Novels by Ava Sterlin

"There," Hesper Nolan said. "And there. Both accounted for."I had not known I was holding my breath until it went out of me all at once, and I lay on a vinyl table in a back room in Bellingham and put the heel of my hand over my eyes."They're alright.""They're better than alright.""Say a number.""Seventeen weeks, give or take four days, and both of them loud."Her palm stayed flat under my ribs. "Now be quiet a minute. I'm listening."The room smelled of bitter antiseptic laid over something green and dusty. She had bunches of dried yarrow and nettle strung on wire above the sink, and every time the baseboard heater came on they shucked against each other like paper.Tell her nothing, Nyx said. Let her hands do the talking.The Mark at my neck had gone quiet under her touch. Not cold, not humming — quiet, the way a dog goes when a competent person picks it up. It had not done that since the night on the stone.Then Hesper went still.I knew that stillness. I had seen it in Wren's

A twig went behind me on the hatchery road, and I knew from the sound of it that whatever broke it weighed more than a deer.I did not turn around. I kept walking at exactly the speed I had been walking, with the propane bottle in one hand and the laundry sack over my shoulder, and I counted.Two sets of boots on crusted snow. Twenty yards back, spread wide, moving well.Deer don't spread out. Neither do hunters from town, in December, at four in the afternoon, on private ground with a gate.Creek, Nyx said, and there was a growl all the way through it. Not the cabin. Don't you take them to the cabin. Creek — now.I set the propane bottle down in the snow like a woman whose arm had got tired.Then I went off the road to the left and ran.Two months of that fire road twice a day, and I had never once been grateful for Nyx until that afternoon. No burn, no stitch, no black at the edges.I went down the cut through the alders with the laundry sack still on my shoulder, because dropping i

I went up the hatchery road at a dead run with a full water jug in each hand, and at the top I wasn't out of breath.Not winded. Not burning. I stood at the gate with five gallons hanging off each arm and a pulse doing about ninety, and the thin air went in and out of me like I'd walked up for the mail.Again, Nyx said. Down and back. Don't put them down."I'm not putting them down."Then move.Five weeks on the east side of the mountains and I have become a woman who argues out loud on a fire road. I decided in the hunter's cabin that I'd rather talk to nobody than go quiet, and I have kept to it.The place is a hatchery that closed in 2011 — four concrete raceways full of leaf mould, a shed, a caretaker's cabin with a woodstove and a hand pump. Nell Prentice owns the ground it sits on and wanted somebody on it over the winter. Cash, no paper, no questions, and a woman on her own suits her better than a man on his own.I split wood. I keep the road open. I run the fire road twice a d

The house was ready and she was never going to walk into it.I stood in the middle of that room on the ninth day with the door open behind me and made myself look at all of it.Beds made. Stove laid with kindling and never lit. Two months of food on the shelf, a lamp with a full reservoir, a bolt on the inside of the door that a wolf her size could throw one-handed.The hearth had ash in it from last winter, cold and grey and packed down, and I put my fingers in it for no reason I can defend.Four miles from the Pack House. Nobody knew it existed except Cole and the man who fitted the bolt, and I had meant to move her here on the seventh, three days before the Council sat, and I had told nobody why.Under my ribs, the bond pulled.That is the part I cannot get past. Not the grief — grief I could carry. It is the pull, the same wire under the sternum I have felt since I was nineteen years old, still tied to something, still going taut in a direction.North. It has pointed north for nin

The door was unlatched.I had walked three days down off that mountain to reach a house with no road to it, and I got my hand up to knock and the door swung two inches on an oiled hinge and stopped.Nobody leaves a door unlatched out here. Not in that country, not in that month.Someone's waiting, Nyx said. Don't you dare thank him for it.The Mark at my neck fluttered — not the deep ache it had kept for three days, something shallower and quicker, the way it goes near anything my body files under wrong.I pushed the door with two fingers.Kai Ashford was standing at a table in the one room, with a lamp lit and rain still beading on the shoulders of his coat. He hadn't been there long. He'd come in from somewhere, and recently, and the wet wool smell of him filled the whole house."Luna Vance," he said."Don't.""Sit down before you fall down. That's not hospitality, it's arithmetic."I sat, because he was right and because my legs had made the decision without me.There was a fire, a

The door gave at the third shove and I went down on the floor of the cabin with my cheek against a board, and two things arrived together: the cold, and his grief.A splinter stood up out of that board, frozen hard as a nail. It went into my cheek and I felt it happen from a long way off.The Mark at my neck was throbbing, and it was not throbbing to my heart. It kept somebody else's time.Up, Nyx said. Aria. That floor will kill you faster than the wind will.The cabin sat on the Elk Creek side, eleven or twelve miles down off the col — a hunter's box with one window, a stovepipe, and a tin roof somebody had nailed on wrong in about 1970. I'd smelled the creosote in that pipe from two hundred yards out."Okay," I said out loud. "Okay. Boots."My fingers didn't work. I got the laces with my teeth and my wrists, and when the first boot came off, the sock inside was grey and the other one was navy."That's a stupid thing to cry about," I told the room.Then don't, Nyx said. Stove.The s