chapter 13 What Elaine Traded

Odessa

My mother told us everything on the courtyard gravel, with the dead Priestess's grey robe lying beside her like a shed skin.

I'll never forget it. Elaine Kade, who hadn't cried at her own mother's funeral, who ironed Dad's shirts at midnight when she was stressed, stood in a ruined dress and told it in a flat, steady voice, like she was reading a grocery list.

I was born dead.

That was the first thing. No breath, no heartbeat, blue as the inside of a shell. The midwives wrapped me in a cloth and tried to carry me out of the room. My mother, bleeding and barely conscious, grabbed her own grandmother, the Moon Priestess, by the wrist and said, Do whatever you have to.

"She told me it would cost," Mom whispered. "I said I didn't care. I said take anything."

"What did she take?" Evan asked quietly.

My mother looked at Josh.

My brother stood three feet away with a torn shirt and blood drying in his hairline. He hadn't said a word since the fighting stopped. Now every muscle in his face went still.

"Mom," he said.

"The Goddess draws a thread for every wolf," she said. "The Priestess cut one and tied it to yours, Odessa, to start your heart. And the thread she cut had to come from someone close to me." Her voice finally cracked. "Josh, baby. It was your mate thread. You were three years old. You had no idea."

Nobody made a sound.

"So when you met Mia," Mom said, "and felt nothing, no pull, no heat, no bond, it wasn't because the Goddess made a mistake. It wasn't because Evan stole her." She pressed a fist to her mouth. "It was me. I gave away the one person the Goddess meant for you, so your sister could breathe."

Mia made a small, broken sound and covered her face.

Josh didn't shout. I think I would have preferred shouting. He just stood there with his hands open at his sides, staring at our mother like she was a stranger. Then he looked at me.

"Did you know?"

"No."

"Does it feel like it was worth it?"

It was the cruelest question anyone has ever asked me, and he didn't mean it to be. I could see that. He was asking because he didn't know where to put the weight.

"I don't know," I said honestly. "I'm sorry. I don't know."

He nodded slowly. Then he walked to the edge of the courtyard and stood with his back to all of us, shoulders shaking.

I started toward him. Mia reached him first.

I don't know what she said. The new thing inside me wanted to listen, and I told it no. But I saw her put her hand on his back, and I saw him let her, and after a long moment, I saw him turn and press his forehead against her shoulder.

Two people who had spent a year hurting each other over a lie, both finally told the truth.

"Odessa."

Evan was beside me. He didn't touch me, but I felt him close, warm along my left side.

"You're doing it again," he said gently.

"What?"

"Carrying all of it." His eyes searched mine. "He isn't angry at you. He's angry at everything. You're just standing closest."

I wanted to answer. Then the ground trembled under my feet, and the silver in my chest rang like a struck bell, and my head snapped toward the road.

"They're here."

Evan

I saw them a second after she did, because I was looking at her.

They came up out of the road like heat shimmer. Women, dozens of them, translucent and silver-edged, walking in perfect silence. Some wore armor. Some wore furs. Some wore the plain linen shifts of girls who'd never been allowed to grow up. Their feet didn't touch the ground, and every one of them turned toward Odessa like flowers toward the sun.

"Goddess," my father breathed. "The threads."

"Not threads," Odessa whispered. "Them. When I pulled the silver out of that puppet, I didn't just break it. I let them out."

The first one drifted close. Tall, long-necked, a crown of braided silver at her brow and a hollow in her chest where a heart should have been. She stopped a foot from Odessa. The courtyard was so quiet I could hear the flag snapping on the gatepost.

"Sister," the woman said. Her voice was wind in an empty house. "Daughter. Last of us."

"I'm sorry," Odessa said, and her voice shook. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know."

"We did not come to blame." The ghost laid a transparent hand against Odessa's cheek. I watched Odessa shiver, and it wasn't from cold. "We came to warn. He was never the one who kept us."

Odessa went rigid. "Draven?"

"A hand. Not a head." The ghost's eyes were deep as wells. "The one who cut our threads. The one who has hunted our line for four hundred years. The one who was in the room when your Priestess tied your life to your brother's."

She looked past Odessa. Past me. Past my father.

At the gates stood a man in a plain brown coat, hands folded in front of him. I hadn't heard him arrive. Nobody had. He had a face you'd pass in a market and never remember.

I remembered it. I remembered it holding the back of my bicycle seat when I was seven, running behind me down the hill. I remembered it laughing at my mother's table. I remembered a funeral, a closed coffin, and my father standing over it without a single tear.

"No," my father said hoarsely. "No. You died. I buried you."

"You buried a box of stones, Grayson." The man smiled gently, the way you'd smile at a child who finally got the answer wrong. "You never did check."

"Uncle Silas," I whispered.

Grayson's older brother. The heir who was supposed to take the Alpha's seat before a border skirmish took him, thirty years ago, when I was eleven.

"Evan." He inclined his head to me, warm and fond. "You've grown. You have your mother's eyes. I'm so glad they didn't get her stubbornness." His gaze slid to Odessa, and the warmth cooled by a degree. "And you. Lunara. You were smaller the last time I saw you."

Odessa's hand clamped around my wrist. "You were in the room," she said. "The night I was born."

"I held the knife, child. The Priestess only held the thread." He said it so mildly. "Your mother thinks she made a trade. She didn't. She made a deposit."

Behind us, my mother-in-law let out a sound like she'd been struck.

"Father didn't kill the last Lunara, Grayson," Silas said, turning to his brother. "You've always believed he did. I let you. I was the one who kept her. I've kept all of them. Four hundred years of moon-thread, wound and stored and waiting for the one who could carry the whole spool."

"Why?" my father said. He looked like a man standing in the ruins of his own house. "What could you possibly want?"

Silas smiled, and for the first time it reached his eyes. They were silver. Not like Odessa's. Colder, thinner, like frost on a window.

He opened his hand, and a single bright thread unspooled from his palm. It crossed the courtyard in a long, shining line, past my father, past Odessa, and stopped against my chest.

I felt it settle over my heart like a hook finding its place.

"The Sorrel heir was never a person, Evan," my uncle said softly. "He was a lock. I tied him to me the day he was born. And the Lunara..." His eyes moved to my wife. "She was always the key."

The thread pulsed once, bright as a heartbeat.

"Thank you both," Silas said, "for turning it."