The Wolf in the Ditch

Joss Carrow found the alpha in a drainage ditch at the bottom of the orchard, and her first thought, honestly, was that the morning had been going so well. She had been out checking the apple trees for blight. That was the kind of crisis the Quiet Pack ran on — blight, fence rot, whether the well would hold through August. Small, fixable, unglamorous troubles. The Quiet Pack did not have the other kind of trouble, the howling kind, the kind that filled the werewolf stories, and that was because the Quiet Pack could not howl. Could not run on four legs. Could not, any of them, shift at all. Three generations back something had been done to them — a curse, a poisoning, an old feud whose details had gone soft with retelling — and the wolf had simply gone out of the bloodline like a lamp turned down. What was left was thirty-some people who were werewolves only on paper: who carried the blood and the long life and the quick healing, and not one scrap of the second self that was supposed to come with it. Joss was their alpha. You did not strictly need to be able to shift to be an alpha, it turned out. You needed to be the one who checked the trees for blight and remembered whose turn it was at the well and stood at the front when the front needed standing at. Joss had been doing that since she was twenty-three. She was good at it. The Quiet Pack was poor and small and entirely overlooked by every full-blooded pack in the region, and Joss had a private and fierce opinion that overlooked was the safest thing a vulnerable pack could be. And then there was a man in her drainage ditch, and the man was very obviously, even unconscious, even half-drowned in orchard mud, a full-blooded alpha — and *overlooked* went out the window with a sound like a slammed gate. She could smell it on him. That was the cruelest joke of the Quiet Pack: they had kept the nose. Joss could stand at the lip of the ditch and smell, rolling off the stranger in waves even while he bled, the thing her own people had lost. Power. The wolf. A second self so close to the surface it practically had a pulse of its own. He had been in a fight. A bad one — claw-marks, a deep gash along the ribs, the particular boneless sprawl of someone who had run a long way on an injury and then simply stopped running. He was not, Joss noted with the part of her brain that stayed unhelpfully practical in a crisis, a small man, and the ditch was steep, and she was going to have to get him out of it more or less alone. She climbed down. She got a grip under his arms. And the stranger — three-quarters dead, by the look of him — chose that exact moment to come halfway awake, take one blurred look at the woman hauling him out of a ditch, and inform her, in the slurred and supremely confident voice of a man who had never in his life been wrong about a room: "It's all right. I'm an alpha. I'll handle it." Joss stopped hauling. "You'll handle it," she repeated. "Whatever's — happening here." He gestured weakly at the orchard, at the morning, at the entire situation, with the bleeding arm. "Pack in trouble. I can smell it. Weak pack. No wolves on any of you, I — that's wrong, that's not how a pack should — " His eyes were already sliding shut again. "Don't worry. Found you in time. Alpha's here now." And then he passed out completely, in the mud, in the ditch, having just promised to rescue the woman currently rescuing him. Joss crouched there for a moment in the cold orchard runoff, holding two hundred pounds of unconscious arrogance, and felt something she had not felt in a long and careful while. It took her a second to name it, because the Quiet Pack did not have much occasion for it. It was the urge to laugh. "Sure," she told the unconscious alpha. She got a fresh grip and started hauling again, up the muddy bank, toward the small poor overlooked pack that did not need saving and was about to acquire, whether it liked it or not, a houseguest. "Sure you are, sweetheart. The alpha's here. We're all saved."