Eleven Forty

Room 6 of the Prospector Motor Inn smells like pine cleaner and old cigarettes and him.

The bed hasn't been slept in. The bedspread is still tucked tight, a dent at the foot where he sat. The chair by the window is turned to face the Gold Pan across the street, and there's a ring on the sill from a coffee cup that was set down and picked up many times in the dark.

He watched your window all night.

He sets the box on the bed. It's an ordinary banker's box, the cardboard soft at the corners from handling, the lid held on with a strap. He undoes the strap like it's a bandage.

"After the funeral," he says, "Lothar ran the inquiry. The Keeper always does, when it's the Alpha's family. He said it was the woodstove. A chimney fire. He said it happened all the time in old cabins." Torben's hands rest on the lid. "I didn't believe him. Not because I suspected anything. Because I couldn't stand it being an accident. I needed somebody to hunt."

He lifts the lid.

Folders. Dozens of them, color-coded, labeled in the same hard square capitals as the phone number on your order pad. Photographs. A thick bound report with a fire department logo on the cover, but not the pack's. A man's business card clipped to the front: Walter Barclay, Certified Fire Investigator, Missoula.

"Human," Torben says. "Retired from the state. I paid him in cash and told him nothing about wolves. I walked him through it three weeks after, before the snow covered it." He hands you the report. "Page nine."

Page nine is a diagram of your cabin. The kitchen. The bedroom with the window that stuck. The porch where you used to sit with your feet in his lap. Three red circles: the porch, the back door, the bedroom window.

Three points of origin, you read. Accelerant consistent with gasoline. Pattern inconsistent with a chimney fire. Estimated time of ignition between 11:35 and 11:45 p.m., consistent with the lake-watch log.

"The lake-watch," Torben says. "There's an old fire tower on the south shore. Mrs. Aune has kept it since before I was born. She logged the first smoke at eleven forty-one."

You turn the page.

Photographs. Black ruin, white ash. A charred doorframe, close up. Something driven into the frame at an angle, thick and dark, as long as your hand.

"Spikes," he says. "Iron. Hand-forged, square-shanked. One through the front door into the frame. One through the back. Driven from the outside." His voice doesn't change at all, and that's what frightens you. "Barclay pried them out and gave them to me. Lothar's report doesn't mention them. When I asked him, he said they must have been old hardware. That the cabin was a hundred years old and full of junk iron."

He reaches into the box and takes out a small canvas bag. Inside, wrapped in a shop rag, are two black iron spikes. They're crude and heavy and the ends are flattened from the hammer.

You can't stop looking at them.

"And no remains," he says. "None. Barclay said a house fire doesn't get hot enough to leave nothing. Not even in a hundred-year-old cedar cabin. Lothar said wolves burn hotter than humans, and you were mated to a wolf, and that was that." He laughs, short and terrible. "I knew that was nonsense. I told myself he was trying to be kind. That there'd been nothing he wanted me to see."

"Torben."

"Six years," he says, "I've been hunting the man who drove these into my door. I've questioned every Greywold wolf who was at that border. I broke a man's jaw in Coeur d'Alene who bragged about it in a bar, and he hadn't done it." He looks at the spikes. "I never found him."

You set the report down on the bed. Your hands have gone numb.

"He told me to wait," you say.

Torben goes still. "Say that again, Ava."

"He told me to drink the hush and wait inside until midnight. To walk out at midnight by the bridge road. He said a man would be waiting there to drive me." You hear your own voice from a long way off. "He said midnight twice. He made me repeat it."

The room is very quiet.

"Eleven forty," Torben says.

"If I'd waited..."

"You'd have been inside." His voice is barely there. "With the doors spiked. And the bond already dark, so I'd have felt nothing different. Nothing at all." He's breathing harder now. "He didn't warn you. He put you in a box and lit it."

You're shaking. You can't stop.

"Six years," you whisper. "I was grateful to him. I thought he saved my life. I thought he saved their lives. Every birthday I thought, someone in that pack was good. Someone risked everything to warn me." You press your hands over your mouth. "I sent him a thank-you in my head every single new moon when I drank that stuff."

Torben crouches in front of you so his face is below yours. He doesn't touch you. His eyes are pure gold now, the gray burned out of them.

"Ava," he says. "I need his name."

You look at the spikes in the rag. At the burned doorframe. At the man who sat at a window all night so you wouldn't disappear again.

"Lothar," you say. "It was Lothar Steen."

Torben doesn't move.

For a second nothing happens at all, and then you watch it land. Not in his face. Lower. In his shoulders, his chest, his hands. As if every bone that has been holding him up for six years has just been quietly removed.

"Lothar," he repeats.

"He came at nine. He put his hand on my head like a grandfather and said, Child, you have to be brave."

"He taught me to read," Torben says. "The old script. In the rolls. He held my hand at my parents' grave when I was nineteen and told me I could do this. He ran the pack for two years while I learned how. He..." His voice cracks straight down the middle. "He stood beside me at yours. He had his hand on my shoulder while they put the box in the ground. He said, She's with the moon now, son."

He takes the recipe card out of his shirt pocket and holds it up to the light from the window. The old slanted script. The Keeper's hand.

"I knew it," he says. "This morning. I knew it in the pantry. I didn't let myself."

He stands so fast the bed shakes. He crosses to the window and puts both palms flat on the glass, and you see the claws come, black and curved, scraping thin white lines down the pane.

"Torben, the Accord..."

"I know." He pulls the claws back in with an effort you can see in his whole body. "I know. Not here. Not in front of..." He looks across the street at the Gold Pan. At the upstairs window with the paper wolf Bodie taped to it.

His phone rings.

He looks at the screen. "Jess." He answers it on speaker without taking his eyes off the street. "Not now, Jessamy..."

"Torben, listen to me." His sister's voice, which you haven't heard in six years, is high and tight and scared. "Where are you? Pieter said you called last night from somewhere south and you sounded drunk..."

"I'm not drunk."

"I don't care. Listen. Lothar left the Hall an hour ago. Rune's driving him. He told the council you'd gone south after something and you weren't in your right mind and he was going to bring you home." A breath. "He asked Pieter which motel. Pieter didn't know. Torben, he knew you were in Gilt Hollow. Nobody told him that. How did he know that?"

Torben looks at you.

"Two hours," Jessamy says. "Maybe less, the way Rune drives. He'll be there by dark."