Mated to the Grumpy Alpha

Chapter 4

Ciara

Raccoons don't have hands. I had walked the ten minutes home with my keys between my fingers, which made me a poor judge of raccoons.

The saucer I had left on the step lay on its side with the bread gone. Someone had dragged a gap through Gran's salt the width of a palm.

Prints crossed the lawn from the tree line and stopped a foot short of the gap, four toes and a wide pad sunk deep. Beside them was a boot print with the heel dug in, and I told myself it was somebody's enormous dog.

I called the clinic from the step because Amrit never turned his ringer off. "You've reached Dr. Bhatt," his voicemail said. "Leave a message and I'll call back when the animals allow."

"It's Ciara. Something was in my yard tonight and I think you know what it is. Call me back, please."

Then I mended the gap. Gran taught me to lay it with the heel of my hand so it had no seams.

Whatever was in the cedars knew I could hear it. My hand went to Gran's necklace and met bare skin, and the dish by the door was too far away.

I took her cast-iron skillet off the stove and held it in both hands. It weighed about as much as a small dog and it had never once let her down.

"I have a skillet!" I called through the screen. "I have a phone and a nosy neighbor!"

I did not have a nosy neighbor. The Dunphys next door went to bed at eight and slept through the garbage truck.

The breathing came again from beyond the fence, slow and heavy. Then the back gate slammed so hard that the whole fence shook.

I jumped. My boot found the saucer and the saucer found the edge of the step, and I went backward off the porch.

"Oh no," I told the sky.

Something caught me before I hit the mud. An arm locked across my ribs and another around my shoulders.

"Got you," Declan Levesque said into my hair.

I was hauled against a chest that was hot through its shirt and pounding. The skillet was gone from my hands and I had no idea where.

He didn't answer when I said his name. He was looking over my head at the mended patch.

A grey shape the size of a pony stood beyond it. I saw a long muzzle and a lip coming back off teeth as long as my thumb.

"It can't cross," he said in my ear. "Stay behind me."

"Absolutely not."

The thing lunged at the patch and hit it. It yelped, a high sound that went through my back teeth.

Then it flung itself backward into the dark. The cedars shook once and fell silent.

"Inside," Declan said. His voice came out rough. "Now."

"I'm standing."

He didn't let go. "Give me a second. Please."

His heart was banging against my shoulder blade and his breath shook. It was the please that did it.

"One second," I said.

He counted it. I felt his chest rise and fall on every number.

Then he stepped back and fished the skillet out of the mud and handed it to me, handle first.

"Thank you," I said. My voice wobbled and I let it.

"Are you hurt?"

"Only my dignity and possibly my left boot."

He turned my elbow toward the porch light, and his thumb stopped an inch above the scrape.

I felt that inch all the way up my arm.

"It's nothing."

"I'll decide that. Does it sting?"

"A little."

"Wash it with soap."

"After you tell me what that was."

"A wolf."

I waited for him to laugh. He didn't.

Headlights swung across the lawn and a second man leaned out of a truck cab with both hands up.

"Hi! It's Jonah! I'm staying in the truck!"

"Stay there," Declan said.

"Is he always like that?" I asked.

"Only when he's nervous."

"Nice skillet!"

"Thank you! It was my grandmother's!"

I laughed, and it came out cracked and a little hysterical.

Declan stared at me. It was the first time I had seen him startled.

"Gran used to tell me stories about wolves that walked like men." My hands were shaking and I tucked them under my arms. "I thought they were bedtime stories."

"They weren't."

"Declan." I took a breath. "It's a modern world. Next, you'll tell me Santa's real."

"Santa isn't real."

"But the wolf is?"

"Yes."

"Okay." I nodded and kept my face polite. "I'll play along. I'm not saying I believe you. I'm saying something tried to come through my back gate."

"How did you get here that fast?" I asked. "I never heard a truck."

"I didn't take the truck."

"You were eating ribs when I left."

"I run fast." He kept his eyes on the prints. "Don't ask me for the rest tonight."

"Should I call the sheriff?"

Declan shook his head.

He crouched and held one palm over the line. His shoulders locked.

"What does the salt do?" I asked.

"It stops one of us crossing." He kept his palm an inch above the line. "Your grandmother made it a wall."

"One of us? Declan, it’s four dollars a bag at the co-op."

"It matters who pours it." He studied the patch. "Somebody scuffed this open before you got home. They wanted him to walk straight in."

"Then why didn’t he?"

"Because you closed it." He glanced up at me. "Just in time."

I knelt in the mud beside him and pressed the edge of the patch flat with my thumb.

His gaze dropped to my mouth and jerked away. Then he scowled at the dirt.

"You said mate in front of Maud Hollis," I said. "Do you say that to women in aisles?"

"No." It came through his teeth. "I'd like it on the record that I didn't pick this."

"Then why are you in my yard?"

"You were afraid."

"I was fine."

"Your pulse says otherwise."

"You can't hear my..." I stopped.

A wind crossed the yard and my forearms were bare. He noticed, and he shrugged out of his jacket and held it out stiffly.

"I don't need it," I said.

"Take it anyway."

I took it, and the sleeves hung past my fingertips.

When he turned toward the dark I put my nose in the collar. It smelled of woodsmoke and rain.

"Is there a tent attached?" I asked. "It's enormous."

"It came from the lumber yard. Nothing there comes in small." He nodded at the dark. "Come up to the Long House for the night. It's safer."

"No."

"It's a reasonable request."

"It's a request from a man I met this morning." I lifted the skillet. "I have a lock and a frying pan."

"That frying pan could have saved your life."

"The salt did."

"Am I in danger?" I asked then.

"Yes." It came out at once. "Not from me."

I held on to the skillet handle until my knuckles ached. The wolf had frightened me less than that answer.

"Then I'll sit in the truck," he said. "Where you can see the headlights from your window."

"On my lawn?"

"On the road."

"It's a public road," I admitted.

"There's a thermos in here!" Jonah called from the truck. "Nobody has to talk to me!"

"Nobody is," Declan said.

I almost laughed again. He was the most irritating man I had ever met and I did not want him to leave.

"Fine," I said. "You're pending."

"Pending what?"

"Problem or lead. Right now you're leaning lead."

"What would make me a problem?"

"Telling me one more thing I didn't ask about."

He faced the line again, still crouched. His hand hovered over it.

"I know this line," he said.

"Everyone in town knows Gran did it."

"No." His voice dropped. “I haven’t smelled it since I was nine. Pilar Cortez laid it across my father’s door every spring, but hers let us in and kept the rest out. Then one year she stopped coming.”

"Gran told me she never set foot on that ridge," I said. "Ever."