The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 28 of 32

Chapter 28: Not Yet

I looked at the page.

Holloran, Holloran, Holloran, a hundred years of them.

Every Luna with her name beside her Alpha's, in ink gone brown.

Then the line for me.

Luna of Coldfoot, in the roll keeper's small hand, and one short stroke, and white paper.

Four hundred people waited.

At the Tennant table my mother had both hands pressed flat on the cloth.

Annalise had come halfway down the floor and stopped.

Warrick didn't look at me. He looked at the floor between his boots, very carefully, so I wouldn't feel him wanting anything.

I could have said Teal.

It would have been easy.

Gussie's duck. The butter. The check pinned to the board.

The old man would have written it, and the hall would have clapped, and it would have been over.

But his hand would have written it.

At this table, in this hall, where my mother couldn't remember it and Elden had said the other one into my face.

"Leave it," I said.

The High Alpha looked up.

"Blank?"

"Blank. Not yet."

A murmur went around the hall.

"When I've got one I want, I'll write it myself. In my own hand. On my own land."

The old man looked at me for a long moment.

Then he laid the pen down across the book, beside the white line, and left it there.

"Then it waits for you," he said.

I turned around.

I didn't walk to the High table or the roll or the Tennants.

I walked to the far end, to the window that leaked, where thirty people in headsets were already getting up.

The cook handed me my jacket.

Gussie took my one arm and Warrick took the other, and we walked out of the Midwinter hall together, the whole pack, into the snow.

Nobody stopped us.

This time a lot of people said goodbye.

On the hall steps my mother stood alone in her good coat.

She didn't say anything.

She didn't try to.

She just nodded at me once, and I nodded back, and that was all it was.

Halfway down the hill, Gussie let go of me and threw both arms in the air and screamed at the sky.

Then the trapper did it.

Then the cook, which nobody had ever seen.

The far-camp father picked Annalise up off her feet and swung her around in the street, and she shrieked and laughed with her headset banging against her collarbone.

A white turbine Otter went over low, climbing south through the snow.

Two enforcers and one passenger.

We all stopped and watched it go until the lights were gone.

"Go," Gussie said to me and Warrick. "Go away. We're taking Annalise to the café for pie that somebody else made."

"It's eleven at night."

"They open for the fishing boats. Go."

The hotel lobby was empty.

No black parkas by the elevator.

Nobody in the wingback chair by the fireplace.

Warrick pushed the elevator button.

I looked at him.

"Elevators move," I said.

"Tonight I don't care what moves."

The doors closed.

He didn't touch me all the way up.

He stood on his side of the car and I stood on mine, and we watched the numbers.

My whole body was ringing.

On five the doors opened.

He held the door of the room for me, and I walked in, and he shut it behind us.

The radiator knocked. The harbor lights came through the window, yellow on the ceiling.

He leaned back against the door.

"He's gone," he said.

"He's gone."

"Nobody's in this town who can say my name."

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