Chapter 3

 Noa’s POV

“You howled,” Shira whispered. “Noa. The whole valley heard it.”

“I don’t have a wolf.”

“Then who was that?”

I didn’t know. I was on my hands and knees in the gravel, breathing like I’d run ten miles, and the ache in my chest had dulled into a slow, steady heat. A second heartbeat. It thumped just behind my own. Warm and huge and very awake.

Above us, the moon glowed gold.

Nobody was talking. Two hundred wolves stood frozen around the lake, staring up. Some of them looked afraid. An old man near the fire had taken off his cap and pressed it to his heart.

Then my mother’s shoes crunched in front of me.

“Get up,” said Liora Bennett.

“Mom, I...”

“Get up. Right now. You have dragged this family through the mud in front of an Alpha and a hundred witnesses. I will not have you crawling around like an animal.”

“She just got rejected,” Shira snapped. “Have a heart.”

“Stay out of it, Shira.”

“No.”

“He looked at her like she was garbage,” Talia said. She had arrived behind my mother, arms folded, her golden hair shining in the moonlight. She looked more thrilled than sorry. “Did you see? Like she was gum stuck to his shoe. I don’t think I’ve ever been so embarrassed.”

“You weren’t the one rejected,” I said.

“I might as well have been. Everyone knows we’re related.”

My father stood at the edge of the crowd with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. He didn’t say a word. He never did.

“In the car,” my mother said. “Now.”

I got up. My knees were shaking. I looked at Shira, who mouthed I’ll call you, and then I followed my mother down the shore, past the whispering wolves, with a stranger’s heart beating in my chest and the golden moon watching us go.

~

I don’t remember the drive.

I remember the kitchen. The pack house on the ridge, the long wooden table, the smell of yeast and old coffee. I remember my mother pacing. My father’s silence. Talia leaning on the fridge, eating an apple, delighted.

“The Alpha of Silverlake will be furious,” my mother said. “Bennett girl, rejected at the Moon Ceremony. Do you know what that does to your father’s standing? We’ll be laughed out of every pack in the state.”

“I didn’t ask him to reject me.”

“You should have made yourself worth keeping.”

The words landed like a slap.

“How?” I said. My voice was very quiet. “Tell me how, Mom. Should I have been thinner? Prettier? Should I have shifted at sixteen like a good daughter? Because I’ve been trying my whole life.”

“Don’t take that tone.”

“I’m not taking a tone. I’m asking.”

“Noa,” my father said, finally. He cleared his throat. “Go to your room. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Fine.”

“And no baking tonight. Get some rest.”

“Fine.”

I climbed the stairs. I shut the door. I sat on the edge of my bed with my hands in my lap and stared at the wall for maybe ten minutes.

Then I went back down to the kitchen at two in the morning, because there was flour in the cupboard, and I did not know what else to do with my hands.

~

The house was asleep. I turned on one small light over the stove. The moon still shone through the window, gold and steady, and it laid a long bright stripe across the floor.

I measured flour. Water. Yeast. Honey. I started to hum.

The dough came together under my palms. And I felt it. A tiny, warm ripple, like a cat stretching in the sun. The second heartbeat in my chest quickened. A warmth moved along my arms, up from my shoulders and down into my fingers, and I looked down and saw the dough begin to glow.

Just a little. Soft and honey-colored, like a candle under paper.

I stopped humming. The glow faded.

I started again. It came back.

“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh, wow.”

Footsteps pounded on the porch. Someone hammered on the kitchen door. I jumped so hard I knocked a bowl off the counter.

“Noa!” Ruth’s voice, cracked and wet. “Please, are you awake? Oh God. Please.”

I flung the door open. Ruth Adler, our pack cook, stood on the step in her robe, her gray hair wild, tears streaming down her face. In her arms was a small boy, limp as a rag doll. Her grandson. Ben. He was six years old, and he had a scab on his knee and a fever that had climbed for three days.

He was burning up. I felt it through my sleeve.

“The healer says it’s the sickness that took the Coleman twins,” Ruth sobbed. “She says nothing more can be done. He won’t last till sunrise. I couldn’t sit there and watch, I just, I didn’t know where to go. Your light was on. You always...”

“Bring him in.”

I laid him on the kitchen table. His lips were dry. His breath came in shallow little gasps. He smelled of fever and sour sweat and fear.

And I knew, with a certainty I couldn’t explain, what to do.

I turned back to the dough. My hands moved without thinking. Shape, fold, braid. I hummed. The sound rose out of me, low and clear, older than I was. Gold light rolled up my wrists. The braided loaf shone in my palms like a lamp.

I shoved it into the oven. Ruth stared at me. The house filled with a smell of butter and honey and warm stone. It was the smell of every kitchen I had ever loved.

Twenty minutes later I pulled out a loaf as golden as sunrise. I tore off a piece and blew on it.

“Ben,” I said. “Sweetheart. Can you eat this for me?”

His eyes fluttered. He opened his mouth.

I put in one crumb.

The room held its breath.

Color rolled into his cheeks like a tide. His chest rose, deep and slow. His fingers uncurled. He blinked once, twice, and looked straight up at me with big brown eyes.

“Noa?” he mumbled. “It smells like Grandma’s.”

Ruth made a sound I will never forget. She dropped to her knees beside the table and buried her face in his blanket.

“Ben,” she sobbed. “Ben. Oh, my baby.”

“I’m hungry,” he said.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It came out cracked and shaky, and tears rolled down my face at the same time.

“Hi,” said a voice from the doorway.

I spun around.

An old woman stood there in a wool coat, leaning on a cane. Tiny. Bird-boned. White braid down to her waist. Miriam, the pack’s oldest healer. She had been eighty for as long as I could remember. She was staring at the loaf in my hands as if it were a ghost.

“That hum,” she said. “Where did you learn it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always done it.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever.”

She crossed the kitchen slowly. Her eyes never left me. She touched the edge of the table, then my wrist, and her fingers were cold and trembling.

“Child,” she said. “Do you know what you are?”

“A baker?”

“You are a Hearth Wolf.” Her voice shook. “There hasn’t been one in three hundred years. The moon sends one only when a true mate bond is broken, and pity moves her. You are the healing of a pack. The heart of a whole territory.”

“That’s not...”

“And you have just been rejected by the Alpha of Ironwood.” Miriam gripped my hand. “Listen to me, Noa Bennett. There are men in this world who would kill to own what you are. And the man who rejected you is one of them.”

Headlights swept across the kitchen wall.

Tires crunched on the gravel outside. A car door slammed. Then another. Then boots, heavy and slow, coming up the porch steps.

Someone knocked, three times.