The Wolfless Contract Luna novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Blackwater

Cora arrives to a cold welcome and a warm healer, and puts down an elder's insult. Garrick appears at the river demanding his wife.

The hunters stopped at the river, because Bram got out of the truck and stood on the bridge.

He didn't raise his voice or shift or reach for anything.

He stood there in the headlights, and six men with ropes found out they were on the wrong side of a line.

I watched from the truck with Joss's hand still gripping the door frame.

"Go back," I told him quietly. "If you're missing, he'll know."

"Luna."

"Joss. I'm not your Luna now. But I'll want to know what he does next."

He nodded once and ran into the dark.

When Bram climbed back in, there was snow on his shoulders and nothing else on his face.

"They'll tell him I didn't let them cross."

"Will he care?"

"He'll care that I did it in front of witnesses."

We crossed the bridge, and the road climbed through black pines until the trees opened onto Blackwater.

It was a town built of timber, with a long lodge at the top and smoke rising from every chimney.

Dawn was turning the sky grey.

People stood in doorways, and not one of them was smiling.

I understood. They had been told their Alpha had found a wife in the middle of the night, and the wife was the wolfless woman from the pack across the river.

I sat up straight in the borrowed coat and a stranger's socks.

"Do they know the terms?" I asked.

"They know there's a Luna," he said. "That's all they need."

He parked in front of the lodge.

A thin old man in a long grey coat was waiting on the steps with three others behind him. He wore an elder's ribbon on his sleeve.

He looked me over, from my hair to the socks.

"So this is her," he said.

"Luna Cora Wexley," Bram said. "She'll have the east rooms."

"Does she have a wolf?"

Everyone on the steps went still.

I opened my door, and got out, and stood in the cold with my chin up.

"No," I said. "I don't."

The elder blinked. He had expected me to flinch.

"Then how do you intend to lead a pack of them?"

"By not being one," I said. "I can't smell you coming, so I'll have to rely on my ears."

I tilted my head toward his boots.

"Your left boot squeaks. I heard you from the truck."

Somebody behind him coughed, a bad cover for a laugh.

A pup in the nearest doorway burst out giggling and got hushed by her mother.

The elder's face went the color of old brick.

"That is not what I asked."

"You asked how I'd lead. I'm going to start by finding out what your people need that nobody has bothered to say out loud."

Bram hadn't moved. I felt him next to me, still as a post.

"Elder," he said, mildly. "She's cold. We'll finish this inside."

The elder's mouth thinned, but he stepped aside.

I walked up the steps with my head high, and my knees shook the whole way.

Inside, the lodge smelled of cedar and bread.

A small woman with a white braid down her back pushed past the elders and took my hands in hers before anyone could stop her.

Her palms were rough, and warm as bread.

"You're frozen," she said. "Look at you. Your feet are blue under those ridiculous socks."

"Hester," Bram said.

"Don't Hester me. Go and wash. I'll take her."

She steered me into a big kitchen with a stove and a long scarred table, and sat me in front of it.

Within a minute I had a mug of something hot in my hands and a plate of eggs I hadn't asked for.

"Eat," Hester said.

"I'm not hungry."

"You will be. Eat anyway."

I ate.

She leaned on the table across from me with her arms folded.

"Do you know why the elder is cross?"

"Because I'm wolfless."

"Because he lost a bet," Hester said. "He told the whole council the boy would never find anyone. And the boy came home with a Luna before dawn."

I laughed, a real laugh, my first of the night, and it cracked in the middle.

Hester set a hand on my shoulder and didn't say anything.

That was kinder than anything Garrick had said to me in a year.

I had stopped crying before the eggs were gone.

Then the door to the kitchen banged open.

A young warrior in a heavy coat stood there with snow on his hair and his eyes wide.

"Alpha says you're to come to the river," he said, looking at me. "Luna. Ashfall's here."

My stomach dropped.

"Garrick?"

"The Alpha himself," the warrior said. "And thirty of his wolves. He's calling for his wife."

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