Chapter 5 The Border and the Burn

By Alastair Sterling-Vane

“You’re doing it again,” Julian said.

“what.”

“You stare at nothing for ten seconds and then crush whatever’s in your hand.” He nodded at my fist. I looked down. The radio handset I’d been holding had a visible dent in the casing now, the plastic warped under my fingers.

“It’s a cheap radio,” I said, setting it down on the hood of the truck.

“It’s the third one this month.” Julian crossed his arms, breath fogging in the cold morning air at the edge of the Blackwood treeline. “Alastair. We have been parked at this checkpoint for forty minutes and you have checked your phone eleven times.”

“I’m monitoring the perimeter.”

“You’re monitoring your phone.”

I didn’t answer that, mostly because he was right, and there was no version of that sentence that didn’t sound pathetic out loud. Three days. Three days since I’d stood in that office and felt my own bones threaten to rearrange themselves around a woman I’d known for ninety seconds, and every hour since had been an exercise in not driving straight to her building like some lovesick adolescent with no command of his own instincts.

“We’re working today,” I said instead, straightening off the truck. “The Silver-Fangs left fresh markers on the eastern ridge two nights ago. I want them found and burned before nightfall.”

“Fine.” Julian shouldered his pack, gave me one last look that said this conversation isn’t over, and started toward the treeline. “But for the record, running yourself into the ground chasing scent markers is not going to fix whatever’s actually wrong with you.”

“Nothing is wrong with me.”

“You put your fist through historic furniture two days ago.”

“That furniture had it coming.”

He didn’t laugh. He just shook his head and kept walking, and I followed him into the trees because the alternative was standing in a parking lot arguing with my own Beta about a woman I’d already decided not to name.

The forest swallowed sound the way it always did once you got past the first hundred yards, the distant hum of the city fading into something older, denser, thick with the smell of wet bark and cold soil. I let the change settle into my senses the way I’d trained myself to do a century ago: shoulders dropping, breath slowing, the human noise in my skull quieting just enough to let the wolf do what it did best.

It didn’t help.

Three miles in, we found the first marker, a deep claw gouge raked into a birch trunk at shoulder height, fresh enough that sap still beaded at the edges. Julian crouched to inspect it while I stood a few feet back, scenting the air for anything beneath the obvious: Silver-Fang musk, sharp and metallic, layered with something colder underneath.

“Two of them,” Julian said. “Maybe three. This is deeper into our territory than the last incursion.”

“How deep.”

“Half a mile past the old boundary stones.” He stood, wiping sap off his fingers onto his jeans. “They’re getting bold.”

“They’re testing us.” I turned, scanning the treeline, forcing my focus onto the actual threat in front of me instead of the one currently sitting at a desk on the third floor of my own building, twenty miles away, completely unaware that her existence had become a strategic liability to an entire pack. “Arthur’s right about one thing. A pack without a settled Alpha looks weak from the outside. The Silver-Fangs smell weakness the same way we do.”

“Then settle it,” Julian said, too lightly for the weight of what he meant.

“Julian.”

“I’m just saying. You could end the border problem and the council problem in one move if you’d just…”

“Don’t.”

He held up both hands, backing off, and we walked the rest of the boundary line in silence, marking over the Silver-Fang scent trails with our own, burning out their claim on the territory one gouged tree at a time. It was mindless, physical work, exactly the kind I’d hoped would drown out the noise in my chest. I tore bark with my bare hands. I let the wolf surface enough to mark a four-mile stretch of border with a dominance scent so aggressive it would singe a Silver-Fang scout’s nose from thirty feet away. By midafternoon my knuckles were bleeding, healing, bleeding again, and none of it had done a single thing to quiet the pull behind my ribs.

“You’re not even tired,” Julian said, watching me drag a fallen log out of a drainage gulley with one hand like it weighed nothing. “You’re just angry at a tree.”

“I’m not angry.”

“You just threw a log forty feet.”

“It was in the way.”

“It was a hundred feet from the actual boundary line.”

I dropped the conversation by walking faster, and Julian, to his credit, let me. We covered another six miles before the light started going gold and long through the canopy, and by the time we doubled back toward the trucks the sun was already low enough to paint the underside of the storm clouds a deep, bruised orange.

“We should head back,” Julian said, checking his watch. “Council session at seven. Arthur wants a border report.”

“I’m aware.”

“You smell like a forest fire and your hands are still bleeding.”

I looked down. They were, four parallel gashes across both palms from the log, already half-closed, the skin knitting itself back together in real time the way it always did. It should have been satisfying, all of it, a full day spent doing exactly what an Alpha was supposed to do, defending territory, marking borders, burning out a rival pack’s claim with raw physical effort. It should have left me hollowed out and quiet.

It hadn’t touched the pull at all. If anything, the exhaustion had stripped away whatever flimsy discipline I’d been running on, and now there was nothing left between me and the thing I’d been trying to outrun for three straight days.

The council session went the way council sessions always went lately, Arthur pleased with the border report, Deborah pointedly unimpressed, a long, circling conversation about Victoria’s family and timelines I barely heard past the first ten minutes. I gave the correct answers. I made the correct amount of eye contact. I left the moment Arthur dismissed the room, ignoring Julian’s pointed look from across the chamber, and drove back into the city with the windows down despite the cold, like the wind might do what six miles of border-burning hadn’t.

It didn’t.

By the time I pulled into my own garage it was past midnight, and I told myself, with the kind of conviction that should have embarrassed me, that I was simply tired. I showered. I sat at my desk reviewing reports I didn’t absorb a single word of. I lay down on a bed I didn’t sleep in, staring at a ceiling I’d looked at for three years without once finding it interesting, and at some point around 1:40 in the morning I stopped pretending I had any intention of staying there.

I was in the car before I’d fully decided to be. The streets of Oakhaven at two in the morning were empty and slick with old rain, streetlights smearing gold across the wet asphalt, and I drove the route to Blackwood Lane without consciously choosing a single turn, like the car already knew the way better than I did.

I parked half a block down, cut the engine, and sat there in the dark with both hands still resting on the wheel, telling myself I would just look. Just confirm the building was still standing, the street was still quiet, nothing about her was in any danger tonight. That was all. I was not going to knock on her door at two in the morning like some kind of obsessive animal who’d lost all control of himself.

I got out of the car anyway.

I stood on the wet pavement outside her building, hands in my coat pockets, and breathed in.