Home / Werewolf / The New Moon Mate / Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

All Chapters of The New Moon Mate: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

200 Chapters

Chapter 21: The Fence Line

I did not say anything at the dinner table.I sat there with my pie and my glass of cider and my hands in my lap and I let Dale tell his lie to the whole pack and I watched the faces around the table while he did it. Mrs. Pike nodded. The Corrigan boys did not look up from their plates. Harlan looked at his plate too, and his jaw was tight, and he did not say a word.June found my knee under the table and squeezed it. I put my hand over hers and held on.Silas ate his pie and asked about the wheat and laughed at Mrs. Pike's story about her hen, and when the plates were cleared he shook hands all around and thanked Harlan for his hospitality and said he would be at the trailer if anyone needed him. He went out onto the porch and down the steps and into the dark, and Dale walked him out, and the two of them stood by the car for a minute with their heads close together.I watched them from the window. Then I went and found June."We are leaving," I said."Now?""Now. Get your coat."We w

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

Chapter 22: Elias Tells Half the Truth

June went home. I made her promise to lock the door and not to open it for anyone but me, and she promised, and she went up the co-op road with the moon on her back and her hands in her pockets.I sat down on the loading dock next to Elias with the coil of silver wire between us.“Tell me,” I said.He put the rifle down against the office wall and folded his hands.“The curse came from the founders,” he said. “I have known that since April. What I did not know until this summer was what it costs to take it off.”“And what does it cost?”“A place,” he said. “It is what the old Alpha said when he cursed them. He said the founders would have the land but never the heart of it, and that the wolf who carried the curse would carry it until a wolf of the Luna’s blood stood in the circle and took the founders’ place in the pack.”I sat with that for a moment.“Took the founders’ place,” I said. “What does that mean?”“It means that the curse is tied to the land and to the pack that holds it,”

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

Chapter 23: The Healer's Warning

Silas drove us up to Maeve's in his car with Elias in the back seat and the coil of silver wire on the floor between his feet, and nobody said anything for the whole ride.Maeve was awake. She opened the door before I knocked and looked at the three of us on her porch and stepped back without a word.We sat down at the kitchen table. Silas put the silver wire on it. I told Maeve about the fence line and the lantern and the wire strung low in the grass, and about the hearing that had been moved to the twenty-ninth.Maeve listened with her hands folded and her dark eyes going from my face to Elias's and back.Then she got up and went to the tin box and took out the photograph and put it on the table in front of me.“You have seen this,” she said. “Look at it again.”It was the picture of the east field in 1911 with the three children standing in the middle of it. I looked at it for a while, and then I looked at the woman standing behind them at the edge of the frame with her hands on th

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

Chapter 24: Dale's Threat

Silas left for Boise at four in the morning.I walked him to his car with the sky still dark and the stars out over the ridge, and he put his bag in the back seat and stood by the door with his hat in his hand."The hearing is on the twenty-ninth," he said. "I will be back before the new moon if I can. If I am not back, you go to the stones anyway. The stones will hold the curse and the wolf will change and come back, and that is better than the alternative." He looked at me. "And warden. If Dale comes to you before I return, do not lie to him. He is better at lying than you are and he will know.""I will keep my face still.""Keep your face still and keep your sister close." He put his hat on. "There is one more thing. The archivist in Boise is a man named Arthur Renn, and he is sixty-one years old, and he has been the archivist for thirty years. If Clara Renn's mother sent the Luna east and the Luna had a family, Arthur Renn may know where that family is. He may be the only person i

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

Chapter 25: The First Kiss

The mill was the same as it had been the night I first stood in its doorway, and it was different, because this time I walked into it with my eyes open.Elias went in first and I followed with the lantern I had brought from the co-op, and the light went up the walls and across the beams and into the corners. There was the grain chute. There was the ladder to the loft. There was the broken loading door and the floor that had been swept clean by a man who had been living there for four months.“Where was the stone?” I said.“Under the floor of the loft.” He pointed up. “There is a trapdoor by the chimney. The boards are loose.”I climbed the ladder with the lantern hooked on my arm. The loft was low and dusty and there was a blanket in the corner and a tin cup and a book with no cover. The trapdoor was where he said it was, and I lifted it and looked down into a dark space between the loft floor and the ground floor, and the smell that came up out of it was old and cold and not like gra

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

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.“

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

Chapter 27: The Wolf in the Field

I ran.The wheat was chest high in the east field and it whipped at my arms and my face, and the ground under it was dry and rutted and I stumbled twice and got up both times and kept going. Ahead of me the pale fur was a shape in the dark that I could follow, and the rope between us pulled tight and pulled harder every time the wolf pulled away.He was not running for the pack house.He went east along the wall and then he turned north, into the trees at the corner of the field, and I stopped at the edge of the trees and listened. There was nothing. The wheat behind me was loud with my own passing and then it was quiet, and the trees in front of me were black and still."Elias," I said.A branch moved. Then the wolf came out of the dark and stood in front of me with its head low and its tail down and its amber eyes on my face, and it made a sound that was not a growl."You are not going to the stones," I said.The wolf turned its head and looked north, into the trees, and then it loo

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

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 shoo

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

Chapter 29: Blood on the Snow

We went down to the wall before the sun was properly up, and the snow came down through the trees all the way and lay in the stubble of the east field in a thin white skin that showed every mark on the ground.The field was a mess.Silver wire ran across it in lines, strung between stakes that had been driven into the hard ground, and the wire was not the thin stuff Dale had put on the fence. It was braided, heavier, the kind that hunters use when they want a wolf to hit it and stay hit. There were four runs of it, and they crossed each other, and the whole east end of the field was a net.“He has been busy,” Elias said.“He has had help,” I said. “It would take one man a week to string this.”The blood was on the wall.It started at the gap where the stones had fallen down and it ran along the top of the wall for maybe twenty feet, dark and frozen and thin, and then it dropped down on the far side and went into the trees in spots and smears.June was standing at the gap with her arms

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

Chapter 30: The Cull Begins

I sat down at the table across from Silas and put my hands flat on the wood.“Tell me everything,” I said. “From Tuesday.”Silas took a breath. “I got to Boise on Saturday and I went to the archive on Monday morning and I found Arthur Renn. He had already spoken to your sister. He gave me the copy of the founders’ record and he told me he would come in October with the originals and testify. On Monday afternoon I went to the Council building to file a notice of a claim of blood, and a clerk looked at it and told me to wait, and I waited for two hours, and then a man I did not know came down and told me the filing had been refused.”“Refused on what grounds?”“On the grounds that a claim of blood can only be filed by a wolf of the wronged bloodline,” Silas said. “I am not one. The only person who can file it is you, or someone with your written authority, and the Council would not accept my word that you had given it. So I got back in my car and I started driving west.” He shifted in t

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

1 2 3 4 5 6

...

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP