Mateo Santiago novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Santiago's Rest

The rogue Alpha offers her a job as his lieutenant, and a Black Lake truck is at the gate by dawn.

He gave me his jacket before he gave me his name.

It was canvas, lined with sheepskin, and it hung to my knees and smelled like woodsmoke and horses.

"I know who you are," I said.

"Then you know the pack law says I can't touch you," Mateo said.

"A rogue on Black Lake land would be dead by morning."

"We aren't on Black Lake land," he said.

He pointed at a line of white stones I'd walked past a hundred times without reading them.

"The boundary is three hundred feet back, and you're on the wrong side of it."

I looked at the culvert, where the big hunter was groaning and trying to stand.

"You could have killed him," I said.

"I could have," he said.

"Then Aurelio would have called it a rogue attack, and the Council would have believed him."

He said my father's name.

His truck was a rust-colored pickup at the top of the ridge, its engine ticking.

He opened the passenger door and waited.

I could have stood in the cold and argued.

I got in instead, because I was twenty-five and cast out and had eleven dollars in my back pocket.

The ranch was forty minutes of dirt road away, past Mora, in a valley full of dark sheep sheds and one lit kitchen window.

Santiago's Rest, the sign said, hand-painted on a plank.

There were people in the yard when we pulled in.

Thirty or forty of them, in coats and slippers and one man in a bathrobe, all standing very still.

They were rogues, and they were looking at me.

A woman with a long grey braid pushed through the crowd with a ladle in her hand.

"That's Aurelio Maldonado's girl," she said.

"She's wolfless," Mateo said.

A little breath went through the yard.

Rogues all knew what that word did to a person.

"She was cast out tonight in front of her whole pack," he said.

"Her father's hunters walked her to my fence and meant to leave her there."

"Good," said the woman with the ladle, and she turned to the crowd.

"Nobody asks the girl anything tonight, and somebody get her a plate."

She was Chela Baca, I found out later, and she ran the kitchen and the infirmary and half of everybody's life.

I ate three tortillas and a bowl of red chile standing up at the counter, with my hands shaking too hard to hold the spoon.

A skinny kid with a buzzed head slid a mug of coffee across the table without a word.

"Nico," he said.

"Don't mind the staring, we haven't had somebody new who wasn't running in a while."

"I'm not running," I said.

"Good," said Nico, grinning, "because that's going to be a short list of people who are."

Mateo waited until I'd finished.

Then he stood at the head of the long table, and the whole kitchen went quiet.

"House rules," he said, and his eyes came to me.

"Nobody asks Sofia about her wolf."

"Nobody tells her to try something, or gives her a tea, or looks at her sideways about it."

"Anybody who can't do that sleeps in the barn."

Nobody laughed.

I didn't understand what I'd walked into, but the silence was heavy and it was on my side.

"There's a second thing," he said, and he turned to me.

"I need a lieutenant."

I blinked.

"I've got three good people who do what I say and nobody who tells me when I'm wrong," he said.

"Every pack in the valley will smell a rogue coming from a mile off."

"They can't smell you."

I had never thought about it.

All my life wolves had said I was strange to be near, flat.

I had never known that was a gift.

"No scent," I said slowly.

"No fear, no lies, no anything," he said.

"You could sit at a Council table and nobody would know what you were thinking."

"That's a weapon."

"That's a person who can walk into any room I can't," he said.

"The job is the second chair at this table, a vote, and a room with a door."

"Why would you trust me?" I said.

"I don't," he said easily.

"Not yet, but you'll earn it or you won't."

I looked down the long table at the faces, forty tired people watching me decide.

"What do I get besides the room?" I said.

"What do you want?"

I thought of my father with his hand on his chest and his face full of sorrow.

I thought of him telling two hundred people that my mother would be ashamed.

"A chance at Aurelio Maldonado," I said.

"In front of his pack, with the lights on."

Something flickered in Mateo's face, quick and dark and approving.

"Then we want the same thing," he said.

"You can have the room at the top of the stairs."

Chela walked me up herself, grumbling about sheets.

The room was small and clean and had a lock on the inside.

I stood at the window and looked at the dark hills I could not name yet.

Then the headlights came up the road.

They were not Mateo's.

They were a Black Lake truck, a white one with the pack seal on the door, and it parked across the ranch gate with its horn leaning on the night.

A man got out of the cab and started to shout.

"Send out the girl," Emilio Archuleta called.

"The Alpha wants to know what she stole."

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