Chapter Five — The Ninth

The Mark at my neck prickled before I saw anyone, the way skin knows a hand is coming. Somewhere behind me a boot turned on gravel, once, and then took great care not to do it again.

Don't run, Nyx said. Count them.

I counted. One at the culvert, checking a fence line that hasn't needed checking since spring. One in the trees above the switchback. One at the crossroads ahead, on a tailgate, arms crossed.

Three ahead, one behind, Nyx said, almost pleased to have something to do. That's a net, Aria. Not a patrol.

I stopped in the middle of the road.

"Delta Ames," I called. "Your fence is fine."

He came out of the ditch grass slowly, the way you approach a horse. I'd have known his Scent with my eyes shut — wet wool and engine grease.

"Three weeks you've had two men on this road," I said. "Since Tuesday there are four."

"Four," Ames agreed.

"So somebody moved the roster."

"Somebody moved the roster."

"Whose orders?"

"Whose do you think."

"I'd like you to say it out loud."

He looked down the road, then back. "The Alpha's."

"Say the rest of it."

"There isn't a rest."

"There's always a rest, Ames."

He blew out a breath. "Watch her. Don't touch her. Log who comes near."

"So you're watching me."

"We're watching for someone," he said. "You're just where they'd come."

That landed differently than he meant it to. I turned it over twice before I answered.

"Bait."

"That's your word."

"It's the correct word."

"It's not how the Alpha put it." Ames's jaw did something complicated. "He didn't put it at all. He gave the order and then stood there a while and said nothing else, and Beta Cole had to ask him twice about the rotation."

He believes it's protection, Nyx murmured. Look at his face. He believes it.

That was the part I carried down to the crossroads.

Hollis keeps the only store between the ridge and the highway. Same bell on the door, same three-legged dog asleep on a feed sack by the register.

Rice, eggs, two loaves, four cans of the cheap stew, a bag of apples. I put it on the counter and heard how it sounded — a woman buying for a house of four.

I came up forty cents short and Hollis said he'd steal it back off me in the spring, and neither of us mentioned that this was the third time.

His dog had left a white hair on my sleeve. I brushed at it while he bagged and it moved half an inch and stayed, and I brushed at it four more times in the next minute like a woman with nothing worse on her mind.

The bell rang behind me on my way out and Trace Bellamy came through it.

He'd been two rows back at the Circle. His was the mouth the word unclean came out of, and he hadn't bothered to lower his voice then either.

"Big shop."

"Move, Trace."

"For one person." He set his shoulder against the doorframe so the gap was too narrow. "Or is it?"

"The Pack's been asking questions about you," he said, when I didn't answer. His eyes went to my collar and stayed there. "Whether a wolf that won't be released ought to walk around loose. Whether that's a Council matter or a Pack matter."

Break his knee, Nyx said, very calm. He'd fold.

I moved the bag onto my hip and said nothing, because my hands were not steady.

"Bellamy."

The voice came from the far end of the porch, unhurried, and it did not belong to anyone from the Blood Moon Pack.

He was on the rail with his boots hooked in the slats. Young, lean, canvas coat, and what came off him on the wind was cold mineral and juniper and something under it like a coin held too long in a fist.

Silver Ridge.

"This isn't your ground," Trace said.

"No. It's a store." The stranger did not get down off the rail. "You're standing in a doorway shouting at a woman holding eggs."

"Careful, Silver Ridge."

"I'm being careful. One of us is embarrassing his Alpha, and it isn't me."

Trace laughed like it cost him money and went down the steps.

"Thank you," I said.

He didn't answer. He didn't look at me at all — not when I said it, not when I came level with him.

Twenty yards on I stopped and pretended to resettle the bag, and looked back the way a person looks back for nothing.

His head was turned three degrees. Not toward me. Toward the culvert.

He isn't here for us, Nyx said. He's counting them.

Three of Damien's on a road nobody uses, to log who comes near me. At least one of Kai's, out in the open, logging Damien's.

