Page 5 of Her Wolf Protector

OH.

Power surged within her, more than she'd ever felt before. This was like when Da had done magic in his greenhouse, transforming plants into more magical varieties to improve their healing properties, and help more people. She was his only child – she knew that. And when a fae royal died, their power and property went to their heirs...but she'd gotten all of it.

The storm in his bedroom. That had been his power, coming to her. No wonder she'd fainted. Right now this was...almost more than she could take.

Arwen opened her eyes and took a shaky breath. Almost, but not quite. Especially now she knew exactly where the fairy ring was. Where she needed to go to claim whatever it was her father wanted her to have.

She dialled up the power on the scooter, and shot away. Out of the hospital car park, out of Glasgow and into the countryside. The forest was calling, and her heart sang in answer.

FOUR

Driving along the muddy, rutted one-lane track that wound between trees that threatened to scrape the paint off his pickup, Tate felt like the darkness of the forest would go on forever. And then...it ended, opening up into an enormous clearing that glittered beneath a thin dusting of snow. The blank canvas that would be Hea Sanctuary, on the cleared shore of Sanctuary Loch.

The kind of shining future pack leaders like Shaw and Sienna, or Shaw's parents, Bernard and Aspasia, had the vision to create for Wuffingas Pack and their allies. A true supernatural sanctuary, the like of which no one had seen for a thousand years or more.

If only he could fix their water issues.

He was supposed to be the project hydrogeologist. He knew these woods, and the water and earth beneath them. They'd picked this site for Hea Sanctuary because of the purity of the lake water.

And now they'd finally gotten council approval and construction would be starting any day...somehow, something had tainted the water. His sole responsibility. Like everything his family touched was tainted, a curse visited on his father for his crimes and passed down...

No. If he had to test every puddle in the Highlands, he'd find the source of this taint, and he'd rip it out of the earth, no matter how deep its roots ran. And if it turned out he couldn't, he'd call in every favour and contact he'd made since university, to build a state of the art water treatment plant that would make every drop of water in Sanctuary Loch as pure as though it had been triple distilled in the goddess's own whiskey still. Or, failing that, he'd find a way to the fae realm, and pledge himself in eternal servitude to whatever fae was willing to turn every tributary into a magical copy of Sanctuary Falls, so the water was pure as the driven snow.

Of course, he'd never met any of the fae, and he had no idea where to find one, unless the rumours about Fannar Snow were true.

But he owed it to the pack – to Shaw, and to Sienna, to solve this, in any way that he could. Which first meant identifying the problem. Something he was hardly likely to do, sitting behind the wheel of his pickup, gawping at the snow-frosted construction site.

The samples from the lake were easy enough to get, so Tate decided to fill a sample bottle with snow from the lakeshore, too. Just in case there was something at the construction site causing the problem, and not any of the loch's tributaries.

The tributary sampling sites were less easy to get to. From the loch, it would be a full day's hike for the round trip to all of them, before coming back here. But if he drove up to the trailhead closest to Tarn Cottage, he could complete the circuit in a little over three hours, sleep at the cottage overnight, and drive the samples back to town in the morning. Of course, he'd need to carry everything with him on the hike, including anything he wanted to take to the cottage, but it would be worth it.

Living with the rest of the pack in the main house on Wuffingas Estate wasn't exactly a hardship – with a housekeeper, a chef, and a luxurious suite that befitted the prestigious pack's enforcer – but he'd always felt more comfortable at Tarn Cottage. As a kid, it had been a much needed breath of fresh air compared to his family's home, which had always felt like it was filled with the foreboding of a coming storm. At Tarn Cottage, he'd made the first choices toward breaking free of his parents' influence, choices he hadn't even known he could make.

Then, and now, Tarn Cottage was about freedom. Not having to protect anyone, to put the pack first...he could be selfish and sleep, instead of patrolling the perimeter for half the night, ever mindful of the people who looked to him for protection. Constant vigilance was a small price to pay to be part of Wuffingas Pack, and he was happy to protect them, but sometimes...just being out here on his own, with no responsibilities was a rare pleasure.

