Chapter 16: The Scar on His Back

I woke before the sun with my cheek on the boards of the loading dock and his coat over me and the cold in my bones.

He was sitting up beside me with his back against the office wall and his knees up, watching the east go gray. The coat was off his shoulders and draped over me, and his shirt was back on, and the bag of stones was in his hand.

"You should have woken me," I said.

"You were sleeping." He put the stones down. "I do not think you have slept properly in a week."

I sat up and pulled the coat around me. The yard was gray and the elevator was gray against a gray sky, and somewhere off to the west a rooster was doing its job badly.

"Give me the stones," I said.

He handed them over. They were warm in my palm, all four of them, and I put them back in the bag and the bag in my pocket.

"Now," I said. "Tell me the thing you did not want to tell me last night."

He did not answer right away. He looked out at the yard.

"It is about the night your brother died," he said. "I told you I found him in the field. I told you I tried to hold the wound shut. I told you that when the sun came up I had his scars."

"You did."

"That is not the whole of it." He turned to face me. "There is something I have not told you because I did not know how to say it without sounding like a madman, and because I was afraid you would think I was making excuses."

"Say it."

He pulled his shirt up over his head and turned his back to me.

The morning light was gray and flat and it came across the loading dock and lit him up, and I saw the scar on his left shoulder blade, the curved one I had seen that first night in the co-op. I had touched it. I had put my fingers on it and felt the heat come up through it into my arm.

But I had not seen the rest.

There was a second scar. It was low on his back, on the right side, and it was long and pale and straight, and it ran from his spine out toward his ribs. It was an old scar. It had healed years ago.

"Turn around," I said.

He turned. There was a third scar on his chest, high up near the collarbone, a small round one the size of a thumbprint.

"Those were not there before," he said. "The curved one I have had since I was nineteen, from the truck. That one is mine. The other two came on the night your brother died." He looked at me. "The long one on my back. And the one on my chest."

I stood up. My legs were cold and stiff and my hands were not steady.

"Owen had a scar on his chest," I said.

"I know."

"He got it when he was fourteen. He fell on a fence post in the north pasture and it went in under his collarbone and my mother sewed it up on the kitchen table with a needle and thread and a bottle of whiskey for him to bite on." My voice was very quiet. "It was a small round scar. It was in the exact place where you have yours."

Elias did not say anything.

"And the long one on your back," I said. "Owen had that too. He got it in the fall of 1974 when a bale came off the wagon and the wire caught him. It ran from his spine out toward his ribs and it was on the right side and it was as long as my hand."

He pulled his shirt down.

"I did not know what they were," he said. "When I woke up in the field I was lying next to your brother and I could not remember the night and I had blood on my hands and two new scars on my body. I did not know they were his. I only knew they were not mine."

"How did you find out?"

"I went back to the field every night for a week. The pack had taken the body. There was a sheriff's man there and there was a light in the field and men with a lantern. I stayed in the trees. On the fourth night I saw the brother's grave being dug at the churchyard in town, and there was a woman there with a stone, and she was crying." He looked down at his hands. "I did not know it was your mother. I did not know who anyone was. I only knew that the grave was the grave of the man I had failed, and that I was carrying his wounds, and that I could not go to the pack because the pack would kill me before I could say a word."

"The woman at the grave," I said. "What did she look like?"

"Dark hair," he said. "Short. A dark coat. She had a green scarf around her neck." He looked up. "Why?"

Because that was my mother's green scarf, and she wore it to the churchyard every week for four months after the funeral, and she wore it until the day she died in February. I did not say that. I sat down on the edge of the loading dock and put my hands over my face.

"Wren," he said.

"Give me a minute."

He gave me a minute. The rooster tried again and got it right this time and the sky went from gray to a thin yellow. I sat on the dock and breathed, and my wolf sat up in my chest and pressed her head against the inside of my ribs the way she does when I am hurting and she does not know what to do.

I took my hands away from my face.

"Two things," I said. "The first is that the scars are not the only thing you took from him. When the curse moves from one wolf to the next, it takes something. Maeve told me that. It takes a mark, and it takes a memory, and it takes a bit of the wolf. That is why you can remember his name. That is why you know what he said before he died. That is why you have been dreaming about a field you have never seen in your life." I looked up at him. "The curse put my brother's death into your body and it took his last minutes and gave them to you, and it is the only reason we know about the coat and the lantern and the man with the sandy hair."

Elias was very still.

"The second thing," I said, "is that a man who is wearing another man's scars does not get to keep secrets from that man's sister. So the next time you have a thing you do not want to tell me, tell me anyway. I do not care if you sound like a madman. I have been living in a county full of liars for twenty-six years and I would rather have a madman who tells the truth."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded, once.

"There is one more thing," he said.

"Of course there is."

"The long scar on my back is not where your brother's wire wound was." He pulled his shirt up again and turned and put his finger on the scar. "Your brother's wound ran from his spine out to his ribs. This one runs the other way. It starts at the ribs and it ends at the spine." He turned back around. "I did not notice it until I saw it in a mirror last week. It is backwards. The whole thing is backwards."

I looked at the scar. I looked at it for a long time.

"What does that mean?"

"I do not know," Elias said. "But it means something. Everything about this curse is backwards. The moon is backwards. The scars are backwards. I change when I should be human and I am human when I should be a wolf." He pulled the shirt down. "If the rest of it is backwards, then the way to break it is going to be backwards too."

I got up and put my boots on.

"Come on," I said. "We are going up the hill to Maeve's. She has letters from the Council archive from 1954 and a page from the founders' record and a photograph of the east field, and if we are going to find a backwards way to break a curse, we are going to start with the woman who has been keeping the pieces in a box for thirty years."

He stood up. Then he stopped.

"Wren," he said. "Someone is coming."

I turned. There was a sound on the road, a car, and it was coming fast.

I looked around the yard. There was nowhere to go. The office was open and the back room was open and the road was thirty feet away and a car coming up that road at that speed would see us both.

"Get behind the elevator," I said.

He went. He crossed the yard in four strides and went around the back of the grain elevator, and I sat down on the loading dock with the coat over my knees and my hair down and my boots untied just as Silas's car came up the co-op road and stopped in the yard.

He got out. He was not in his gray suit. He was in a dark jacket and his hair was not combed and there was a mark on his jaw that had not been there the day before.

"Warden," he said. "The stone is in the mill."

I stood up.