The Lone Wolf's Mate

Ronan Maddox reads tracks the way his father taught him, the print and the white space between. Three sets in the season's first snow, heading toward the old den. A male, heavy-bodied. A female, shorter stride. A juvenile. A family, moving at a steady lope, with no hesitation at the boundary and no scent-marking, which tells him exactly one thing. Not pack. Strangers. He follows them and finds boot prints, then a woman in a bright orange anorak crouched at the creek's edge over a sedated gray wolf, pressing a cotton swab into its open mouth. *"I have a permit."* Freya Lindstrom is a University of Fairbanks PhD candidate collecting genetic samples for a population study, and the map she is working from says this is unincorporated public land. What it does not say is that the people who live here can turn into the animals she is sampling. Ronan tells her she is finished. She tells him she has a legal right to be there. Neither of them says the part that matters. His own is asleep in a cabin behind him. Tova is twelve years old, her lungs filling with fluid that should not be there, her medicine bottles lined along the window ledge and her last prescription run out ten days ago. She has been kept alive on his blood for nine years, and she is not getting better. He came out to the boundary that morning already carrying that. Her own secret is in her coat pocket. A worn Zippo engraved with a howling wolf, found wedged beside the driver's seat of a truck that went off Moose Creek Road, in a crash she cannot remember, at a scene where the police found blood that wasn't hers. The lighter was not in her truck when she drove out. Then the woman behind the counter of the general store asks whether her daddy was Joseph Lindstrom and puts his field notes in her hands. Derek Hargrave is the third party neither of them planned for. Ruddy-faced and thick-necked, three years in town, known for talking about the real predators in the forest, and lately asking the ranger about research permits and unusual sightings. He started two weeks ago, around the time the researcher arrived. When he finally forces the issue in public, he has brought cameras, and he has brought a drone. This is a shifter romance set in snow country outside a town called Silver Creek, about a territory kept sealed at enormous cost, a sick child nobody can treat honestly, and a scientist whose questions are the most dangerous thing in the valley. The heat is closed-door.