Her voice stayed level. The OR voice. The one that never climbed. "It weighs what it costs. Down here, in the dark, with the lake and no witnesses, it costs you nothing. So that's what it's worth. That's not me being cruel, Seth. That's the exchange rate."
His jaw worked under the beard. The amber did not move off her.
"I'm not asking you to weigh it," he said. "I'm not asking you for anything."
"Good. Because you haven't got any credit here."
"I know."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it's true."
And there it was, the thing she had not planned for. He was not going to fight her. The Seth in her record fought everything, argued the elders down, stared a whole yard crew into line. This one stood in the cold and took it, and that was harder to hold against him than arguing would have been, and she was furious with him for that too.
"I'm going up to see your father," she said. "Films tomorrow, at the clinic. Joan's arranging it. If the films look like the phone call, I operate Saturday. Back kitchen, Joan on anesthesia, and nobody pretends a wolf burns through drugs like a man. You can tell him that. You can tell him I'll be straight with him and I expect the same."
"I'll tell him."
She stepped past him toward the path. Close. Closer than she meant to, and his scent opened over her again like heat off a stove door, and her wolf lunged, and she held it and kept walking.
"Kirsten."
She stopped. She did not turn. She had turned once tonight. Once was the allowance.
"Thank you," he said. "For coming. For him. Whatever else."
"You can thank me when the leg works."
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.