Chapter 10: The Man Called Elias

The rifle came up and I stepped in front of Elias and put both my hands out.

“Do not shoot,” I said. “Do not shoot, Mrs. Bell. He is not going to hurt anyone.”

“Warden, get away from the wolf,” Mrs. Bell said. Her voice was flat and calm and the rifle did not move. “Step to your left and put your hands where I can see them.”

“He is not a wolf right now.”

“He is about to be. I have seen the change before, and I know what it looks like when it starts, and I am telling you for the last time to step away.”

Behind me Elias made a sound that was not a word. I felt his hand leave mine. I felt the heat go out of my fingers and the cold come in, and then I heard him drop to his knees in the stubble.

“He is sick,” I said. “He is sick and he is not armed and he has not hurt anyone, and if you shoot him in this field tonight I will spend the rest of my life making sure the Council knows a licensed hunter shot an unarmed man on pack land without a cull order.”

Silas had not moved. He stood on the other side of the wall with his folder under his arm and his head tilted a little, and in the moonlight his pale gray eyes were bright and interested.

“That is an interesting speech,” he said. “And it is almost entirely true. There is no cull order. The Council has not issued one, and Dale’s hunters are licensed to take a rogue under pack law, which requires the rogue to be in wolf form and a danger to the territory. A man on his knees in a field is neither.” He looked at Mrs. Bell. “Lower the rifle.”

Mrs. Bell did not lower the rifle.

“Mrs. Bell,” Silas said again, and this time his voice had a little edge in it, and the edge was cold. “The Council thanks you for your diligence. Lower the rifle.”

She lowered it. She did it slowly, the way a person does a thing they do not agree with, and she did not put the safety back on.

I turned around. Elias was on his knees in the stubble with his arms wrapped around his chest and his head down, and he was shaking so hard that the wheat around him was moving.

“Elias,” I said.

“It is coming,” he said. His voice was thick. “It is coming and I cannot stop it, and you need to be somewhere else when it does.”

I crouched down in front of him and put my hand on his shoulder, and the heat came up through my palm and into my arm, and his shaking eased a little.

“Tell me what to do,” I said.

“There is nothing to do. It happens and then it is done.” He lifted his head. His face was pale and there was sweat on his forehead, and his eyes were amber and had gone strange. “The wolf will run north. It always runs north. It will run to the trees and it will stay there until the moon goes down, and then I will wake up in the trees with no clothes on and no memory of the night, and I will walk back to the mill and start again.” He swallowed. “But this month is different. This month the stone is awake, and I do not know what the wolf will do with it.”

“The stone is in my pocket,” I said. “I have it right here.”

“That is the problem,” Elias said.

Behind me Silas cleared his throat. “I am sorry to interrupt what is clearly a very important conversation,” he said, “but I would like to know what stone you are talking about, and I would like to know it before the wolf in front of me finishes changing, because I have read the field reports for this territory and there is no stone in them.”

I stood up. Elias was still on his knees and the shaking had gotten worse, and there was a sound coming out of him now, low and rhythmic, that was not a man’s breathing.

“You need to go,” I said to Silas. “Both of you. Now.”

“Warden.”

“I am not asking.”

Silas looked at me for a moment. Then he looked past me at Elias, and something in his face changed, and he said, “Mrs. Bell, the truck. Drive it to the road and keep the engine running.”

“The Council hired me to do a job,” Mrs. Bell said.

“And the Council will hire you again tomorrow,” Silas said. “Go.”

She went. She went with the rifle over her shoulder and her braid down her back, and I heard her boots on the stubble and then the truck door and then the engine.

Silas did not move.

“You should go too,” I said.

“I am not going to shoot him,” Silas said. “I do not even have a gun. I have a folder and a fountain pen and a very good memory, and I am going to stand on this side of the wall and watch, and then I am going to write down what I see, and in the morning I am going to decide what to do with it.” He opened his folder. “That is the most honest thing anyone in this county has said to you in weeks, I imagine.”

Elias cried out.

