Chapter 15: My Wolf Rolls Over

The light was going by the time I got up the hill, and Maeve had the lamp on in the kitchen and the pie on the windowsill and the tin box open on the table.

I sat down across from her and she pushed a plate at me and I did not touch it.

“Before you show me anything,” I said, “tell me what happened in that field today. I have heard Silas’s version. I want yours.”

Maeve poured the tea. “I was not there. I was up here with a kettle and a bad knee and a very good view of the road.” She set the pot down. “But I saw the truck go out and I saw the truck come back, and I saw Dale get out of it at the pack house and walk to the barn, and he walked like a man who had won something. That is all I need to know about what happened in the field.”

“The stone is gone.”

“I heard.” She sat down. “Drink your tea.”

I drank it. It was the same bitter thing she had given me the night I came up the hill with my hand still warm from the mill, and it went down and warmed me through.

“Now,” Maeve said, and opened the box.

It was not much to look at. A bundle of letters tied with string. A photograph, brown at the edges. A page torn from a book, with handwriting on it in ink gone brown. A small cloth bag that clinked when she set it on the table.

“This is what I have been keeping,” she said. “I have been keeping it since 1954, when I was a girl of nineteen and my mother gave it to me on her deathbed and told me not to open it until I had to.” She tapped the letters. “These are from the archive in Boise. My mother worked there for two years as a copyist before she came back here, and she copied things she was not supposed to copy, and she brought the copies home.”

I picked up the photograph. It was a picture of a field with a low stone wall running along the bottom of it, and three children standing in the middle of the field with their arms around each other. Two girls and a boy. The girls had dark hair and the boy had hair so pale it was almost white in the sun.

“That is the east field,” I said.

“That is the east field in 1911,” Maeve said. “And those children are the last three of the founders’ line. The boy died in the war. The girl on the left married a man from Walla Walla and moved away. The girl on the right is my grandmother.”

I put the photograph down very carefully.

“Your grandmother.”

“My grandmother, and the grandmother of the woman who gave you that face and that hair and that stubborn chin.” Maeve looked at me steadily. “Your mother and I were sisters, Wren. You have known that since you were twelve and you have never once said it out loud in this kitchen.”

I had known. I had known since I was twelve and I found the photograph in my mother’s drawer and my mother sat me down and told me that Maeve was her sister and that we did not talk about it because there were things in this family that were better left where they were. I had never said it out loud to Maeve herself. I had never known how.

“I know,” I said.

“Good. Then you know that the founders’ line did not end in 1911. It came down through my grandmother and through my mother and through me, and it came down through your mother and into you and June.” She tapped the photograph. “The curse does not move through a family, Wren. It moves through a line. The founders stole a Luna from the old pack, and the old pack cursed the founders’ line, and the founders’ line is our line. Every generation, one of us carries it. The last one was a boy in 1948 who died at nineteen in a car on the Walla Walla road. Then there was a long gap. Then there was Owen.”

The kitchen was quiet. The lamp hissed.

“And now there is Elias,” I said.

“Now there is Elias.” Maeve picked up the page and turned it toward me. “This is the copy my mother made of the founders’ record. It is the page the Council has never let out of its sight, and it says what I told you. Two bloodlines, one claim, no cure. And under it, in a different hand, the line about the Luna coming home.” She put her finger on the ink. “I have read this page a hundred times in fifty years and I did not understand the last line until this summer. The old Alpha did not curse the founders because he hated them. He cursed them because his Luna was still alive when they took her, and he believed that if she ever came home, the curse would let go.”

“But she died in the mill.”

“That is the story.” Maeve looked at me. “That is the story everybody tells. But the old Alpha was not there when she died, and the founders were not there either, and the only one who was in that mill with her was a girl of fifteen who brought her water.” She picked up the small cloth bag and set it in front of me. “Open it.”

I opened it. Inside were three small stones, gray and smooth, each with a line in it like the stone Elias had carried for four months, and each one was warm.

“Those came from the east field,” Maeve said. “My mother dug them up in 1932 when the wall was rebuilt. They are pieces of the same stone. The old Alpha broke the stone into pieces when he cursed the founders and scattered them, and the founders spent eighty-five years collecting them, and the Council has most of them in a vault in Boise.” She looked at me. “The curse is not tied to one stone, Wren. It is tied to all of them. And as long as the Council has the pieces, the curse can be moved anywhere the Council wants.”

I sat with the three warm stones in my hand.

“So what do we do?”

Maeve sat back in her chair.

“We find out who took the stone from the east field,” she said. “And we find out what they mean to do with it. And before the new moon we find a way to take the curse off the man in the mill, because if we do not, he will be pulled to that stone wherever it is, and the person holding it will have a wolf on a chain and a pack on its knees.” She stood up and went to the window. “Go home, Wren. Sleep. Come up tomorrow after the co-op and we will look at the letters. They are dull reading but they are the only record of the Council’s business in this territory that has ever left Boise, and there may be a name in them we can use.”

