The Unfamiliar Scent

POV: Brill Cox

On the morning of the fourth day, by the time I had gathered my things to move on, Tessa was already crouched beside me, waiting.

The wound on her leg still hadn't healed, and she hadn't made a sound of complaint all night.

Her eyes rested on the back of my neck for a while, and only when she noticed I had caught her did she look down and busy herself with her bundle.

I glanced at her, meaning to ask why she'd been staring at my neck, but the question died at my lips and I only said, "When we reach Blackridge Academy, we go our separate ways."

"All right." She agreed far too quickly.

"I won't speak for you, and I won't help you."

"I know." She nodded, and even smiled.

I had no idea what she was smiling at. I turned, shouldered my pack, and walked on, and she followed, limping along behind me.

When we stopped at midday, Tessa dug up some snow kudzu root and pushed the larger piece at me. I wouldn't take it, and she said she had more of her own.

Looking at her frost-reddened face, I remembered that the only person who had ever saved the good things for me was my mother.

Her kindness left me uneasy instead.

That night we sheltered in a collapsed animal den. Tessa volunteered for the first watch, and I closed my eyes but never truly slept.

Out on the waste, turning your back on someone you'd known only a few days was no different from killing yourself.

By the next morning she was still sitting at the mouth of the den, dark circles under her eyes.

"Why didn't you wake me when it was time?" I asked.

She added a branch to the fire. "I wanted you to sleep a little longer."

She said it so naturally. I looked at the shadows under her eyes and meant to say we'd take turns from then on, but in the end I didn't say it.

We'd known each other only a few days. One good deed wasn't enough for me to hand her my back.

She chattered the whole way about everything — the snow, the woods, the tree bark she'd eaten as a child.

At first I ignored her, then I realized she didn't care in the least and could keep talking to herself perfectly well.

She asked why I was going to Blackridge Academy.

I said only that I was looking for someone, and she didn't press.

On the fifth day, old boot prints appeared in the snow, packed hard.

I watched from behind a tree for a long time before going on, and Tessa murmured that I was too cautious. I told her that out on the waste, the people who weren't careful were dead.

That evening we found an old shed with half its roof fallen in, and inside it a pile of ash that had long since burned dry.

I began whittling a stick to a point with a stone, and she sat across from me watching, and then suddenly asked, "Can you shift?"

My hand paused. "No."

"Not once?"

"I'm twenty this year, and I've never awakened." I kept whittling, waiting for her to show disgust.

Tessa froze for a moment, and then I heard her sniff. "No wonder I couldn't smell you all this time. I thought my nose was broken."

That was it?

I looked up at her, caught off guard. "You don't find it disgusting?"

"Why would I? You're amazing. You pulled me out of the hands of four Rogues all by yourself, and I have a wolf, and they still had me flat on the ground."

I didn't answer. I'd taken too much off the stick, and the point had snapped away in a small piece.

I looked up at her and tried to find evidence in her face that she was lying.

There wasn't any. She looked entirely serious, and everything she said was what she truly meant.

"And you know the way, and you can tell whether the snow is hollow, and you know herbs." She counted on her fingers. "And I can't do anything, and I'd probably just slow you down."

I looked down and kept whittling, and my throat went tight.

After Adrian rejected me in front of everyone, they had all called me a useless thing without a wolf.

Tessa was the first person who hadn't looked at me that way.

I finished the stick and tossed it to her. "To defend yourself."

She caught it and tested her grip on it seriously.

All I'd given her was a sharpened stick, and she truly meant to use it to defend herself, and that left me somehow uncomfortable.

When we set out the next day, I noticed she had turned strange.

She walked beside me with her nose twitching, and after a few steps she leaned closer and sniffed twice more.

"What are you doing?" I stepped away.

"You have a scent on you." She shook her head, her brows drawn together. "An Alpha's scent."

My feet stopped.

"There can't be an Alpha's scent on me," I said.

The Mate Bond between Adrian and me was already broken. That day he had found even touching me disgusting. There was no way his scent could have stayed on me.

"There definitely is." Tessa straightened, drew a breath very seriously. "It's very faint. I didn't dare say anything at first. I thought I'd smelled it wrong."

"What kind of scent?"

She thought about it for a long time. "I can't describe it. I've just never smelled anything like it before."

Without thinking, I reached up and touched the back of my neck.

Where the beast had bitten through, only a hard scar remained now, and the white wolf had licked that place.

"When did you smell it?" I asked.

She said she had smelled it on the first day, when she handed me the berries.

Which meant the scent had already been on me before I ever met her.

I pulled my collar up without thinking.

If Tessa could smell it, the other werewolves at the Academy might smell it too.

And when that happened, who would believe I had no idea where the scent came from?

Was that white wolf an Alpha?

I was just about to ask more when a low howl came from the woods ahead.

Tessa seized my arm and dropped her voice. "Don't move."

On the snow at the edge of the trees, a string of fresh wolf tracks had appeared.

They ran in from a distance, circled the place where we had just been standing, and then headed north.

I couldn't tell whether it was the white wolf, but the scar on the back of my neck had begun to itch.

The scent wasn't yet explained, and a new trail had already shown itself.

We went around the woods and kept moving, and when I looked back, the tracks in the snow had already been covered over by the wind.