The Executioner's Mate

Chapter 1

Sage’s POV

The humans were doing something weird.

The town was doing something with flags. I counted seventeen of them from my position on the ridge — red white and blue bunting strung between the lampposts on the main street, a hand-painted banner stretched across the intersection that I was too far away to read, and what appeared to be a man in a tricorn hat arguing with a woman holding a clipboard near a flatbed truck with a generator on it. The generator wasn't running yet. The man in the hat was very committed to his argument.

They do this, I told my wolf. Humans. They gather in large groups and make noise and call it a good time.

My wolf, characteristically, had nothing useful to add.

I'd been on the ridge observing the town since four in the morning, which was either professional diligence or a symptom of something I'd rather not examine. The Council would call it operational preparation. My tent was behind me, already broken down and packed, because I would not be coming back to this site. Everything I brought fit into a hiking pack that contained, among other things, three changes of clothes, a medical kit, six different forms of identification, and a small bag of the specific coffee I can't sleep without that I'd been rationing since Missouri. On missions like this it was the goal to carry as little as possible, easier to abandon if the mission goes sideways.

The coffee situation was becoming critical. This was logged as my primary concern on this particular Tuesday morning. Not the target. Not the mission. Not the fact that I was about to walk into a neutral human town on the edge of werewolf territory to meet a man I was already certain I was going to dislike.

The coffee.

I'm a simple person.

Below me Briar's Hollow was not the quiet small mountain town I’d been expecting to arrive to. The main street ran through the center of town like a spine, shops on both sides. The storefronts had disappeared behind a solid wall of humans who had been slowly gathering since dawn. The crowd had the restless celebratory energy of people one small delay away from entertaining themselves in ways the organizing committee had not planned for. At the far end the flatbed truck with the inert generator was now surrounded by additional people who had opinions about it. The man in the tricorn hat had been joined by a man in a full colonial militia costume including, I was fairly sure, a musket that I hoped was decorative.

Fourth of July, I remembered. It's the Fourth of July.

I'd lost track. This happens when you live out of a backpack and your schedule is determined by other people's crises. The Fourth of July meant a parade. The parade meant crowds. Crowds meant noise and bodies and the particular human habit of standing in the middle of streets they would normally be driving down, staring at things moving slowly past them and applauding.

My wolf watched a squirrel vanish into a pine tree and swung her attention to the town. She was curious in the way she sometimes got about human behavior — not suspicious, just baffled. Like watching a nature documentary about a species you share a planet with but will never entirely understand.

I know, I told her. I don't get it either.

This was a lie. I understood it perfectly well. They were celebrating a birthday. Their country's birthday. They made food and gathered and marked time together because marking time together is the thing that tells you you're not alone in it. I understood the impulse. I simply hadn't had occasion to practice having been raised by the Werewolf Council since infancy to be their executioner. My whole purpose in life is to be invisible so, celebrating a birthday would have drawn too much attention to myself.

Deciding it was almost time to meet the contact, I shouldered my pack, checked that my hair was doing something reasonable, and started down the mountain.

The hiking trail deposited me at the edge of Briar's Hollow's small municipal parking lot. I had chosen the trail deliberately — it was the route that looked most like a recreational hike and least like an approach vector, which is the kind of sentence I have learned not to say out loud to people who don't do what I do. In the parking lot there were three cars and a van with a local news logo on it. A woman in television makeup was talking at a camera while a man with a large lens framed her against the banner, which I could now read.

Briar's Hollow 4th of July Founders' Parade — 136th Annual Celebration.

I walked into town the way I walk into every unfamiliar place — like I've been here before and found it mildly disappointing. It's a useful posture. People don't look at you twice when you seem faintly bored by your own presence. After finding some overgrown shrubbery to hide my pack I headed towards where the meeting was to take place.

The diner was called Ruth's and it had been open since five according to the handwritten sign on the door that also proclaimed Best Pie in the County!! with two exclamation points that suggested Ruth felt strongly about this. I went in and took the corner booth with sightlines to the door, the counter, the kitchen pass-through, and the window facing the street, because old habits are called that for a reason.

