Page 19 of Fated, Allegedly

Somebody's mother is standing beside me with a coffee cup, watching her daughter argue about a data sheet. Hazel is in the corner knitting with the look of an old woman recalculating.

Erin has her sleeves shoved up and marker on her wrist. She's put a wounded-deer chart on the wall next to the bird counts, and Wyatt has clearly been promoted to something with a title. She's been in this valley less than three days.

She catches me in the doorway, but doesn't stop teaching. She just tips her head an inch toward the empty chair by the wall, and I sit in it, and the children turn around to see if the Alpha's in trouble.

Later, when the hall's empty, she's peeling butcher paper off the wall and rolling it.

"They're good," she says. "Not kid-good. Good. That fourteen-year-old caught an error in my own transect sheet and had the nerve to tell me about it."

"That's Bo. He'll be insufferable for a week."

"He earned a week." She snaps a rubber band on the roll. Then she looks at me properly and her face changes. "You found something out there."

"I did."

"Bad?"

"Yes." I place my palm on the map inside my jacket. "I'll show you tonight with the elders, because you'll see things in it I won't. But there's something I need to know first, on our own, and it's time I stop putting it off."

She goes still. Not frightened. Attentive, in the same manner she goes still over a rock she doesn't understand.

"Okay," Erin says. "Before the elders. Just us."

"All right."

She picks up her roll of paper and heads for the door, then stops with her hand on the frame. "Nash. Whatever it is, I've had a wolf roughly as big as a pony and a tunnel under a lake this week. Your bar for shocking me is extremely high."

"It's not that kind of thing," I say. "It's the kind you get a choice about."

13

ERIN

He takes me down to the dock at eight with two mugs and a demeanor of walking to a disciplinary hearing.

The whole afternoon I've been inventing theories. Most of them were bad. The best one involved a wife, and I sat with that for an hour and discovered some extremely unwelcome information about my own feelings. Nash sits on the boards and hands me a mug.

"There's a thing that happens to wolves," he says. "Not all of us. Maybe half in a generation, and nobody can predict it. Hazel's notebooks call it recognition. Everyone else says mates."

"Mates."

"It isn't a preference. It's not falling for someone." His eyes are locked on the water. "It's the first second you're in the same air as a specific person, and every system you've got reports at once, and it says that one, permanently, with no appeal. My mother had it with my father. Caleb had it with Isla in a school hallway when they were eleven, which she has never let him live down."

The dock is very quiet. Somewhere behind us the generator hums.

"Nash."

"It happened when I set eyes on you," he says. "You'd said maybe six words. You had coffee on your sleeve and you seemed annoyed, and it hit me hard enough that I had to hold the tailgate. Every day since I've stacked a wall between you and that information."

I set my mug down carefully because my hands aren't reliable.

"That's why," I say. "The nineteen minutes from a twenty-six-minute drive. The bridge. You knew before the wood cracked because you were listening for it. You were always listening for it."

"Yes."

I stand up. I need to move; it's what I do with things too big to hold sitting down. The water's gone silver and flat and the whole valley smells like woodsmoke and cold water.

"Okay. I have questions and some of them are going to be rude."