“How bad?” she asks.
“Bad.”
She sets the spoon down on a folded cloth and crosses to the chair opposite me. She sits with the unhurried weight of a woman who’s seen every variation of wolf biology and hasn’t been surprised by any of it in thirty years.
“This isn’t your normal cycle.”
“No.”
“Something’s changed.” She’s reading me the way she reads her herbs, watching for color, for scent, for what the body is telling her. “Your scent is different since you’ve been back. There’s a thread in it I haven’t smelled on you before.”
She tilts her head.
“Male. Alpha. Strong.”
My hand goes to my collar.
I catch the movement too late. Greta’s eyes track my fingers like a hawk on a mouse.
“Show me.”
Reluctantly, I unbutton my collar and peel the gauze aside. The bite is mostly healed, but there’s no disguising the extent of it. Or what it is. Every wolf over the age of fifteen knows what a mate mark looks like.
Greta flinches, then looks at the mark for a long time.
“He wasn’t gentle, was he?” She makes a tutting sound.
I shrug. It doesn’t hurt. Never has. If anything, pressing on it sends a tingle through my skin.
“A mate bond pushes a heat harder,” Greta says. “The body is reacting to the claiming.” She pauses. “It isn’t subtle about it.”
“How do I stop it?”
“You don’t stop a heat. You manage it.” She stands and crosses to the pantry, then pulls down three jars from the shelf that only she ever reaches to. A shelf that smells, from where I’m sitting, like something that grows deep in the woods. She measures into a wooden bowl. The sound of the pestle against the mortar is the oldest sound in the room.
“Yarrow,” she says, grinding. “For the cramping. Chasteberry for the hormones. Black cohosh for—” She glances at me. “The wanting.”
“Will it stop it?”
“It will make you functional. Upright. Able to walk and talk without going down in the yard.” She works the pestle. The smell sharpens — green, bitter, something you find under rotting leaves. “The drive underneath won’t go once the bond is in place.”
“But the bond wasn’t completed.”
“You never marked him back?”
I shake my head.
Greta sighs. “That’s probably the problem. Your wolf won’t settle until it’s completed.”
“What if I don’t want to complete it?”
Maybe this is my way out of this.
Greta sets the pestle down. “Trust me, I’ve been in your shoes. I know what you’re going through. And it’s not about what you want. Your beast has decided. And from what I’ve seen, she’s powerful. You’re fighting your own animal instincts. You’re fighting the bond.”
“I’m not bonded, dammit!”
“The mark on your neck says otherwise.” She smiles gently.