If he'd been born a thousand years ago or more, Tate suspected he'd have been perfectly happy, living as a hermit on his own little island, lord of all he surveyed, hunting and fishing when he needed to, and tucked up inside a cozy croft, with a peat fire on the hearth, when the weather did its Scottish best to freeze everyone's unmentionables off. Maybe that was why traditional Scotsmen scorned wearing any kind of unmentionables under their kilts...

Tate laughed softly to himself as he parked his pickup at the trailhead. He considered heading down to Tarn Cottage to drop off his clothes and the cooler bag of food but the days were getting shorter now winter had come, and the hour long detour could mean the difference between finishing the day's sampling before sunset and hiking through the woods well after dark, wishing he'd made better decisions earlier in the day.

It would be fine if he could shift and do this as a wolf, but water sampling was best done by a human in daylight. At least he could leave his waders and boots in the back of his pickup – the remaining water bodies all had bridges or stepping stones that made sampling much easier than the fathoms-deep loch.

So Tate filled up his backpack, strapped the telescoping sample pole to the side, threw the satchel of sampling bottles over his shoulder, and marched up to Bubble Brook, snacking on what was likely the most delicious Scotch egg he'd ever tasted.

Sienna was the best thing that had ever happened to Wuffingas Pack. Tate had a long way to in order to earn her respect, not least because of his father's past mistakes. But Tate was determined to do it. One day, perhaps she'd forgive him for the part he'd played in her mother's death, and if he was really lucky, she'd accept him as her half-brother. He could only hope.

First, he had to fix the water supply for Hea Sanctuary.

Bubble Brook was almost as much of an oddity as Sanctuary Falls, though without the magic. Bubble Brook gushed out of a crack in the only remaining Cretaceous chalk cliff in the Highlands, frothing madly in the pool below like it was a sink of washing up. Sometime in the distant past, volcanoes and huge amounts of geological pressure had naturally carbonated this water, which flowed all year round. The high mineral content had made him suspect Bubble Brook as the culprit for whatever was contaminating the lake, but all the tests he'd done had come back clear: Bubble Brook was no more dangerous than Circle Creek, Fairy Feeder, or even Wolf Tarn. If Tate was to put money on it, he'd bet that the contaminated source was either Couch Creek or Holt Tarn. After all, it was the otters who'd been behaving weirdly, and both watercourses were home to freshwater otters.

Tate screwed together the sections of his sampling rod, then took two samples at the base of the falls, and another pair about ten metres further along the stream. After carefully scrawling the location and sample numbers on the side of the bottles in waterproof marker, he tucked them into his satchel.

Holt Tarn was next. No one was quite sure where the tarn actually started, as it tended to disappear if it hadn't rained for a week or so, but on the days it did rain...a thousand tiny rivulets came down from the tor, colliding and combining until they all ran into the channel Holt Tarn had carved into the earth until it exposed the gneiss bedrock beneath.

It was also where his game trail met with the longer, advanced hiking trail that adventurous tourists took in the summertime. On a wet day, the public trail was a sure path to broken bones and other injuries that left most hikers in tears. Tate and Shaw had done it once on summer break between university semesters, amid a storm of swearing, ending with the strongest oath of all: never to take the younger members of the pack on that trail during their stays at Tarn Cottage.

Tate took samples from Holt Tarn, then slid them into his satchel and fastened it securely for the crossing. A leap across the tarn itself, then slow, careful steps along a ledge barely wider than his boots, before another scramble up onto a boulder that the public trail curved around. There were no hikers in winter, for it was deadly when there was ice and snow on the ground. Not on this part, though, where the rock glittered in the winter sun.

Granite gave way to Lewisian gneiss, so weathered it looked like ancient wood, though it was at least a billion years older than any tree in these woods. Any tree anywhere. And wood didn't glitter like it was covered in a billion tiny diamonds, either. Of course, he knew he was looking at metamorphosed mica schist, not any form of carbon at all, but it was still pretty. Like the rock itself knew to rivet his attention to his every step, so he'd reach Couch Creek safely. There, he could cross back over to the game trail that led up to Circle Creek and the strange dell where no trees grew.