THE ALPHA'S DAUGHTER

The Alpha's Daughter Chapter 5:The Ridge At Midnight

Chapter 5: The Ridge at Midnight

There is a part of the Marrow Hills the pack calls the Quiet Ridge, and no one goes there after dark unless they are running from something.

I went on the fourth night, and I was running from everything.

I had left the house without shoes, which was stupid, and without a coat, which was worse. It didn't matter. I climbed until the lights of Ashgrove were small and yellow below me, and then I kept climbing until my feet were cut and my breath came in ragged sobs. At the top I sat on a boulder and put my face in my hands and cried the way I had not let myself cry in front of anybody.

I don't know how long it lasted. When I finally raised my head, there was a shape at the tree line, very still.

I nearly screamed. I didn't, because the shape spoke first.

"Sorry," said Ronan Keir. "I didn't want to interrupt. I also didn't want you to walk off the cliff without knowing someone was here."

He stayed at the edge of the trees, hands loose at his sides, giving me distance. He wore a canvas jacket and had a bow slung across his back.

"You're not supposed to be talking to me," I said thickly.

"I'm not. I'm patrolling. You happened to be on my route." He considered. "On the patrol route I invented an hour ago."

I laughed. It came out wet and broken, and it startled both of us.

"Sit if you want," I said. "You're making me nervous, hovering."

He came and sat on the far end of the boulder, leaving a full yard of stone between us. He smelled of pine and woodsmoke and something else I couldn't place, something sharp and faintly metallic, like the air before lightning.

For a while we said nothing. Below us, a single window burned in my father's house.

"Can I say something?" he asked. "You can tell me to go to hell."

"Go on."

"Nothing happened to you on the Hill." He kept his eyes on the valley. "Everyone's calling it a failure. A curse. They're wrong."

"You don't know that."

"I know what a failed Calling looks like." His voice was odd, flat and careful. "I've seen them. The Cord wakes but the Second won't rise. There's a sickness, a fever, sometimes a screaming that lasts a night. You didn't have any of that." He turned then, and his eyes were sharp in the moonlight. "Your Cord didn't fail, Elara. It never came. That's different."

The cold spread through me slowly, like ink through water.

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying you don't smell like us."

I stared at him. "I don't—what?"

"Wolves have a scent. Under the skin. It's not a bad smell, it's just a mark, like a signature. Your father's smell is on every wolf in this pack because of the Cord, a shared thread running through all of them." He hesitated. "You've never had it. I noticed the first day I saw you. Rain on stone. Just rain on stone. I thought it was strange, but I thought maybe the Alpha's line did something to it. Now I don't think that."

"You're lying."

"Maybe. But I'm not sure why I would." His voice gentled. "I'm sorry. I probably shouldn't have said it."

I got to my feet. My legs were shaking. "Everyone's been whispering about me for three days, and you sit here and tell me I'm—that I'm—"

"Human," Ronan said quietly. "I think you might be entirely human."

The word hung between us.

"That's impossible." I heard my own voice rise. "My father's the Alpha. My mother was his mate. A wolf's child is a wolf. It's—it's the first rule. It's the first thing we're taught."

"I know."

"Then you're wrong."

"Then I'm wrong." He didn't move. "But if I am, explain something to me. If it were only strangeness, only some quirk of the Alpha's line, why has nobody here ever mentioned it before tonight? You've been looked at, touched, held, since the day you were born. Explain why it took someone who's never set foot in this valley before this winter to notice."

"Maybe nobody was looking as closely as you."

"Maybe. Or maybe nobody here has ever had reason to know what to look for." His voice was steady and low, the voice of a man laying out something he'd turned over alone more than once. "A signature doesn't finish coming in until the Calling wakes it. Every child in this valley smells faint and unfinished until eighteen. Nobody in Ashgrove has ever needed to listen closely to that faintness, because they've never had reason to doubt it would arrive on schedule, the way it always has. I've passed through four packs since mine broke. I know what an unfinished child is supposed to smell like. Thin, but there. Yours isn't thin. It isn't anything. That's not a difference you'd catch unless you'd already learned, the hard way, what its absence costs."

I had no answer for that. The silence stretched, and it frightened me more than anything he'd said yet.

"But ask yourself why the whole pack went quiet the moment you didn't shift," he added, quieter now. "Not shocked. Quiet. Like they'd been waiting to see if a rumor was true."

I turned and walked away from him, back down the ridge on cut feet, and I did not look back.

But the words followed me, rain on stone, rain on stone. All the way home I could feel them turning over and over in my head like a key in a lock, and I knew, without wanting to know, that somewhere in this house there was a door that fit it.

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