Three weeks I had been walking around inside somebody's arithmetic and had thought I was simply being punished.

The notice board is in the corridor outside the common hall. I never got as far as reading it.

"—cleanse it before the Council sits. That's all I'm saying."

I stopped with my hand still up at the board and the Mark went cold. Not cool. Cold, all at once, the way a stove goes when somebody shuts off the gas.

"There's people in the kitchen, Trace."

"There's people everywhere. That's rather the point."

That hall smells the same all through the wet months — wet wool, old grease, the coffee urn nobody has descaled since Elder Mara's mother ran the kitchen. Somewhere back there a knife was going on a whetstone, slow and even, six strokes a side.

Somebody's kids were shrieking in the nursery at the far end. Two of them, chasing something.

Don't move, Nyx said. Listen.

"You do the thing," Trace went on, "and then it's done, and everybody gets to be surprised about it after."

"And the Alpha?"

"The Alpha's the reason we're in this. He put her down in front of us and then he guarded her. The bond's live and every wolf in this valley can smell it isn't finished."

"That's not our business."

"In nine days the Council sits and they'll rule she's bound." His voice went up and he pulled it back down. "Then you've got a Luna nobody chose sitting in that Pack House by law, with the Elders behind her and the Alpha's word in the dirt. That's Silver Ridge through the front door inside a year."

The knife went on going. Six strokes a side.

"You're talking about a wolf who hasn't done anything."

"I'm talking about a thing that needs to not exist by the ninth."

"Say a name," the second voice said, "or I'm not in this."

"Vance," said Trace. "We start with the Vance girl. There isn't anybody else."

Something moved behind me and I turned around too fast.

Gamma Theo was four feet away with a crate of jarred stock against his hip, and from his face he had been standing there some while.

He could have said my name out loud, and it would have carried into that hall.

Theo moved the crate to his other hip.

"Board's out of date," he said, conversationally, not quietly at all. "Council notice is on the second sheet, under the snow rota."

"Thank you."

"Mm."

He walked past me into the hall, said something about the stock, and two chairs moved.

The notice was on the second sheet, under a flyer for a lost brown dog — ANSWERS TO BISCUIT, VERY FRIENDLY, PLEASE CALL — which I had to lift with one finger to read the rest.

Sitting of the Council of Elders. The ninth of November. Matter: the standing of the Rejection spoken by Alpha Damien Kane over Aria Vance, and the standing of the Mate Bond thereafter.

My name, typed, on a piece of paper, under a lost dog.

Ames straightened when he saw me coming back down the road, which he had never once done before.

"If four wolves come up this road at two in the morning and take me out of my house," I said, "what goes in your book?"

His jaw worked. Down in the ditch the water was going hard and brown with the week's rain.

"I write what happened."

"After."

"...After."

"That's what I thought. You're not a guard, Ames, you're a witness. He didn't put you here to stop anything — he put you here so there'd be a record."

"Who was it?"

"Bellamy. And he said a date."

I watched it land. The shoulders, the small change around the eyes.

"Would you stop them?"

He didn't answer for four full seconds, and that was the whole answer.

"I'm ordered to watch and log," he said at last. "Not to touch."

"Right."

"I go off at six."

I looked at him.

"In the mornings. Six." He was studying the fence line. "The trees post picks up at half past. There's a gap. It's in the roster, anyone could read it. It's not anything."

"No," I agreed. "It's not anything."

At home I smoothed the grocery list flat with the side of my hand. My own writing had gone through where the paper tore and I could not read the fourth line at all.

I put it in the stove and watched it take.

Then I got the notebook out of the drawer, turned it over, and started a new page from the back.

Money in the coffee tin. The pharmacy off the highway that takes cash. Wren's back door. The eastbound bus that goes nowhere near Silver Ridge land.

Nine days until the Council sits. Eight, if Trace is any good at all, because a man who says by the ninth means before the ninth, and Trace has never been early for anything in his life except this.

And then, at the bottom, in my own handwriting, I found I had written one more word that I had not decided to write.

Thursday.