Chapter 28: My First Shift in Years

June drove us back to the co-op with the folder on the seat between us and Elias in the back with the coat around his shoulders, and none of us said much. The sun was up over the elevator by the time we pulled into the yard, and Harold was already there with the loading door open and a wagon of wheat backed up to the pit.

“Where have you been?” Harold said. “The co-op has been open for an hour.”

“Family thing,” June said, and Harold looked at the three of us and did not ask again.

We went into the office and shut the door and I put the folder on the desk and opened it and read the photostat of the letter from 1954 twice, and then the handwritten note underneath it, and then the letter from Margaret to her sister in 1891.

“Arthur Renn is coming,” June said. “He said he would come in October with the originals and stand in front of the Alphas and swear to them. He said he has been waiting for thirty years for someone to ask and he is not going to be late.”

“And Silas?” I said.

June shook her head. “I went as far as Walla Walla and there was no sign of him. I asked at the hotel and at the gas station and nobody had seen a black-haired man in a gray suit. I came back because I did not know what else to do.”

I sat down on the desk. My boots were wet from the moss and my hands still smelled of pine.

“Then we do not wait for Silas,” I said. “We have the record and the stones and the circle and the words, and we have a witness in Boise who will come when we call him. We hold the curse until October and then we go to the Council of Alphas and we make the claim.”

“And where do we hold it?” June said. “Dale has eleven of the stones and he has the pack house and the hunters and the Council. If we stay in this territory he will find us.”

“He will not find us in the clearing,” Elias said. “Nobody in this pack knows it exists. The trail is not on any map and the rogues will not come near the standing stone.”

June looked at me. “You want to live in the trees for a month.”

“I want to live,” I said.

She was quiet for a moment.

“Then I am coming with you,” she said. “And so is Maeve, and so is Clara Renn, because Clara Renn is seventy-nine years old and she has been waiting for this since she was a girl, and if you think I am going to leave her in that house at the end of the mill road while Dale searches the county, you have not been paying attention to your own sister.”

We went up to Maeve’s at noon and told her everything, and Maeve listened with her hands folded and then got up and started packing a basket. We went down to Clara Renn’s house and told her too, and Clara Renn sat in her chair by the table with her old hands in her lap and her eyes bright.

“I have been ready for this since 1932,” she said. “Give me ten minutes and my mother’s box and I will be ready again.”

We went into the clearing at dusk.

It took us two trips to carry everything. Blankets and bread and a sack of potatoes and the rifle from the co-op and a lantern and a can of kerosene and Maeve’s herb bag and Clara Renn’s wooden box and the folder from Arthur Renn wrapped in oilcloth. Elias carried the heaviest of it on his back and I carried the stones in a bag against my chest and June carried the hatchet and the rope and the two loaves of bread she had baked that morning.

The clearing was the same as it had been at dawn. The moss was deep and the trees were thick and the standing stone in the middle of it had the mark on it that was on the flat stone under the wall, and the air in it was still and cold.

Maeve walked around the edge of it with her lantern and stopped at the north side.

“There is a spring here,” she said. “Under the roots. It has not run dry in eighty-five years. That is why the old pack chose this place.”

We made camp. We put the blankets down on the moss and dug a fire pit in the lee of the stone and set the stones in a circle around the standing stone, all sixteen of them, and Maeve took the herbs and put them around the edge of the moss to keep the insects off. Clara Renn sat on a root with her mother’s box on her knees and watched us work.

When it was dark, Elias went to the edge of the clearing and sat down with his back against a tree to keep watch.

I went and sat beside him.

“You should sleep,” he said.

“I cannot.”

“You have not slept in two days.”

“I have slept. I slept on a loading dock and I slept in a cellar and I slept on the moss and every time I slept I woke up and remembered that there is a man in this county who wants me married to him and a Council that has signed the paper.” I pulled my knees up. “I cannot sleep. My wolf will not let me.”

He turned his head.

“What does she want?”

I looked at him. His face in the dark was close and his eyes were amber and the rope between us was tight.

“She wants out,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

“Then let her out.”

“Elias.”

“There is nobody here but the five of us and the stones. There is no pack and no Council and no Dale and no hunters. There is a clearing in the trees and a stone with a mark on it and a wolf who has been locked up for four years.” He put his hand on my knee. “Let her out, Wren.”

I got up and walked to the edge of the clearing and took off my jacket and my boots and put them on a root. Then I stood in the moss in my socks and looked at the trees and the firelight on the standing stone and the four people I loved most in the world.

