Chapter 57: A Kiss in the Barn

The ford was passable.

Mrs. Bell went first and her truck went down the bank and into the water and the water came up to the running boards and did not come any higher, and she came up the far bank with her engine roaring and her wheels spinning and then she was on the road on the other side and her lights were flashing.

I went next. The water was cold and the truck came up the far bank slower than hers and for a moment I thought the wheels had gone through the ice at the edge and then the tires caught and we were up and on the road and the county line was behind us.

We drove until the sky was full light and the snow had stopped and the road was clear and dry in the middle, and then we came to a barn.

It was a big barn at the edge of a field with a tin roof and a hayloft and a door that had been left open, and it belonged to a farmer whose name was on a mailbox at the end of the lane, and the farmer was not home or the farmer was asleep and did not come out.

Mrs. Bell pulled in and stopped and got out and stretched her back and said, "We can stay here two hours. No more. The trucks are cold and the people in them are colder and if we push them any further they will break."

I got out. My hands were stiff on the wheel and my eyes were full of the road and my shoulder was aching where the mark was.

We put the trucks in the barn and shut the door and June and Hannah and Arthur Renn sat down on a bale of hay with the blankets around them and Mrs. Bell got out a thermos and poured coffee into the lid and passed it around. Dale sat in the corner of the barn with his back against a post and his coat around him and did not say anything.

Elias went up the ladder to the hayloft.

I followed him.

The loft was warm from the hay and the light came in through the cracks in the boards in long thin lines, and there was dust in the air and the smell of hay and old wood. He had his coat off and his shirt off and he was sitting on a bale with his back to me and the stitches in his shoulder were red at the edges.

"Let me see," I said.

"It is fine."

"Let me see."

He let me see. The wound was a clean bite, four punctures in the muscle, and the stitches were holding and the skin around it was hot and swollen but not angry. I put my hand on it and the mark on my shoulder went warm and he let out a breath.

"It will heal," I said. "You heal faster than a man."

"I heal faster than a man and slower than a wolf." He turned around. "Wren. About your mother. About the churchyard. I should have told you before the field and before the mark and before any of it."

"You should have." I sat down on the bale beside him. "And if you had told me before the field, I would have thought you were lying. I would have thought you were trying to get close to me because of the land." I looked at him. "I have spent a week learning that everyone in this county has been lying to me, and the only thing that has kept me going is that I could feel you through the mark and the mark did not burn. So do not tell me what you should have done. Tell me what she said. My mother. Tell me everything she said to you in that churchyard."

He was quiet for a moment.

"She had your chin," he said. "And your way of standing. She stood in front of that bench and she did not sit down and she looked at me for a long time and then she said, you have the curse on you and I can smell it." He put his hands on his knees. "She said the curse came down through her line and it took her son in 1948 and it would take her son in 1975. She said she had written to the Council and the Council had told her to be quiet. She said she had a daughter who was four years old and a son who was two and she was going to keep them out of the pack records and out of the Council's file for as long as she could."

"She had a daughter who was four," I said. "That was me."

"That was you." He looked at me. "She said, if I go to the Council again they will drive me out and my children will be rogues. If I do not go, the curse will take my son and it will take his children after him. And I said, what will you do. And she said, I will do the only thing a mother can do. I will keep them alive and I will teach them to keep themselves alive and I will hope that one of them is stronger than I was."

I sat in the loft with the dust in the light and the hay under me and my hands in my lap.

"She was trying to keep me alive," I said.

"She was trying to keep you alive."

"And she never told me. She never told me about the curse or the Luna or the Council. She let me walk the fence line and find the bodies and go to the pack meetings and never said a word."

"She was afraid," Elias said. "Afraid of the Council and afraid of what you would do if you knew. She was afraid you would go to the Alphas the way she did and the Council would drive you out and you would be a rogue at fourteen years old with a curse on your back."

I turned and looked at him.