The coffee arrived before I asked for it, delivered by a teenager who said you look like you need this with the cheerful cruelty of someone who has never once in her life had insomnia. She was right. I tipped her accordingly.

Outside, Briar's Hollow was boisterous with all the activity. People appearing from side streets with lawn chairs, children appearing from everywhere with flags on sticks, a man in what I could only describe as an aggressively patriotic sweater setting up a folding table with a cooler on it. The parade wasn't scheduled to start until the sun reached the apex and already the street was developing the cheerful chaotic energy of a large group of people who had agreed to be delighted about something.

My wolf found this interesting. She found humans mildly interesting in general the way she found the squirrel mildly interesting — as creatures going about the business of being alive in ways that looked different from our business but amounted to the same thing.

Don't get comfortable, I told her. We're not staying.

She was already watching a child try to eat a popsicle that was melting faster than she could manage it. The popsicle was losing.

I let my eyes move in the methodical sweep that happens automatically now, the way breathing happens automatically. I observed who was local, who wasn't, who was watching the crowd and who was part of it, what vehicles were parked facing out for fast exits, what vehicles had been there long enough to collect dew on the windshields.

All of it is automatic. All of it underneath the part of my mind that was doing something else entirely.

Something else was a feeling I'd been carrying since Director Voss's briefing three days ago, sitting in the back of my skull like a stone I couldn't dislodge. I'd been handed bad assignments before. Complicated ones, ugly ones, ones where the official justification had gaps in it you could drive a truck through. That was the work. You didn't get into this particular line of employment expecting clean.

But this one sat differently.

He's dangerous, Voss had said about the target, and then listed reasons that were technically accurate and collectively unconvincing. Like a recipe where all the individual ingredients were real but the dish they allegedly made wasn't something that existed. I'd listened and nodded and kept my face in the expression I keep it in during briefings — attentive, professional, the face of a woman who does not have opinions about her assignments — and then I'd gone home and read every publicly available piece of information on Heath Blackwood and his Bull Mountain pack and arrived at Briar's Hollow ridge with the stone still in my skull.

This has to be a trap,I thought, watching a small boy in a flag cape attempt to convince his dog to also wear a flag cape. The dog was philosophically opposed.

This was not a thought I was supposed to be having. I had it anyway.

My wolf stirred. Not about the dog, not about the child, not about the popsicle situation which had resolved badly and was now involving a parent and a stack of napkins. About the thought. She pressed against the inside of my ribs the way she did when she agreed with something I was trying not to say out loud.

I know, I told her. I know.

I ordered toast I didn't want and paid my bill and stayed seated, because arriving exactly on time was for people who wanted to be caught arriving.

My contact came through the door and I knew him before he fully crossed the threshold.

Not personally. By type.

He was perhaps 50ish, although it’s hard to tell what with how slow werewolves age. He was solid through the chest in the way that spoke of a lifetime of physical confidence, with gray at his temples and the specific careful posture of a man who has never fully decided whether he is the most important person in a room. He scanned the diner and found me and something moved across his face that he rearranged very quickly. Satisfaction, maybe.

He appeared close shaved, collar straight, the kind of clean that announces itself. He smelled like expensive soap and nothing else, which should have been unremarkable and instead was the thing that bothered me. Wolves smell like something. Always. It's not negotiable. I was the only wolf I knew who had no smell — something that had wielded an advantage when it came to the work I do for the council. Whatever Gareth actually smelled like underneath the soap, he'd buried it as if he knew he was doing something he shouldn’t.

Something about him just felt slimy even though there wasn’t a speck of dust or dirt on him.

He sat across from me, folded his hands and smiled the smile of someone who had practiced it.

I smiled back the smile of someone who hadn't needed to.

He ordered nothing. I found this notable — a man in a diner on a holiday morning in his own territory, ordering nothing. Like he didn't plan to be here long enough for it to matter.

The meeting was efficient. He gave me patrol schedules, a map of compound layouts, the target's known movements and habits. He knew the information cold — not like someone who had memorized a briefing, like someone who had lived alongside it for years. He said our patrol routes and our eastern boundary and our compound.

