Chapter 25: The First Kiss

The mill was the same as it had been the night I first stood in its doorway, and it was different, because this time I walked into it with my eyes open.

Elias went in first and I followed with the lantern I had brought from the co-op, and the light went up the walls and across the beams and into the corners. There was the grain chute. There was the ladder to the loft. There was the broken loading door and the floor that had been swept clean by a man who had been living there for four months.

“Where was the stone?” I said.

“Under the floor of the loft.” He pointed up. “There is a trapdoor by the chimney. The boards are loose.”

I climbed the ladder with the lantern hooked on my arm. The loft was low and dusty and there was a blanket in the corner and a tin cup and a book with no cover. The trapdoor was where he said it was, and I lifted it and looked down into a dark space between the loft floor and the ground floor, and the smell that came up out of it was old and cold and not like grain at all.

“Give me the lantern,” Elias said, and I passed it down and climbed down after him, and we stood in the dark space under the loft floor with the lantern between us.

It was not a space. It was a room.

It had a floor of packed earth and walls of stone, and there was a wooden bench along one wall and a shelf above it, and on the shelf there was a box and a stack of paper tied with string and a small tin of what looked like pencils. The air was dry and cold and it had the smell of a place that has been closed for a very long time.

“This was here the whole time,” Elias said. “I slept above it for four months and I did not know.”

I picked up the box. It was wood and it had a brass clasp and the clasp came open in my hand, and inside there were letters, folded small, and a photograph, and a little cloth bag that clinked.

I opened the bag and poured it into my palm. There were four stones in it, gray and smooth, each with a line in it, and they were warm.

“Elias,” I said. “These are the four the Council has.”

He came and looked. He picked one up and turned it over and put it down again.

“Then the Council does not have them,” he said. “They have been here all along.”

I put the stones back in the bag and the bag in my pocket, and I unfolded one of the letters. The hand was small and neat and it was dated 1891.

“It is from Margaret,” I said. “The founders’ wife. She wrote it to her sister in the east.”

I read it aloud in the lantern light. It was a long letter and it was about the weather and the house and the wheat, and then at the end there was a paragraph that was written in a different ink, in a hand that was faster and less careful.

I will not write about the woman in the mill. I have been told not to write about her and I will not. But I will say this to you, sister, and then I will not say it again. She was not what they said she was. She was not an animal and she was not a thief. She was a woman who had been wronged, and I was in the room when they brought her out of the cellar, and I saw her face, and I have not slept well since. The man who took her away in the wagon had kind hands. I hope she is alive. I hope she is somewhere with a garden and a door that locks. I have put the record in a safe place. If I die before it is found, tell them Margaret did what she could.

I folded the letter.

“She helped her,” I said. “Margaret helped the Luna get away.”

“She did,” Elias said. “And she hid the record and the stones in this room and told her sister, and her sister told someone, and somewhere down the line it came to Clara Renn’s mother.” He looked around at the stone walls. “This is where it started. This is where the founders held her. This is the cellar my mother’s mother was brought to when she was fifteen, and it is the cellar where she pulled a drowning woman out of the water and hid her for three days.”

I sat down on the bench. My hands were cold and my heart was going.

“Twelve days,” I said. “Twelve days until the new moon and I am sitting in the founders’ cellar with a bag of warm stones and a letter from a woman who has been dead for sixty years.”

Elias sat down beside me.

“It is more than we had this morning,” he said.

“It is.” I looked at him. “And it is not enough.”

He did not say anything. He was close to me on the bench and the lantern was low and his face in the light was tired and steady and very near.

“I have been thinking about the new moon,” he said. “I have been thinking that if the stones are here and the circle is in the east field, then the thing to do is to bring the stones to the circle and let the wolf run to them and then bring them back before anyone sees.”

“And if Dale is waiting at the circle?”

“Then I will run the other way and he will have to catch me.”

“And if he catches you?”

Elias looked at the lantern.

“Then I will not be the first wolf this county has buried in a closed casket,” he said.

I turned and took his face in both my hands and kissed him.

I did not plan it. I did not decide it. I had spent twelve days telling myself that the heat in my hands was the bond and the bond was a thing the moon had done to me and not a thing I had chosen, and I had been lying to myself, and I knew it, and the knowing came up all at once and it came out of me as a kiss.

He made a sound against my mouth and then his hands came up and he pulled me in and kissed me back, and the lantern went over on the bench and did not go out, and the light went up the stone walls and the two of us were in it.

The heat came up through my hands and into my chest and it did not stop there. It went down into my belly and out into my legs and my wolf rolled over and put her head back and howled, a long silent howl that went through me and into him, and I felt his wolf answer it, and I felt the two of them meet somewhere between us.

The mate bond snapped into place.

I had heard about it. Every wolf has heard about it. Maeve had told me once that it was like a door opening in a house you had lived in all your life and never known was there. It was not like that. It was like standing in a room and having the walls fall down and finding out that the room was the whole world.

I could feel him. Not his thoughts, not his words. His warmth, and his fear, and the place in his chest where the curse sat, and the way his heart was going too fast. I could feel the pull of him toward me like a rope tied to my ribs, and I knew, the way you know the sun is up, that if he walked out of that cellar and kept walking, I would feel the rope stretch and I would feel it all the way across the county.

He pulled back. His hands were still on my face and his eyes were wide and dark.

“Wren,” he said. His voice was hoarse.

“I know.”

“Do you feel that?”

“I feel it.”

He let go of me and got up and walked to the other side of the cellar and put his hand on the stone wall.

“This is not what I wanted,” he said. “I did not want this for you. I have been telling myself for four months that I would come to this territory and I would find the sister and I would tell her the truth and then I would go, and she would have her pack and her place and her life.” He turned around. “And now I can feel you across a room and you can feel me and there is a rope between us that neither of us put there and it is going to pull us both apart.”

I stood up.

“Do you want it gone?” I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

“No,” he said.

“Then stop talking about going.”

He came back across the cellar. He took my face in his hands again, and this time he kissed me slow, and the pull came up through my chest and into my throat and I put my arms around his neck and held on.

“Twelve days,” he said against my mouth. “Twelve days and then the moon comes and I change, and I do not know what the wolf will do now that the bond is there.”

“Then we will find out together,” I said.

He laughed, low and short. “You keep saying things like that.”

“I keep meaning them.”

He kissed me again, and the lantern burned down, and in the dark cellar under the mill we did not think about Dale or the Council or the claim or the new moon for a long time.

We came out of the mill at dusk with the bag of stones and the letters and the photograph, and I pulled the trapdoor shut behind us and covered it with the boards, and we went down the ladder and out into the gray evening.

And then I saw the truck.

It was parked at the end of the mill road with its lights off, and Dale was standing beside it with his arms folded and Mrs. Bell beside him with her rifle over her shoulder.

“Wren,” Dale said. “I thought I told you to think about which side you wanted to be on.”

Mrs. Bell lifted the rifle.

“And I thought I told you to stay away from this mill,” Dale said. “Now put down the bag and step away from the wolf, and we will have a talk about what happens to Gammas who hide rogues.”