I put the stones back in the bag and the bag in my pocket with the one Elias had given me, and I stood up.

“Maeve,” I said. “The girl of fifteen who brought her water. The one who was in the mill with the Luna.”

Maeve turned around.

“Do you know who she was?”

“I do not know her name,” Maeve said. “But I know she was the miller’s daughter, and I know she lived in this territory all her life, and I know she died in 1936 and is buried in the churchyard in town under a stone that says only her first name.” She looked at me. “I have been to that stone. It says Mary.”

I went down the hill in the dark with the bag of stones in my pocket, and I did not go home.

He was where I knew he would be, at the edge of the trees behind the co-op, and he came out of the dark slow and stopped at the edge of the yard, and I stopped too. I could feel him from ten feet away. I could feel my wolf press against my ribs and put her chin down and make that low sound.

“The stone is gone,” I said.

“I heard the trucks.” He came closer. “I have been in the trees all day. I heard the shovel and I heard the men and I heard the Alpha’s voice.”

“It is gone and the new moon is in eleven days, and if we do not find it before then, you will be pulled to it wherever it is.”

He stood in front of me in the dark with Owen’s coat on and his hands at his sides.

“I know,” he said.

“And there is something else.” I put my hand in my pocket and brought out the bag and opened it and showed him the three stones. “They are pieces of the boundary stone. Maeve has had them since 1954. They are warm.”

He looked at them. Then he looked at me, and his face in the dark had gone very still.

“Wren,” he said. “Put them away.”

“Why?”

“Because they are warm because you are holding them,” he said. “And because I can feel them from here, and I can feel you from here, and I have been in the trees all day telling myself that I am not going to do this, and I am running out of telling myself.”

I put the bag back in my pocket. My hands were not steady. My wolf was not steady.

“I have been fighting it,” I said.

“So have I.”

“I have been telling myself that it is the curse and the bond and the moon, and that it is not me, and that if I let it happen I will lose everything.” I looked up at him. “And I am tired of telling myself.”

He took one step closer. I could hear his breath.

“If you say no,” he said, “I will walk back into those trees and I will not come out until you call me.”

I reached out and took his hand.

The heat came up through my fingers and into my arm and into my chest and it did not frighten me this time. My wolf rolled over. She rolled all the way over and put her belly up and put her chin on her paws and gave herself up, and I let her. I let the whole thing come through me, the scent and the heat and the pull and the sound of his breathing, and I stood in the co-op yard in the dark with his hand in mine and I did not fight it.

“Do not walk into the trees,” I said.

He made a sound low in his throat. Then his other hand came up and cupped the back of my head, and his fingers went into my hair and pulled the tie loose, and my hair came down, and he looked at me with the amber of his eyes gone dark.

“You are sure,” he said.

“I am done being sure of nothing,” I said. “Kiss me.”

And he did.

It was not a gentle thing. He kissed me like a man who had been in the trees for four months, and I kissed him back like a woman who had been fighting her own wolf for a week, and my hands went up around his neck and his arm came around my waist and lifted me, and the yard spun. When he let me down I had my fingers in his coat and my forehead against his jaw and I could not get my breath.

“There is a room,” I said. “With a door that closes.”

He laughed, low, into my hair. “Lead the way.”

We did not make it to the room. The loading dock was right there and the door was open and the office was dark, and he lifted me onto the edge of the dock and I pulled him in by the coat, and my boots came off and hit the concrete, and his hands were on my back and my thighs and in my hair, and the night air was cold on my skin and he was warm everywhere he touched me.

“Wren,” he said against my throat.

“Do not stop.”

“I am not going to stop,” he said. “I am going to be very careful and I am going to be very slow and I am going to remember every second of this, because I have been dead for four months and you have just brought me back.”

The dock boards were hard under my back and the sky was full of stars and the smell of grain was all around us and his hands were on me, and my wolf rolled over and over and made a sound I had never heard her make, and I heard myself say his name out loud into the dark yard.

It was a long time before either of us said anything else.

Afterwards he lay beside me on the loading dock with his coat over both of us and his hand in my hair, and I watched the stars and listened to his heart, and the bag of stones was on the boards beside us, and all four of them were warm.

“There is a thing I have to tell you,” he said.

“Not tonight.”

“It is about your brother.”

I turned my head. His face was close to mine, and his eyes in the dark were steady.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Tonight I want to lie here and not think about my brother or the stone or the Council or the new moon. Tomorrow we will find whoever took the stone and we will take it back and we will break the curse and then I will listen to whatever you have to tell me.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“All right,” he said.

But there was something in his voice that I did not like, and I lay there on the loading dock with his arm around me and the four warm stones beside us, and I did not sleep for a long time.