My Mate Cut My Brand Off, So the Outcast Wolf Claimed Me novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Reimer Sickness

I woke alone in his bed with his shirt folded on the pillow beside me.

The room was gray with early light, and my left wrist lay on the quilt with the bandana gone.

The cut had closed overnight into a thin white line.

Across it, faint and silver, lay the shape of a new moon.

I rubbed it with my thumb and it did not smudge.

It was warm.

I found Rod in the kitchen in his socks, cracking eggs into a skillet, with the dog pressed against his shin.

The table where he'd had his mouth on me the night before was bare except for a coffee cup and a salt shaker.

He had pushed the feed catalogs into a neat pile.

"Coffee's on," he said without turning around.

I poured a cup and sat down.

I had my sleeve pulled over the mark, and I was not sure when I'd decided to do that.

He set a plate in front of me, eggs and toast and fried potatoes, and took the chair across the table.

He didn't eat.

"You need to know what it is," he said.

"Tell me," I said.

"You won't like it."

"I haven't liked anything since yesterday at noon. Tell me."

He looked at his hands.

"In 1962 my grandfather was nineteen," he said.

"He danced with a Reinholt girl at the Rendezvous. Einar's father's sister."

He turned his cup on the table.

"In front of the whole valley the marks came up on both their wrists. Silver. No iron. Nobody called it."

"Rose on their own," I said.

"That's what the old people say. The rising."

"And?" I said.

"Her father shot one of our calves the next morning, and my family cut his fence.

"By the end of the week two men were dead."

He said it flat, with no weight on any word, because he had been taught it as a boy.

"The valley decided it was a sickness. A Reimer sickness. Something in our blood that gets into a person and drags them down."

"Drags them how?"

"Ties them. Wrecks them. The girl was sent to a sanatorium in Casper and never came back.

"My grandfather lost a leg in the fence war.

"He died on that bench without ever being let into a pack hall again."

His eyes came up.

"No mark has risen since. Not once, in sixty years.

"That's why they keep us off the Book. They say it's ours, like a bad hip."

I ate a bite of egg and looked at the window.

Out past the barn the hay meadows were green with the first growth, and mist was coming off the river.

"It's a rash," I said.

"Marit," he said.

"It's warm and it doesn't hurt. Do I look like I'm dying?"

"That isn't how it works," he said.

"Then how does it work?" I said.

"I don't know," he said, and it was the first time I'd heard him sound afraid.

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