"I am angry at her," I said. "I have been angry at her since the day she died and I did not know why. She was sick for a year and she did not tell us and then she was gone and I was nineteen years old with a brother and a sister and a house and a co-op job and no idea what my mother had been carrying." I put my hand on my chest. "And now I know and I am still angry at her and I do not know what to do with it."

He put his hand on my face.

"You do not have to do anything with it," he said. "You can be angry at her and you can love her at the same time. I have been angry at my mother for thirty years and I still sing the songs she taught me."

I put my hand over his.

"I am going to be angry at her for a while," I said.

"That is allowed."

"And I am going to be angry at you for not telling me."

"That is allowed too." He leaned his forehead against mine. "I am not going anywhere. You can be angry at me for as long as you want and I will still be here."

I kissed him.

It started as a small thing, a kiss in a hayloft with the dust in the light and the barn quiet, and then his hand went into my hair and pulled the tie loose and my hair came down and he made a sound in his throat that made the mark on my shoulder burn.

"Wren," he said against my mouth.

"Shut up."

"Your sister is down there."

"She is drinking coffee with Mrs. Bell and Arthur Renn. She is not coming up a ladder."

He laughed, low, and then he was not laughing, and his hands were on my back and my shirt and my hair, and I put my arms around his neck and pulled him down into the hay.

It was not the mill and it was not the loading dock. It was fast and it was quiet and it was two people who might die on the road to Boise and knew it, and there was dust in the air and hay in my hair and his mouth on my throat and my hands on his back and the scars under my fingers. He put his hand over my mouth when I made a sound and I bit his palm and he laughed into my shoulder and then he stopped laughing and the barn was very quiet.

Afterwards we lay in the hay with the blanket over us and the light coming through the cracks in the boards.

"Three days to Boise," he said.

"Three days if the truck holds."

"And then?"

"And then we stand in front of the Alphas and we tell them the truth and they decide." I put my head on his chest. "And then we come home and we go to the circle at the new moon and we break the curse."

"You and Hannah and Arthur Renn."

"Three Lunas in the circle." I looked up at him. "I have been thinking about it. The founders' record says the old Alpha said the Luna carries the cure. It does not say the Luna takes the curse. That is what Erik said and Erik is a liar and a murderer and he has been lying to this territory for eighty-eight years. So I am not going to trust his version of the cure."

"Then what is the cure?"

"I do not know," I said. "But I know that three Lunas in a circle is the first thing in this whole county that has not come from the Council or the founders or a man with something to hide. It came from Hannah's mother and it came from Clara Renn's mother and it came down through the women of the Luna's line." I put my hand on his chest. "And I am going to trust the women."

He kissed the top of my head.

"Then I will trust the women," he said.

There was a noise below us. The barn door opening and a voice calling up.

"Wren," June called. "Wren, there is a car on the road. It has stopped at the mailbox and there is a man getting out of it and he is wearing a gray suit."

I sat up.

I got my shirt on and went down the ladder.

Silas was standing in the barn door with the light behind him and his arm out of the sling and his face gray and his folder under his arm.

"Warden," he said. "I have been following you since the river road. I have a thing to tell you and it is not good and I would like to say it before Rourke's men get here."

"Say it."

Silas opened his folder.

"The Council has offered you a deal," he said. "It came through the wire this morning and it came from Boise. It says if you hand over the wolf and sign the mill land to the Council, the Council will drop the warrant for treason and the cull order and the claim and everything else. It says you and your sister and the archivist and Hannah will be free to go." He closed the folder. "And it says if you do not, the Council will declare the Palouse Ridge pack rogue and every wolf in it will be fair game for any hunter in the territory."

I stood in the barn door and looked at him.

"The Council sent this to you?" I said.

"The Council sent it to me," Silas said. "And the Council sent it to me because the Council thinks I am still their investigator." He put the folder away. "They do not know I have stopped being their investigator. They think I am here to bring you in."