Chapter 16: First Snow

Garrett stood with my sister in his arms and stared at the observer.

"Then we'll see you at the Cold Moon," he said.

He carried Lacey out through the kitchen door.

My mother held it open for them.

She didn't look up when I passed her on the way out.

The next night, Redmoor finished the ceremony behind closed doors.

Lacey posted the pictures at midnight.

Her in white, my pendant on her collarbone, the pack kneeling. A ring of candles.

Our Luna, finally, somebody commented.

On the Wednesday after, two of the observers drove to Redmoor to look at the greenhouse.

They found the back bed dug out to the gravel.

The soil was fresh and black and smelled of ash.

Lacey told them she'd had blight.

After that, nothing happened for two weeks.

I worked my shifts at the hospital and my days in the infirmary.

My stomach rounded out, and the Ironpine pups started asking if I'd swallowed a ball.

On the fourteenth of November, I woke up and the window was white.

The first snow had come in the night.

It lay six inches deep on the pack house roof, and it was still coming down, slow and fat.

Wyatt knocked on the infirmary door at nine.

"Walk," he said.

"The healer says I can't run."

"I said walk."

We went up the ridge behind the pack house on a deer trail.

He went first and broke the snow for me.

Every so often he stopped and waited without turning around, and I caught up.

At the top, the trees opened.

The whole valley was below us, gray and white.

The Sable River ran black through the middle of it.

On the far side I could see the Redmoor ridge, and the dark spot near the top where the Moon Stone was.

Wyatt stood looking at the river.

"There," he said.

He pointed at a bend downstream from the bridge, where the bank flattened out into a gravel bar.

"That's where my father died."

I didn't say anything.

"Redmoor came over at two in the morning. Twelve of them. My father went down to the bar with five men to turn them back."

He was quiet a moment.

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