All Chapters of The New Moon Mate: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

I got to the clearing an hour later by the long way round, through the trees and up the ridge and down the far side where the ground was rocky and the snow did not settle.The fire was out. The stones were in their circle around the standing stone and Maeve and Clara Renn were behind the stone with the blankets and the basket. Silas was sitting on a root with his bandaged arm in his lap and his face gray. June was at the edge of the clearing with the rifle.Elias was not there.“Where is he?” I said.“He went back for you,” June said. “He went back down the ridge twenty minutes ago and I could not stop him.”I turned around and went back to the edge of the clearing, and he came out of the trees before I got there, and he stopped when he saw me.“You are all right,” he said.“I am all right. He took the scarf and he let me go.” I put my hand on his arm. “But he is going to search the co-op. He said it in the field. He is going to search the co-op and the pack house and the barn and eve

We went to the mill at first light with the snow still coming down, and we went in through the trees from the north so that nobody on the mill road would see us.Elias had the lantern and the hatchet. I had Owen's knife, which June had stolen back out of Dale's coat pocket while Dale was talking to Maeve on the porch and which she had pressed into my hand without a word. It sat in my jacket against my ribs and it was cold.The mill was the same as it had been. The door hung open and the floor was swept by the wind and the grain chute ran up the wall like a scar."The false wall," I said. "You said there was a false wall behind the grain chute.""There is." Elias went to the chute and put his hand on the boards at the bottom of it. "I found it in June. I was sleeping in the loft and I heard a noise in the night and I came down and there was a draft coming through the boards. I pulled at them and they came away and there was a space behind them." He looked back at me. "I did not go in.

The man at the door was old and thin and he had a green coat and a green truck and a face like a walnut that had been left out in the sun.“I am Arthur Renn,” he said. “I am the archivist. I have come a long way and my hip is not what it was, and I would like to sit down.”We sat him down at Maeve’s table and gave him tea and he drank it in three swallows and put the cup down and looked around at all of us.“You are the Halloran girl,” he said to me. “Your sister came to see me. She has your mother’s chin.” He looked at Elias. “And you are the cursed one. I have read about you in a record that is eighty-five years old and I have been waiting a long time to meet you.”“You drove here,” Silas said. “From Boise. In this weather.”“I drove here from Boise in this weather because I received a telephone call from a Council investigator three days ago telling me the claim of blood had been refused and the territory was in trouble, and I decided that I was not going to wait for October.” Arth

I went to the door before anyone could stop me and opened it.Dale was standing on the step in his shirtsleeves with the snow on his shoulders and a lantern in his hand, and his face was gray and wet and his eyes were red.“Wren,” he said. His voice was not the voice he used at pack meetings. “I need to talk to you.”“You can talk to me from there.”“I am not going to do anything. I have no gun and no hunters and I walked up this hill alone.” He held up the lantern. “I am asking.”I looked at him for a long moment. The mark on my shoulder was warm and steady and it did not burn.“Come in,” I said. “But you say one wrong thing and you are out in the snow.”He came in. He stood in the middle of Maeve’s kitchen with the snow melting on his shoulders and he looked around at all of us and something in his face went out like a lamp.“Everybody is here,” he said. “The healer. The old woman from the mill road. The archivist from Boise. The investigator.” He looked at Elias and did not say any

I asked Harlan for three things.The first was a truck and a driver and the right to take the pack truck to Boise and back without a single wolf in this territory asking me why. The second was a letter in his hand and on the pack letterhead, signed and sealed, saying that the Alpha of the Palouse Ridge pack supported the claim of blood that the Gamma would file in front of the Council of Alphas on the tenth of October. The third was the pack house to himself for one afternoon while he went through every drawer and every cupboard in the Alpha's office and brought out every piece of Council paper he had ever signed and put it on the kitchen table so Silas could read it.He agreed to all three before I finished the third one.We went down the ridge together at first light with Mrs. Pike carrying her basket and Harlan carrying his hat, and we came into the pack house yard just as the sun was coming up over the barn roof. There were wolves in the yard. The Corrigan boys were there and the