The Alpha's Dark Secret

The bus left me at the bottom of the hill with two suitcases, a cardboard box of my grandmother's cookbooks, and a sky that looked ready to rain on me out of spite. "Ashgrove," the driver said, as if I might have gotten off at the wrong place and needed the name to be sure. He didn't wait around to see if I had. The doors folded shut, the engine coughed, and I stood in the gravel watching the bus climb back up the road until the trees swallowed its tail lights. It was the first week of October. I had turned nineteen eleven days ago, and I'd spent that birthday signing papers in a lawyer's office that smelled like old carpet and peppermint. The lawyer was kind about it. He kept sliding the tissue box toward me even after I'd stopped needing it. Grandma Odette had left me one thing, he said, and it wasn't money. It was a house. I hadn't known she owned a house. I hadn't known much about her at all, if I was honest, and that was the part that sat in my chest like a swallowed stone. She had raised me in a rented flat above a laundromat, in a village two hundred miles from here, and in nineteen years she had never once mentioned this place. She talked about the weather, and the price of eggs, and what the neighbors were getting up to. She did not talk about where she came from. When I was small, I used to ask. Where were you born, Grandma? Did you have a garden? Did you have sisters? She would smile and press a biscuit into my hand and say, "That was a long time ago, little rabbit, and long times ago are best left to sleep." Once, when I was eleven and a documentary about wilderness came on the neighbours' television, she got up so fast that she knocked her tea over, and she turned it off without a word. I remember thinking it was odd. Then I forgot about it, the way children forget everything that isn't about them. I hauled the first suitcase up the hill. The wheels caught on every pebble. By the time I reached the top, I was out of breath and the rain had finally decided to commit, so I did what anyone would do and pretended I'd planned to arrive soaked. Ashgrove turned out to be one main street and a scatter of crooked houses leaning against each other like tired friends. There was a diner with a hand-painted sign, a hardware shop, a church with a crooked steeple, and a post office the size of a garden shed. Everything past the last streetlamp was forest. Real forest, the dense kind, dark even at four in the afternoon, the pines packed so tightly you couldn't have slipped a hand between them. A woman sweeping the steps of the post office paused to watch me trudge past with my suitcases. She didn't wave, and she didn't call out to ask if I needed help, which in a town this size felt like a statement. A grey dog lying under the bakery awning lifted its head, looked at me, and then did something I've never seen a dog do. It whined, low in its throat, and tucked its nose between its paws as if I were somebody to be afraid of. I told myself it was the rain. Nobody liked wet strangers. The address on my paperwork led me to the very last house on the very last lane. It was small and made of grey stone, with a slate roof and a front door painted a faded green. A wooden fence ran around the garden, and on the other side of it, maybe thirty steps from the back porch, the trees began. I stood at the gate for a while. Rain ran off my chin. "Okay," I said to nobody. "Okay, Grandma. Let's see what you were hiding." The key was exactly where the lawyer said it would be, under a flat stone by the step. It turned stiffly. The door opened onto a smell I wasn't ready for: lavender and woodsmoke and something underneath that I couldn't name. It smelled like her. Not like the flat above the laundromat, but like her, the real her, the way she must have smelled before she ever had to leave. I made it as far as the kitchen table before I cried. It wasn't a dramatic cry. I just sat down in one of the mismatched chairs, put my forehead on the cool wood, and let it happen. Six weeks of being strong at a funeral, being polite at a lawyer's office, being sensible about suitcases, and it all came out at once in a stranger's kitchen that was apparently mine. Afterwards, I felt hollowed out and oddly lighter, the way you do when a fever breaks. I sat there a while longer, listening to the house. It was a good house to be quiet in. The clock on the wall had stopped at ten past three, the tap dripped in a slow, patient rhythm, and the stove ticked as the cold crept into its iron. Nobody here needed me to be okay. For the first time in six weeks, that felt like a gift instead of a loneliness. When I was finished, the light in the window had gone grey-gold, and the rain had eased to a patter. I washed my face at the sink. The water ran cold and tasted like iron. The house was only four rooms, so exploring didn't take long. There was the kitchen with its cast-iron stove, and a sitting room with two armchairs and a bookshelf bowed under the weight of paperbacks. Upstairs there was a bathroom with a clawfoot tub, and one bedroom with a narrow bed made up in a quilt the color of dried roses. On the nightstand sat a photograph in a tin frame. I picked it up. A young woman stood in front of this same green door, squinting into the sun. She had my chin. She had my stubborn eyebrows. She was laughing at whoever held the camera, and I knew without being told that she was my mother. I had no pictures of my mother. Grandma Odette had said they were all lost in a flood. I'd never questioned it. I turned the frame over. Written on the back, in my grandmother's slanting handwriting, were four words. "Keep her away from the woods." I read it three times. Then I put the photograph down very carefully, as if it might go off, and went to find something to eat. There was nothing in the cupboards but tea and a tin of shortbread that had gone stale around the edges. I ate four pieces standing at the window, watching the dark gather between the trees. The forest looked different at night. Less like scenery and more like something breathing slowly. I locked the back door. Then I checked it, which is what people do when they've just told themselves they're not afraid. Somewhere far off, so faint I might have imagined it, a long thin sound rose from the hills and held for a few seconds before it faded to nothing. A dog, I thought. Someone's dog, lonely in the dark. I put the kettle on and stood by the stove until the sound didn't come again. I told myself it was a note about safety. Grandma had always fussed. Don't swim after eating, don't talk to men who offer you sweets, don't walk in the woods alone. Of course, she would write something like that. She was old, and I was all she had left, and now she was gone and had somehow still managed to worry about me. That was the sensible explanation. I held onto it all the way up the stairs. I slept badly. The bed was too soft, and the house made noises I didn't know yet, the tick of cooling pipes, a branch dragging along the roof. Somewhere around midnight, I fell into a dream so vivid that it felt less like sleeping and more like being carried. I was standing in the forest. Not the garden, not the fence, but deep inside the trees, where the moss was thick as carpet and the moonlight came down in pale columns. I wasn't afraid. That was the strange part. Everything in me felt loose and easy, like I'd finally put down something heavy. Then something moved between the pines. It was a wolf, but that word is too small. It stood taller than a horse, black as spilled ink, and it moved without making a single sound. Its eyes caught the moonlight and held it, two circles of molten gold. It stopped ten paces away and looked at me. It didn't growl. It didn't bare its teeth. It only looked, the way you look at someone you've been waiting for a very long time, and something in my chest turned over and ached. There you are, said a voice. I don't know if the wolf said it. I don't know if it was a voice at all. It was in my head and in my ribs and in the soles of my feet. I woke up with my heart slamming and my sheets twisted around my legs. The room was grey with early morning. Outside the window, in the dewy garden, something had left a trail of prints in the grass. I crept to the glass and pressed my forehead against it. The prints were huge, each one wider than my spread hand. They came out of the trees, crossed the lawn, and stopped right beneath my window. Then they turned around and went back.