It was not a loud cry. It was a short one, bitten off, and then he doubled over in the stubble with his hands in the dirt, and his back arched, and the sound of his bones was a sound I had never heard before and have never been able to forget. It went on for a long time and then it stopped and there was a wolf lying in the wheat where he had been.

It was big. Bigger than any wolf I have ever seen, and pale, the color of wheat in the sun, and it got to its feet slowly and shook itself and turned its head and looked at me with amber eyes.

My wolf rolled over. She went down flat on her belly inside my chest and bared her throat, and I felt it in my knees, and I put my hand out.

The wolf came to me.

It came across the stubble slow and it stopped in front of me and it put its nose in my palm and breathed, and the heat came up my arm and into my chest and settled there, and the wolf made a sound in its throat that was almost a purr.

“That is not a rogue,” Silas said quietly. His pen was not moving. “That is a wolf that knows you.”

The wolf lifted its head and looked at Silas across the wall, and the fur along its back went up, and a growl started in its chest.

“Elias,” I said. “No.”

The wolf looked at me. The growl stopped. Then it turned and put its nose to the ground and made a sound I had heard before, a long low sound like a question, and it began to walk north.

“Where is it going?” Silas said.

“The trees,” I said.

“Is it going to the mill?”

The wolf stopped. It stood in the middle of the field with its head up and its ears forward, and it turned and looked back at me, and then it walked again, and this time it did not go north. It went east, along the stone wall, toward the place where the wall met the trees.

I followed it.

“Warden,” Silas called. “Warden, that is the east boundary. There is nothing over there but the old orchard.”

I did not answer him. I walked along the wall behind the wolf, and the wolf kept looking back at me, and when I got close it would go on, and we went along the wall to the trees, and under the trees the ground was soft and the moon came through the branches in pieces.

The wolf stopped at a place where the wall was broken down and the stones had fallen into a heap. It stood there and looked at the heap and then at me, and then it put its nose under a stone and pushed.

I crouched down. The stones in the heap were old and gray and the same as all the other stones in the wall, but under the one the wolf had moved there was a flat stone lying face up in the dirt, and there was a mark cut into it. It was a circle with a line through it, and there was another line crossing it, and it was worn almost away.

“Silas,” I said. My voice came out quiet. “Come here.”

He came. He came through the trees in his gray suit with his folder under his arm and he crouched down beside me and looked at the stone, and his pen finally moved.

“This is a boundary marker,” he said. “This is not in the Council records. The Council records say the founders’ boundary was six miles east of here.” He looked up at me. “Someone moved the boundary, warden. Someone moved it a long time ago, and someone put a false mark in the record, and the Council has been buying land based on a false map.”

The wolf sat down on its haunches beside me and put its head against my knee.

“He cannot speak,” I said. “Not when he is like this. He cannot tell us what he saw or where the curse takes him, and he cannot tell us anything at all until the moon goes down.” I looked at Silas. “But I can tell you that he changed when the moon came up, and the moon came up a minute ago, and that is not how the rest of us change.”

Silas was quiet for a moment. Then he closed his folder.

“No,” he said. “It is not.” He got to his feet and looked at the wolf and then at me. “I came to this territory to buy grain land. I am beginning to think I was sent here to buy something else. In the morning I would like to speak with you, warden. Privately. Before the pack meeting.”

“There is a pack meeting?”

“Dale called one at sundown.” Silas brushed the dirt off his knees. “He is going to ask the pack to name the rogue, and if no one names the rogue, he is going to name the person who has been hiding him.” He looked at me with his pale gray eyes. “I would think very carefully about what you say at that meeting, and I would think about who you say it to.”

He walked back toward the road, and I crouched in the dirt by the broken wall with the wolf’s head against my knee, and the wolf looked up at me with his amber eyes and made a low sound in his throat.

“It is all right,” I said. I put my hand on his head. “I will be at the meeting. I will figure something out.”

The wolf pressed against my hand, and my palm went warm, and I sat there under the trees with the moon in pieces above me and the stone in my pocket and the pack meeting four hours away.