The Executioner's Mate

Chapter 2

Heath's POV

The truck took exactly four seconds to pass.

I counted.

Four seconds of brass instruments and a man in a colonial hat waving at nobody in particular. When the other side of the street came back into view, she was gone.

I stood there looking at empty pavement for what I will generously describe as a reasonable amount of time. Then I looked at the space to the left of the empty pavement. The space to the right. The alley mouth between the hardware store and the insurance office where she could theoretically have gone.

Nothing.

This was a new experience for me.

I can find anything in these mountains. Ask my pack. Ask the three rogues last month who thought the eastern ridge gave them sufficient cover and discovered, at considerable personal cost, that they were wrong. I have tracked wolves through snowfall, through rain, through the particular chaos of a summer forest after lightning strikes. I have never once put my nose to the air and found nothing where something should be.

I put my nose to the air.

The parade had been, olfactorily speaking, a crime scene. A diesel generator, four hundred humans in various states of July, and someone in my immediate vicinity who had made catastrophically aggressive choices about cologne. Every scent in a half-mile radius was fighting for dominance.

I found nothing that could have been her.

My wolf did not know what to do with this. He wanted to cross the street and search the alleys and find her and — he hadn't worked out the rest yet, but he was committed to the first part. Unfortunately, between him and the other side of the street stood forty brass instruments at full volume and a drum section that appeared to have a personal grievance against silence.

I know, I told him.

He was not comforted.

Around me, Briar's Hollow continued its annual celebration. The parade rolled on. People clapped at things going by. Someone nearby had an air horn and no strategy for deploying it. A child in a flag cape sprinted past my legs at speed, pursued at a distance by a parent wearing the expression of a person who had stopped sprinting some years ago and regretted it now.

I looked at the empty pavement one more time.

Then I turned and walked toward Odette's shop, because I am a functional adult with responsibilities, and the Fourth of July parade of Briar's Hollow was not among them.

Crane's Curiosities sat at the quiet end of Main Street, where the foot traffic thinned, the buildings got older and the general atmosphere suggested that whatever was happening at the other end of the street was none of its business. The sign above the door had been fading for so long it had achieved a kind of permanent dignity. The closed sign was turned out.

I went in anyway.

The bell announced me. The shop smelled like beeswax, old paper and something underneath both that I had never been able to identify in thirty years of visiting and had stopped trying to.

"I'm closed," Odette said from somewhere in the back.

"I know."

A pause. Something set down carefully. "Wipe your feet."

I wiped my feet and navigated through the shop's chaotic landscape — furniture from three centuries sharing floor space with no organizing principle I had ever identified, display cases of objects ranging from genuinely ancient to bafflingly mundane, and the taxidermied fox on the shelf near the window that I had disliked since I was eight years old and that showed no signs of going anywhere anytime soon.

Odette emerged from the back room in a linen dress the color of old bone, white hair pinned at her neck. She was wearing the countenance she reserves for Blackwoods who show up uninvited — which is all of us, historically, because we have never once used the front door during business hours. I was never sure why she kept being surprised.

She was, to all observable evidence, seventy years old. She had been seventy years old for as long as anyone in Briar's Hollow could remember.

I had learned very young not to ask about this.

"You said Thursday," she said.

"It's Tuesday."

"I'm aware of what day it is, Heathen." She moved to the back corner table where she kept the kettle. "Sit down. You look like you haven't slept."

"I slept."

She looked at me with the expression she has deployed at me since childhood — the one that communicates, without a single word, that she finds my relationship with honesty intermittently creative.

I sat down.

Tea appeared in front of me. I didn't ask what kind. It had never mattered.

"The samples," I said.

"Yes." She sat across from me, folded her hands, and looked at them for a moment before she looked at me. Odette's pauses have always meant something. I've learned to wait them out. "I've been through everything I have access to, Heath. Every archive, every correspondence, every text in this shop and several that aren't." A shorter pause. "The signature matches something I hoped I would never have cause to identify."

Outside, faintly, the parade music swelled and then receded. In here it seemed very far away.

"Tell me," I said.

She spread three small glass vials across the table. Each one held what looked like ash, but wasn't. I'd collected them from three different attack sites over six weeks — miles apart, different territories, different incidents.

"Same signature," I said. "All three?"

"All three." She touched the nearest vial without picking it up. "Magic leaves a residue the way fire leaves ash. Different practitioners, different workings, different intentions — they all burn differently. No two signatures are ever identical." She looked at me. "These are."

"One source."

"One source. One working, performed repeatedly over a long period of time." She sat back. "The second problem is the signature itself. I've spent two weeks cross-referencing every catalogue I can reach. I've encountered obscure workings before. Regional variations. Practitioners who worked in isolation and left no wider record. I have never," she said carefully, "encountered a signature that was actively absent from every archive simultaneously."

I looked at the vials. "Someone removed it."

"Someone removed every reference to it from every accessible record. That takes considerable effort. Considerable reach." A pause. "You don't expunge something from the historical record unless you intend to use it again and don't want it recognized when you do."

"How old is the working?"

"Old enough that whatever originally documented it predates the current Council by at least a century." She was quiet for a moment. "What I found — and I want to be clear that it was a fragment, a partial reference in a private correspondence never meant to be read outside the original exchange — describes a binding. Something that operates on the wolf's inner consciousness rather than the body."

She said the word then. An old word. The kind that sounds like it was made to be whispered, not spoken aloud in the daylight.

I sat with it.

"The rogues," I said.

"Yes."

"They're not actually—"

"No," she said quietly. "They're not."

The full weight of it settled. I made myself look at it directly rather than away from it, because looking away had never once made anything smaller.

"How aware are they," I said. "While it's happening."

Odette's expression answered before she did.

"Completely," she said.

Outside, an air horn. The crowd cheered at something passing.

Fourteen months.

Fourteen months of double patrols and gutted sleep schedules and wolves coming home from the eastern boundary with injuries that healed and feelings that didn't. Fourteen months of Council reports that disappeared into an institutional void. Regional resources currently allocated. Situation does not meet threshold for emergency intervention. Recommend continued local management.

My pack had engaged those wolves at the tree line. In the dark. And I had written the patrol reports and filed them and—

"Heath."

I looked up. She almost never used my given name. The fact that she had now told me everything about how she was reading my face.

"Nothing you could have known," she said. "The signature was obscured deliberately. That was the point of obscuring it."

"I know."

"Knowing doesn't help."

"No," I said. "It doesn't."

We sat with that. Outside, Briar's Hollow celebrated with flags and brass instruments and cheerful ignorance of everything happening in this back room.

"Can it be stopped?" I asked.

Not reversed. I wasn't ready for reversed. Stopped was the immediate problem. The thing happening right now, tonight, while I sat here drinking unidentified tea.

Odette was quiet long enough that I had my answer before she spoke.

"Not easily," she said.

A pause.

"And not alone."