All Chapters of The New Moon Mate: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I woke up in the dirt with a headache like a horseshoe nail driven into the back of my skull and a naked man lying half across my legs.The first thing I did was reach for the fence post. The second thing I did was get my boot under his shoulder and push him off me, hard, and roll away into the wheat, and I came up on my knees with my knife out and my wolf already halfway through my skin. She wanted out. She wanted out badly, and she was not making any noise about it.He did not move.I stayed on my knees in the wheat with the knife in my hand and my breath going hard, and I looked at him. He was face down in the dirt, and he was tall; even lying flat I could see he was longer than the fence posts, and his back was broad and pale in the dark. He was barefoot. He had no clothes on at all. His hair was the color of wheat when it has been standing too long in the sun, and there was grain in it. Actual grain. I could see the little pale kernels caught in the strands above his ear.I waite

The pack house porch was full by seven, and half the pack was standing in the yard because there were not enough chairs.I got there early and took a place by the rail with June on one side of me and Harlan's old dog on the other, and I watched everyone come in. The Corrigan brothers came together, as they always did, and old Mrs. Pike came with a pie she had made for the meeting and then set down on the step where anyone could take a slice, and the young border-wardens came in a clump with their hair still wet from washing. It could have been any meeting from any year of my life. The same porch, the same faces, the same smell of coffee and cut grass.Dale came out last, with the hunters.There were two of them, a man and a woman, and they did not look like hunters. The man was thick through the shoulders with a gray beard and a canvas jacket, and the woman was younger and had her hair in a braid down her back and a rifle case over her shoulder that she did not put down when she sat.

Dale walked me back to the road with the coil of silver wire over his shoulder, and he talked the whole way about the hunters and the weather and how good the wheat was going to be this year, and I answered him in the right places and did not look at the fence.At the road he said, "You should sleep. You have a long walk tomorrow.""I will sleep when the line is walked," I said.He smiled and put the wire in the back of his truck and drove off with his headlights sweeping the wheat, and I stood in the road and watched until the taillights were gone. Then I went the other way, up the hill toward the healer's cottage, because I was not going home and I was not going to sleep.Maeve's cottage sits at the top of the ridge where the trees start, with a tin roof and a porch that leans and a chimney that smokes all year round. She has lived there since before I was born. She is the pack healer, and she has silver hair she cuts herself with sewing scissors, and dark eyes that see everything,

The headlights swept across the mill door and I dropped flat behind the grain chute, and Elias was gone before I had my knees under me. There was the sound of boots on the floor above, quick and light, and then nothing.The truck came down the mill road slow and stopped outside. I heard the engine idle and a door open and boots on gravel, and then a voice, Mrs. Bell's, flat and unhurried."Light's not on in there. Nothing moving.""Check the door anyway," Mr. Hask said.I pressed myself into the gap between the chute and the wall and put my hand over my mouth and breathed through my nose. My wolf had gone quiet, the way a wolf goes quiet in a hedge when the dogs come past. The mill floor was cold under my knees and the dust in it was old and fine.The boots came up to the door and stopped. A flashlight came on and moved across the floor, slow, left to right, and then up over the beams and across the loft floor."That ladder's new," Mrs. Bell said."It's an old ladder," said Mr. Hask.

The rifle came up and I stepped in front of Elias and put both my hands out.“Do not shoot,” I said. “Do not shoot, Mrs. Bell. He is not going to hurt anyone.”“Warden, get away from the wolf,” Mrs. Bell said. Her voice was flat and calm and the rifle did not move. “Step to your left and put your hands where I can see them.”“He is not a wolf right now.”“He is about to be. I have seen the change before, and I know what it looks like when it starts, and I am telling you for the last time to step away.”Behind me Elias made a sound that was not a word. I felt his hand leave mine. I felt the heat go out of my fingers and the cold come in, and then I heard him drop to his knees in the stubble.“He is sick,” I said. “He is sick and he is not armed and he has not hurt anyone, and if you shoot him in this field tonight I will spend the rest of my life making sure the Council knows a licensed hunter shot an unarmed man on pack land without a cull order.”Silas had not moved. He stood on the