Bound by the Pack Master

Fiona MacLeod hides her brother in a hollow log forty yards into the trees, presses her palm to his forehead, and finds him too hot again. Finn is fourteen. *He's never even kissed a girl.* The curse has taken his strength, then his sight, and it is working its way toward his voice. Fiona is a healer whose whole inventory fits in one leather bag, and she has hauled him up out of the Highlands to the one place that might still hold a cure. The MacBain spring. When riders stop her on the road and ask what a woman with a healer's bag and a dead man's boots wants with the MacBain, she tells them the truth: *My brother is cursed. I need the spring water.* What she does not know yet is that the spring is poisoned, and that the man she has come to beg from is dying too. Callum MacBain is Pack Master, and the wasting curse that killed his father is in his hands now, a tremor that spreads from wrist to fingers whenever he is tired. *The wasting curse didn't just take your strength. It took your certainty.* His elders have called a vote of confidence. If he cannot call the pack spirit down at the full moon, they will replace him. Then there is Hamish. *"Hamish MacBain," he said, not offering his hand. "I'm the Master's cousin."* He is smooth about it, and reasonable, and he is the one telling the great hall that the outsider arrived and the trouble arrived with her. A letter in slanting handwriting eventually says otherwise. Hamish has been dealing with Duncan Ross, and the curse that has been killing MacBains for thirty years was never bad luck. Morag, who has been serving MacBain masters since before Callum was born, is the one who works out why the spring answers Fiona at all. Her grandmother was Elspeth MacLeod, who served as the spring's guardian before the curse took her, and who left the water locked behind her. The blood is still there. The spring recognises it. Which leaves Fiona a choice she never came for. *I came here to save my brother,* she says, standing over the black water. *I didn't come to bind myself to a pack.* The old rite is a blood oath spoken over the spring with the moon overhead, and the guardian has to speak the words willingly. There is no version of it where she saves Finn and then walks away clean. A Scottish-set wolf shifter romance told in both leads' voices, closed-door, ending on a bond made in the spring chamber with an enemy's second oath still waiting out past the hills.