The Alpha’s Doomed Mate

The boy's fingers were cold when Agatha Morris pressed her palm against them, and that frightened her most, because wolves ran hot, even the sick and the dying. "Stay with me," she said. "Look at me, Toren, not at the ceiling." Toren was eleven and small for his age. His mother knelt on his other side, pressing a wet cloth to his forehead, her hands shaking so badly the water dripped onto his collarbone instead of his skin. "Let me work," said Mira, the healer, touching Agatha's shoulder. Her face gave the answer before her words did. "I have four more like him outside. I don't have the herbs to save all five." Toren's mother made a sound that wasn't quite a word. "He drank from the eastern well," she whispered. "I told them all not to, since the fish started dying. He said the water tasted the same as always." "It does taste the same," Agatha said. "That's what worries me." Then Toren's eyes snapped open, suddenly clear, and his small hand locked around her wrist with a strength he should not have had. "The Hollow is bleeding," he whispered. Agatha went cold. "Toren?" "Red, everywhere. The trees, the ground." His gaze dropped to her collar, to the place beneath it where her crescent-shaped birthmark lay, a mark only her father and Bryn had ever seen. He flinched as though it burned him. "You're standing in the middle of it. Everyone else is dead, and you're the only one still standing." His grip went slack. His eyes rolled shut. His mother screamed his name, and Mira dropped to his chest, listening. One terrible second. Two. "He's breathing," Mira said. "Barely. It's the fever talking." But she did not look at Agatha when she said it, and the birthmark under Agatha's collar had begun to prickle with heat. Agatha stood, and her legs held, though she could not say how. "I need to see the well again." Mira caught her wrist. "You've seen it twice. Your father wants you planning for when the harvest fails." "It hasn't failed yet." "It will." Mira's voice softened, almost fond. "You never stop, do you? Go, but be back before dark. I don't like how quiet the wolves have gone near the tree line." Three days' ride north, in a stone tower above the dark pines of the Shadow Territory, Alpha Cole Jack read the letter his spymaster had handed him, then read it again, slower. "Say that again." Garrick, his chief informant for six years, had never once needed to repeat himself, but he did. "Northern soldiers have spent a month moving grain, medicine and timber toward the southern border. Far more than the North needs. Every route ends in Greenvale." "Greenvale is dying." "Yes, and Jerry Frank appears to be the one keeping it alive." Cole sat back, the old wood creaking under him. Six years of watching the Northern Alpha had taught him one lesson: the man did nothing that didn't serve him first. "Jerry doesn't give charity. He wants something from Greenvale, or from whoever leads it. Their Alpha has a daughter." "Our contacts say marriage talks may already be underway." Cole went very still. A weakened neighbor bound to Jerry by marriage would put the North on his border and shatter a peace that had held only because neither Alpha could destroy the other without destroying himself. The hatred he had carried since he was seventeen, standing over his father's grave, stirred like something waking. "Find out who she is," he said. "Whether this marriage is her father's idea or Jerry's. And learn it before the wedding." Garrick hesitated at the door. "There is one more thing, my lord. The man I sent to watch Greenvale's border did not come back. We found his horse this morning, its throat opened, the saddlebags empty except for this." He laid a scrap of cloth on the desk. Pale gray, finer than anything a soldier or farmer would wear, stitched through with silver thread. Cole turned it over in his fingers, and his pulse slowed into something cold and certain. "This isn't Northern make." "No, my lord." "Then Jerry isn't the only one moving pieces toward Greenvale." Cole closed his fist around the cloth. "And I don't yet know which of them I should fear more." Dusk was gathering when Agatha reached the eastern well, Bryn hurrying beside her with a bucket. "You've gone white," Bryn said. "What did Toren say?" "That the Hollow is bleeding." Agatha did not slow. "And that I was standing in it." "Fever talk." "That's what Mira said." At the stone ring she knelt and drew up the bucket, the rope rough against her palms. The water looked clean and smelled clean, but near the bottom a faint oily film shimmered, gone the moment she looked at it straight on. "Tilt your head. There. It's in every well I've checked east of the ridge, and it wasn't there before the illness began." Bryn squinted, and slowly her face changed. "That wasn't there last season." Agatha dipped two fingers into the water. The birthmark beneath her collar burned like a brand. The film recoiled from her fingertips like oil from soap, and for one heartbeat the whole bucket turned black as ink. Then every sound in Greenvale stopped. No wind. No coughing from the camp. No howl. "Agatha." Bryn's whisper shook. "The wolves have gone quiet." She snatched her hand back. Her fingertips glimmered faintly silver, then faded to ordinary skin. "What was that?" "I don't know." Her heart hammered. "But the water knew I was here." That was when she saw the mud at the well's lip. Boot prints, sharp-edged and fresh, water still seeping into the heels. They led from the stones to the tree line. Someone had stood here this very morning, close enough to touch the rope. Someone who walked on two feet and had not wanted to be seen. At the edge of the trees, where the shadows had gone thick and blue, a figure stood perfectly still. A pale gray cloak, the hood drawn low, no face beneath it. Bryn gripped her arm. "That's not one of ours." The figure raised one hand, not in threat but in greeting, the way one welcomes someone long expected. Though the field lay silent, the voice reached Agatha as clearly as if it had been spoken against her ear. "Not yet, little moon. Soon." Then the hood turned toward the camp, toward Mira's tent, and the figure was gone, as though the dusk had swallowed it whole. The howling began again, all at once, from every direction. It was not mourning this time. It was a warning.