Escaping the Arrogant Dark Moon Alpha novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Tamarack

Tobin walks off into the snow after hearing about the radio order, Marlow follows him down to his sister Ginny's bar for strays, and at moonrise the bond snaps back on and Roman texts that he knows where she is.

Tobin didn't say anything.

He just looked at me.

"He radioed me from the lodge," I said. "You'd closed the Crown. He wanted the Embrys to have it anyway. Their money was buying the new lift."

"I told him no. I told him you'd found a weak layer. He said, 'Pull it, Marlow.' In the voice."

I held up my hands.

They looked like somebody else's in the dash light.

"I was crying. I was telling them to stop. They untied every knot you tied."

"And then they came up the lift," Tobin said.

"And then they came up the lift."

The Embry party had skied right past me.

Portia had waved.

Twenty minutes later the slope broke above them and ran into the maintenance shack, where two men were changing a bullwheel bearing.

I'd eaten lunch with those men every day for six years.

"He told the pack your forecast failed," I said. "He put you in silver the next morning. And I said nothing for eight months."

"Why?"

"Because I was scared of him."

It was the truest thing I'd ever said out loud.

Tobin opened the cab door.

Cold air rushed in.

He climbed down into the snow in my parka and his cell shirt and walked away down the Idaho road.

I sat in the cat for one full minute, watching his shape get smaller between the trees.

Then I shut the engine off.

This was Roman's cat, and I'd driven it far enough.

I climbed down and left the keys in it and followed Tobin.

I walked fifty yards behind him all the way down.

He never told me to go away.

At the bottom of the pass the track came out onto a plowed forest road.

A county plow truck was idling at the turnaround with its yellow light spinning.

The driver rolled down his window and stared at us.

"You two come over the top?" he said.

"Yes," Tobin said.

"In December?"

"Yes."

He looked at my orange coveralls and Tobin's bare ankles and shook his head.

"Get in before you lose a foot."

We rode down into Larch Creek wedged together on the bench seat.

Tobin's shoulder pressed against mine, because there was no room for it not to.

He didn't move it away.

He let us off in front of a bar with a neon sign that said TAMARACK, half the letters dead.

The door was unlocked.

Inside it smelled like coffee, bacon and old beer.

Six or seven people sat at the long bar eating breakfast.

Every one of them was a wolf.

I could smell it on them, and they could smell it on me.

A tall woman with short copper hair and a bar towel over her shoulder turned around from the grill.

She saw Tobin and dropped the spatula.

"Toby," she said.

Then she came over the bar.

Not around it.

Over it, one hand on the wood, boots and all.

She grabbed her brother and held on, and he put his face in her hair and shook.

Nobody at the bar said a word.

When she finally let go, she held his wrists and looked at the silver burns.

Her face went hard.

"Who got you out?"

Tobin looked at me.

Ginny looked at me too.

"Marlow Sowell," she said. "The groomer."

"Hi, Ginny."

She'd been five years gone from Dark Moon, but I remembered her.

She'd been loud even at twenty.

She jerked her head at the kitchen door.

"Both of you. In the back."

She let the door swing shut behind us.

"Who pulled the rope, Toby?" she asked, without taking her eyes off me. "You've had all night with her. Did you ask?"

"I asked," Tobin said.

I didn't make him say it.

"I did," I said. "Roman ordered me on the radio, in the voice. I pulled it."

Ginny slapped me.

It was a good slap, open-handed and loud.

My head turned with it.

Out front, somebody's fork stopped scraping.

I turned back and looked at her.

"I know," I said. "Do it again if you want."

Her hand was still up.

She looked at it.

Then she looked at Tobin.

He hadn't moved to stop her.

He hadn't moved to help her either.

"She drove a cat up the pass in December with the Alpha firing shells at her," he said. "To get me out."

Ginny breathed in through her nose for a long time.

Then she put her hand down.

"There's a cot in the storeroom," she said to me. "And there's soup. Go sit."

I went back out and sat at the end of the bar.

Nobody asked what the noise had been.

She put a bowl of split pea soup in front of me, and a spoon, and a roll.

"Eat it," she said. "You look like a dead fish."

I ate it.

It was the best thing I'd eaten in my life.

At nine o'clock the moon came up somewhere behind the clouds, a thread too thin to see.

I felt it anyway.

The bond snapped back on under my ribs.

I gasped and grabbed the edge of the bar.

Far away to the east, past the pass, I felt Roman.

He was awake.

He was furious.

And he could feel exactly where I was.

My phone buzzed in my coverall pocket.

I took it out with numb fingers.

It was a text from Roman.

"Larch Creek. Cute."

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