Then I let go.

The first time I shifted I was fourteen and my mother was alive and I was so frightened I cried. The last time I shifted I was twenty-two and Owen was alive and I had gone into the trees behind the house where nobody could see and I had run for an hour and then I had gone home and never done it again.

This time it hurt less than I remembered and more than I wanted. The bones moved and the skin went hot and the ground came up, and I went down on my hands and my knees in the moss, and then my hands were paws and my knees were paws and I was on four legs in the clearing with the firelight on my fur and the smell of the trees in my nose.

I was smaller than Elias. My fur was the color of my hair, gold in the firelight, and my eyes in the stone were blue-green, and my wolf stood up in the clearing and shook herself and turned around and looked at me.

She was not angry. I had been afraid of that for four years. She was not angry. She put her nose in the air and breathed in the clearing and the trees and the smoke and the people, and she made a sound that was very close to a sigh.

Elias stood up. He did not shift. He came to me slow with his hand out and I went to him and put my head under his hand.

“There she is,” he said.

I ran.

I went out of the clearing at a dead run and into the trees, and the wind was in my face and the ground was soft and my paws were sure, and the rope between us was tight and easy and pulled me back toward him and I did not need it to know where he was. I could hear him behind me. I could smell him and hear him and feel him, and I ran until the clearing was far behind and the trees were strange and the stars were low.

He caught up with me at the stream and we ran along the bank together and I was faster than him on the turns and he was faster than me on the straight, and I found that out and it made me want to run faster.

We ran through the stream and up a bank and through a stand of birch trees that were white in the dark, and then I stopped and turned and he stopped too.

The world was different. It was the same world, but the smells were stronger and the sounds were sharper and the trees were full of small lives that I had never heard before. I could hear a fox on the ridge. I could hear an owl in the pines. I could hear the grain elevator humming two miles away at the co-op.

And I could feel him, in the middle of all of it, like a fire in the dark.

I walked up to him and put my nose against his shoulder.

He shifted.

It came on fast and it hurt him and I saw it all, the bones and the fur and the shape of the man coming up out of the wolf, and then he was kneeling on the bank with the water running past and his hand on his own chest and his breath coming hard.

“Wren,” he said.

I did not shift back. I could not, not yet. I was not ready to be a woman again. I put my head on his shoulder and he put his arms around my neck and held on.

“This is the first time I have run with anyone,” he said. “In my whole life. The first time I have run and not been afraid of what the moon would make me do.”

I made a sound in my throat.

“I know,” he said. He put his face in my fur. “I know.”

We went back to the clearing as the sky began to gray. I shifted back in the trees with his coat over my shoulders, and it hurt going back the way it always does, and when it was done I sat on the moss with my hands on my knees and my heart going.

Maeve was awake. She had the fire built up and a pot of something on it.

“Good,” she said. “The wolf is out of you. You will sleep now.”

I slept. I slept on the moss with the blankets over me and Elias on watch at the edge of the clearing, and I did not dream.

I woke to June shaking my shoulder.

“Wren,” she said. “Wren, wake up.”

I sat up. The fire was almost out and the sky through the trees was dark and there was a smell in the air that had not been there when I fell asleep.

Snow.

I put my hand out and felt it on the blanket. Small, hard flakes, the first of the year, coming down through the trees.

“It is too early,” I said.

“It is early and it is heavy,” June said. “And Wren. There is something else.”

She did not have to tell me. I could smell it. Even under the snow and the trees there was a smell that was not the forest, and my wolf stood up in my chest and her ears went back.

Silver.

“Where?” I said.

“In the east field,” June said. “I went down to the wall at first light to bring water and there is silver wire everywhere, strung across the field and through the gap in the wall. There is more of it than he had on the fence. It is a net.”

I got up.

“And the blood,” she said quietly. “There is blood on the wall. There is blood on the wall and a trail of it going into the trees, and there are boot prints in the snow and a rifle casing and a lantern, and Wren, I think someone else has been in the field tonight.”

Elias was standing at the edge of the clearing with the rifle in his hand.

“Dale was here,” he said. “He was in the field and he had the wire and he had the hunters, and something happened in the field last night that he did not plan for. There is blood on the wall and it is not his.”

“Whose is it?” I said.

“I do not know,” Elias said. “But there is a piece of green cloth on the wire by the gap in the wall. It is the same color as a scarf.”

He held it out to me. It was a scrap of green wool, torn at the edge, with a little dark stain on it.

The snow kept coming down through the trees.