"The Alpha's patterns are consistent," he said. "Predictable, even. He runs the northern boundary every morning before sunrise. Alone."

"Alone," I repeated.

"He thinks it projects strength." Something moved behind Gareth's eyes that he rearranged quickly. "Running alone. Like nothing in his territory could touch him."

I let that sit for a moment. “Who does he trust in the inner circle?"

"His Beta, Declan Hurst. Loyal to a fault — you won't get near Heath through him." He paused, turning his coffee cup on its saucer with a thumbnail. "The Scholar, Oryn Marsh, knows too much about too many things. Avoid him." Another pause. "The Empath, Petra Wynn, is—"

"A problem?"

"A complication." He said it the way you say something you've been managing for years and resented the whole time. "She reads people."

"I've dealt with Empaths before."

He looked at me then with the first genuine curiosity he'd shown. "And?"

"They didn't," I said pleasantly, "bother me."

Gareth studied my face for a moment and then nodded slowly, like I'd confirmed something he'd been wondering about. I didn't love that.

"What about the pack?"

"What about them?"

"If something happens to the Alpha during a rogue crisis, the pack's response will be—"

"After is not your concern."

"I'm making it my concern."

"The pack will have a new Alpha," he said. "A stronger one. One who understands the value of Council relationships. They'll be better for it."

He said it like he’d believed it. A lie he’d no doubt told himself one too many times.

I looked at the map. At his hand still resting near it — clean nails, good watch, a hand that didn’t look like it belonged to someone who would do this.

I smiled the smile I use when I have nothing to say that would be appropriate to say.

"Of course they will," I said.

I left the diner to get swallowed up by the rambunctious crowd, I crisscrossed across the street and around a few blocks, looking out to make sure Gareth hadn’t had anyone follow me, before I could double back towards my concealed backpack then I turned south to leave the town.

The Bull Mountain pack lands were to the east and just over the next ridgeline but I needed to obscure my path to my next campsite before I earnestly began the task the council had sent me on. I leave no scent trail. It's the closest thing to a superpower I possess and I've never once taken it for granted. The coffee in my pack that I’d nicked from the diner, however, has no such gift, any werewolf would be able to follow it through the forest.

The parade's opening music started somewhere behind me — something brass and enthusiastic and very American. The crowd cheered. The afternoon smelled like kettle corn and smoke and the very edge of something else, something that raised the fine hair on the back of my neck for reasons I couldn't immediately name.

I was nearly to the edge of town and the end of the people staging for the parade. Nearly clear. Twenty more steps and I was a hiker leaving a holiday town on a Tuesday and no one in Briar's Hollow would remember a 5 '5 woman with dark brown hair in simple clothes and an unremarkable face.

I don't know why I looked back across the wide street.

I don't have a good answer for that. I've thought about it since, turned it over the way you turn over something that won't stop bothering you, and the most honest thing I can tell you is that something made me look. My wolf. The sun. Some alignment of attention that I've learned over a career of close calls to follow without demanding explanation.

I looked across the street.

And the street looked back.

He was standing perfectly still on the opposite sidewalk in the way that very few people can stand perfectly still — not frozen, not posed, just still, the way a tree is still, the stillness emphasized by the chaos around him. Tall. Dark haired. A dark canvas jacket over a henley pushed to the elbows despite the early afternoon heat. A beard that suggested he had better things to do than maintain it but still looked fresh.

And eyes that I would have said were green.

Probably green.

Possibly green.

He was looking directly at me with an expression I could not categorize, which was the first interesting thing that had happened to me in a long time and the worst possible moment for it to happen. The crowd moved between us, bright with flags and holiday noise. A gap. He was still there. Still looking.

I looked back.

The parade's flatbed truck rolled between us, the brass section working hard, and I took my chance to scatter off unobserved, my wolf doing something in my chest I didn't have a name for.

Don't, I told her.

She didn't answer. She was looking toward the town, with the focused unsettled attention of someone who has noticed something they won't be able to un-notice.

We have a job, I said.