I heard Torvald before I saw her. Somewhere past the boat shed a girl was whispering please, please, in the flat voice people use on a phone that has stopped answering.
My shoulder had throbbed the whole twelve minutes from Greywater. I had left Jude behind a night guard's chair to stand in the black at five to eleven, and I still didn't know who she was begging.
I killed the truck lights a hundred yards back and walked in. Diesel, lake mud, rotted rope. One plank in three was loose, and I stepped around them.
"Torvald."
She spun. Phone light under her chin, red hair coming out of its knot, a grocery-store parka over the white apron she hadn't taken off in four days. She backed up until the rail stopped her.
"You came alone? Miss, you really came alone?"
"Who sweetened it?"
"I didn't pour, I never pour the heir's tea, Cook does the pot, but Friday it came up from the pantry already done, honey in it, on his tray, and they said just take it, so I took it, and I touched the rim and my fingers burned and I knew, miss, I knew, and I ran."
"Who, Torvald."
She wiped her nose on her wrist. "Before supper I saw Mr. Evander come out of the pantry. He had a bottle under his coat. He saw me and he laughed and said it was Silvan's mead and I was a good girl for not noticing."
Evander, lifting a glass to me that first night. Evander, whose father went out at midnight because someone asked him to.
"And Saturday, at my aunt's, there was an envelope in my bag." She held up two fingers, then spread them, like fingers weren't enough. "Five hundred in cash. And a card that said Say nothing. I don't know anybody who has five hundred dollars to say nothing with. Except him."
I wanted it to be him. That was the trouble. It fit like a boot I'd already broken in, and I knew better than to trust anything that comfortable.
"Did you see his face?"
"I saw his coat. Miss, I saw his..."
She stopped. She was looking past my shoulder, and I smelled nothing at all.
That was what turned me. Lake, diesel, girl, and a hole in the wind where a wolf should have been.
I shoved her behind me and my hand was already at my ankle. The knife came out of its sheath into my gloved fingers just as the dark came off the boards and hit me.
It was big, and it made no sound. No claws on the planks, no breath. It took me low and my left shoulder slammed the planking, and the dressing Jude had taped on went with a wet little tear I felt more than heard. Teeth went by my ear. I got my forearm under its throat, and the stink of lake mud rolled off its coat, as if it had rolled in the shallows to wash itself of everything.
I couldn't see colour. Dark on dark. I could see a shoulder, a heavy skull, and a leg coming down toward my face.
I cut the leg.
The blade went across the left foreleg, high, and the silver bit it the way silver does, with a sound like water thrown on a stove. The wolf yelped, the first noise it had made, and then the weight was gone. Claws scrabbled once at the end of the pier. Reeds snapped. After that, only the lake.
"Miss," Torvald said, from somewhere low. "Miss, you're bleeding."
I was. It ran warm under my jacket and down the inside of my sleeve. I put my back against a piling and slowed my breathing until it came down to four.
"Get in the truck," I said.
The Landing was a diner on the Briar Ferry road with its sign unplugged and one light on over the back door. Odile Brannock opened it before I knocked, sixty-three, in a man's cardigan, a dish towel over her shoulder like she had been caught mid-shift.
She looked at Torvald. She looked at me. She didn't ask.
"In," she said. "Both of you."
The kitchen smelled of fryer oil and bleach. She sat Torvald on a flour bin, pushed a cup of cocoa into her hands, and had her out of sight through the cellar door in the time it took me to say who was hunting her. Torvald stopped in the doorway with the cup shaking.
"Nobody comes for kitchen girls," she said. "You know that? Nobody ever."
"Go downstairs," I said.
"You came."
"Go on."
The door shut. Odile turned to me and took hold of my chin, rough, and tipped it to the light.
"You're grey, kid. How many nights?"
"I'm fine."
"Mm." She let go. She peeled my jacket off my shoulder with her thumb and said a word I won't write down. "I was out on the north shore Sunday. Lake road, past the Coldbrook turnoff. Saw tracks in the frost. Four, maybe five sets, running the tree line." She pressed gauze on the tear. "More every year. Your lot. Ones who drifted and kept going."
"Nobody called them."
"Nobody left to." She taped it down too tight on purpose. "Go. Whoever's after her will count the time you've been gone."
I was already moving.
I took the lake road at seventy and let the truck have its way with the curves. Twice I called Marten's phone from the cab. Twice it rang out.
A wolf with a silver cut on its left foreleg. That was a thing a person could look for. A limp. A glove. A sleeve held a little too carefully at breakfast.
Whoever it was had waited for me at the ferry landing, which meant they had known where I'd be, and when. Someone had put that note in my coat, and I had thought only about who wrote it.
I went up the east stairs two at a time with the shoulder screaming. The corridor light was on. Marten Rhee's chair stood where I had told him to put it, against Jude's door, tipped back on two legs.
Marten wasn't in it.
Jude's door stood wide open. His bed was empty, the sheets thrown back, the pillow on the floor. On the nightstand, steam long gone, sat a cup of tea, half drunk.