Chapter 53: Elias Breaks the Door

Dale and Rourke went into the dead branches together and the men with the lanterns stood there with their rifles half raised and did not know what to do.

“Put them down,” I said. “Put the rifles down or I swear to God I will put this one through the first man who fires.”

They put them down. I do not know whether it was me or the rifle or the fact that their culling officer was rolling in the snow with the Beta of the pack, but they put them down.

June was holding her arm. The blood was coming through her fingers and it was not much but it was enough to make my stomach turn.

“Let me see,” I said.

“It is not deep.” She pulled her hand away. The sleeve of her coat was torn and there were four punctures in the skin under it, shallow and clean, and the blood was already slowing. “He grabbed me. He did not bite down. He wanted me to scream so that the wolf would come.”

“And you screamed.”

“I screamed.” She looked at me. “I am sorry.”

“Do not be sorry. Screaming was the right thing to do.” I pulled my scarf off and wrapped it around her arm and tied it. “Can you walk?”

“I can walk.”

“Then go. Up the ridge to Maeve's and do not stop and do not look back. Tell her what happened and tell her to put the stones in the truck.”

June looked at me.

“What about you?”

“I am going to get Elias.”

Elias was on the ground ten feet away with his coat half off and his shoulder bleeding through his shirt. He had shifted back. He was a man on his hands and knees in the snow and he was breathing hard.

“Can you stand?” I said.

“I can stand.” He got up slowly. “He bit down. I felt it go through.”

“I saw.”

“Where is June?”

“She is going up the ridge. She is all right. He did not bite down on her.”

Elias let out a breath.

“Then I am going to kill him,” he said.

“No.” I put my hand on his chest. “You are not. You are going to stand here and you are going to let Dale do what he is doing and then we are going to walk out of these trees and go up that ridge and get in the truck and drive to Boise.”

“He put his teeth in a nineteen year old girl.”

“He did. And if you kill him in these trees tonight, there will be a dead Council officer in this territory and the Council will have the pack by morning and the Alphas will never come. Do you understand me? If you kill him now, they win.”

Elias stood in the snow with his shoulder bleeding and his jaw tight and his amber eyes going from me to the two wolves in the branches.

“Fine,” he said.

Dale and Rourke came out of the branches. Dale had Rourke by the back of the neck and his arm was twisted up behind him and the gray wolf was on two legs again and he was naked and bleeding from a cut over his eye.

“He is done,” Dale said. “He is going to walk back to the pack house and he is going to sit in the room I sat in and he is going to stay there until the Alphas come.”

“The Alphas are not coming,” Rourke said. “The Council has already ruled. There is no hearing. There is no petition. There is a cull order and there is a wolf and there is a Gamma who has just fired a rifle at a Council officer.” He spat blood in the snow. “You have all signed your own warrants tonight.”

“Take him back,” Dale said to the men. “And if he opens his mouth again, put him in the tack room and lock the door.”

They took him. They took him down the north line with his hands behind his back and his feet bare in the snow and the lanterns went with them and the trees went dark.

Dale stood in the clearing with his coat torn and his face gray.

“You took your word back,” I said.

“I took my word back.” He looked at Elias. “How bad is the shoulder?”

“It will heal. He did not get the bone.”

“Then get out of these trees.” Dale picked up a rifle from the snow and held it out to me. “Go up the ridge and get the stones and get the truck and go. The road to Boise is open for about six hours. I am going to put every man I have on the north line and I am going to tell them the wolf is gone to the west. But at dawn Rourke's men will find out he is locked in the tack room and they will come looking for me, and when they find me I will not be able to hold them.”

“Dale,” I said.

“Do not thank me. I have not earned it.” He turned away. “There is a thing I did not tell you. Rourke had a paper with your name on it. It was in his coat. It said the Council has ruled that the Gamma of the Palouse Ridge pack is to be held until the Alphas meet and that the mill land is to be placed under Council administration until the claim is heard.” He looked back at me. “The mill land, Wren. Not the pack land. The mill land. The Council did not care about the claim and it did not care about me and it did not care about the curse. It wanted the east field and it wanted the mill and the whole thing was a land grab and I have been helping them do it for six years.”

He walked off into the trees.

We went up the ridge. June was at Maeve's with her arm wrapped and Maeve was putting things in a basket and Arthur Renn was at the table with the record in his lap and Hannah was standing in the doorway with her coat on. The stones were in the wooden box on the table and the box was closed and the clasp was fastened.

“The truck is at the back of the cottage,” Maeve said. “It is Harold's and it has half a tank and it will get you to the river road and no further. There is a can of gas in the back.”

“You are not coming,” I said.

“I am sixty-one years old and I have a bad knee and I have been the healer of this pack for thirty years. If I go to Boise I will slow you down and if I stay here I can keep this pack together while you are gone.” She put her hand on my face. “I have been waiting for this since I was nineteen years old and my mother gave me a tin box. I am not going to see the end of it in a truck on the river road. I am going to see it when you come back.”

I put my arms around her and held on.

We loaded the truck with the stones and the record and the letters and the petition and the box from the tack room and four blankets and a sack of bread and the can of gas. Hannah got in the back with the stones. Arthur Renn got in the front with the record on his knees. June got in beside him with her arm wrapped and her face set.

Elias was standing by the tailgate with his shirt off and Maeve's needle in his shoulder.

“Get in,” I said.

“Wren.” He did not move. “There is a thing I have to say to you before we get in that truck and drive three hundred miles.”

“Say it in the truck.”

“No.” He came and stood in front of me. “I have been keeping a thing from you for four months and I have been telling myself it was because I could not prove it and it was because the curse took the words out of my mouth. And that is true and it is not the whole of it.” He took a breath. “I knew your mother. Not in June. Not in the field. Before. Years before. She came to me in 1968 and she sat down beside me in a churchyard in Walla Walla and she told me what I was and what the curse would do to me and she told me to run east and not come back to this territory.” He looked at me. “And then she said, if you ever meet my daughter, tell her I am sorry.”

I stood in the snow with the truck running behind me and the whole county going white around us.

“You knew my mother,” I said.

“I knew your mother,” Elias said. “And I have been protecting you since the day I found out whose daughter you were, and I did not tell you because I did not know how to say it.” He put his hand out. “And there is more of it and it is worse and I am going to tell you the rest in the truck.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“Get in,” I said.