Chapter 26: The Night of the New Moon

I put the bag of stones on the ground and stepped away from Elias and put my hands up where Mrs. Bell could see them.

“That is better,” Dale said. “Now. The bag. What is in it?”

“Stones.”

“Do not be clever with me, Wren. I have had a long week and I am not in the mood.” He came forward and picked up the bag and looked inside and his face changed. “Where did you get these?”

“They were in the mill.”

“The mill has been empty for years.”

“The mill has a cellar under the loft floor and the cellar has been there since 1891 and nobody in this pack has been inside it since the founders.” I kept my hands up. “The stones were in a box on a shelf along with a letter from Margaret and a photograph of the east field and the founders’ record. I have not touched the record. I have not read the record. I do not know what is in it. But I know what is in the bag.”

Dale looked at the bag in his hand. Then he looked at Elias.

“And you,” he said. “You have been in that cellar too.”

“I have,” Elias said.

“Then you have seen the record.”

“I have seen a box on a shelf.”

Dale’s jaw worked. He turned to Mrs. Bell.

“Take the wolf,” he said. “The Council has approved the cull. You have the order in the truck. Do it here and do it quiet.”

Mrs. Bell did not move.

“Beta,” she said, “the order says the rogue must be taken on the new moon in wolf form and in the act of threatening the territory. That is the wording. The Council was specific.”

“He is a rogue.”

“He is a man standing in a road with his hands at his sides and a Gamma beside him, and I have been a licensed hunter for eleven years and I have never shot a man standing in a road.” Mrs. Bell’s voice was flat. “I will take him on the new moon if he is a wolf and he is a threat. I will not shoot him now.”

Dale turned on her. “You are paid to do what you are told.”

“I am paid to hunt wolves,” Mrs. Bell said. “Not to murder a man in a road so a Beta can keep his land.”

The road was very quiet. Somewhere off in the trees a bird was doing its last call of the evening.

Dale looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled.

“Fine,” he said. “The new moon, then. The new moon is in four days.” He held up the bag of stones. “And I will keep these until then. Call it insurance. If the wolf wants his stones back, he can come and get them, and Mrs. Bell can do her job in the open where the Council can see it.” He turned and walked to the truck. “Four days, Wren. I will see you at the pack house on Friday and we will talk about the claim.”

He got in the truck and started it and drove off up the road with the bag of stones on the seat beside him.

Mrs. Bell did not go with him. She stood in the road with her rifle over her shoulder and watched the taillights go, and then she turned to me.

“Warden,” she said. “I have been in this county for three weeks and I have been lied to by your Beta every day of it. I do not know what is going on in this territory and I do not much care. But I know a man who is trying to get a woman killed when I see one, and I am not going to be the one who does it for him.” She shifted her rifle. “The new moon is on Friday night. I will be on the north line because the order says I have to be. But I will be on the far end of it, and I will be walking slow, and if a wolf runs past me I will not see it. Do you understand me?”

I looked at her.

“I understand you,” I said.

She nodded once and walked off down the road toward town.

Elias and I stood in the road in the last of the light.

“Four days,” I said. “He has the stones and he has the claim and he has the hunters and the Council.”

“He has the stones that were in the cellar,” Elias said. “He does not have the stones in your pocket.”

I put my hand in my jacket and touched the little bag of four that I had taken off the shelf before I ever opened the box, and the flat stone with the mark on it that Clara Renn had given me. They were warm under my fingers.

“He has eleven of them,” I said. “We have five.”

“Five is enough to hold the curse,” Elias said. “The stones do not work by number. They work by being together in the circle. Five is enough.”

“And what about the eleven he has? If he puts them in the circle before we get there?”

“He will not put them in the circle,” Elias said. “He does not know how. He thinks they are rocks with a value. He will put them in a box in the pack house and he will sell them to the Council in October.” He looked at me. “The stone is not magic, Wren. It is a marker. It is a thing the old pack made to hold the territory. It only works if a wolf of the old blood stands in the circle and claims it. Dale can carry those stones to Boise and hand them to the Alphas one by one and it will not matter a bit, because he is not of the old blood and he does not know the words.”

“And I am,” I said. “And I do not know the words either.”

“Then we had better find them,” Elias said. “Because on Friday night the moon comes and I change whether we are ready or not, and if the stones are in the pack house and I am in the field, the wolf is going to run for them.”

Four days went by faster than any four days of my life.

Silas was not back. June was not back. There had been no word from Boise and no word from the road and no word from anybody, and I went to the co-op every morning and worked the tickets and went up to Maeve’s every afternoon and sat in her kitchen with the letters spread out on the table.

We found the words on the third day.

They were in a letter from Ruth, Maeve’s mother, written in 1932, the year she rebuilt the wall. It was a letter to her sister and it was mostly about the weather and the price of flour, and then at the bottom there was a paragraph she had written in a hurry.

I have been to the circle. It is in the east field under the wall where the stones are broken down, and the mark is on the flat stone and the words are on the mark and I have copied them out. They are not in English and they are not in any language I know. They are the old tongue of the old pack, and my mother knew them, and she taught them to me, and I am going to teach them to you.

And then there were seven words, written in a hand that was not Ruth’s, in a language I had never seen.

I copied them out onto a piece of paper and put the paper in my pocket and did not show it to anybody but Elias and Maeve.

On Friday night the moon did not come up.

That is what it felt like. The sun went down and the sky went from gray to black and there was not a sliver of moon anywhere, and the stars were very bright, and I stood in the east field by the stone wall with Elias and Maeve and Clara Renn, and the four of us waited.

“It is coming,” Elias said. His voice was already changing. “I can feel it.”

“Get behind the wall,” I said. “Get down and stay down.”

He got behind the wall and I crouched beside him with my hand on his shoulder, and Maeve and Clara Renn stood at the far end of the wall with a lantern that they did not light.

And then the new moon rose, a thin dark sliver in the dark, and Elias changed.

I had seen it once before, in the field, and I had been frightened then. I was not frightened now. I watched the whole thing with my hand on his back, and I felt the bones move under my fingers and the skin go hot and the wolf come up out of him, and it took longer than it had in the field and it hurt him more, and he made a sound that was not a word and then he was a wolf.

He was big. He was bigger than he had been in the field, and his fur was the color of wheat in the sun and his eyes were amber and he turned his head and looked at me, and the rope between us pulled tight.

“Elias,” I said.

The wolf put its nose in my hand and breathed, and the heat came up my arm and into my chest, and the wolf turned and looked east toward the pack house and the bag of stones that was in a box in a room where Dale slept.

“No,” I said. “Do not run. Do not run for the stones.”

The wolf looked at me. Then it looked east again, and its ears went back, and it made a low sound in its throat.

“Wren,” Maeve said quietly. “Get back.”

The wolf turned and ran.

It ran east along the wall with its belly low and its tail out, and I got up and ran after it, and behind me I heard Maeve call my name and Clara Renn say something in a voice I did not hear, and I did not stop.

The wolf went through the gap in the wall and into the wheat and I went after it, and the stars were bright and the ground was hard and my boots were loud, and the rope between us pulled tight and I followed it.