My Alpha Wanted a Graceful Rejection, So I Rehearsed Dating His Rival novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Parting Howl

The choir rehearses the howl that sends a wolf out of the gate, Nils cannot hit his note, Hilkka tells Aino why she rehearses, and Ulla moves the feast up two days.

The choir director was a retired shop teacher who wore a tuning fork on a lanyard.

He began by telling me I was standing on the wrong side of the gate.

"The leaving wolf stands outside the Gate Mark," he said. "Facing out. She doesn't look back until the last note."

"What if I want to look back?"

"Then you're not leaving, you're lingering."

It was Wednesday evening, in the lake field above the lodge, two hours before dusk.

Forty-one members of the Pine Lake choir stood in three rows with their hands behind their backs.

They were rehearsing in skin.

On the day they would shift.

The Parting Howl has three parts.

The choir sings the rise, and a low group drone holds the floor.

The Alpha finishes it alone with a high held note called the Releasing Note.

If the Alpha hits it, the wolf is released.

If he misses it, the wolf is technically still a member until the next full moon.

I did not intend to be a member until the next full moon.

"Run one," I said. "Choir, rise. Drone, floor. Nils, note."

I walked out through the Gate Mark with my back to them and my chin up.

This was the part I was good at.

I had rehearsed it in my kitchen, using the oven door as a mirror.

The choir rose.

The drone held.

Nils opened his mouth and produced a long squeak.

"Again," I said, from outside the gate.

"I can hear that I missed it."

"So can the Council. Again."

He tried again.

It went up, and stopped, and came down as a cough.

Petra sang lead alto and had not stopped grinning since the dock.

"It's a B-flat," she said. "It's very high. Think of something small and sad."

"I'm not thinking of a puppy, Petra."

"I didn't say puppy," Petra said.

"You were going to."

Ulla stood at the edge of the field with her binder and a thermos.

"He has it at home," she said. "He just needs the room."

I came back through the gate, which I was not supposed to do, and took the tuning fork off the director's lanyard.

I held it against Nils's ear.

"That one," I said.

"I know the one."

"Then hit it, or I'm a member of your pack until July," I said.

"You don't want that?"

"I want to be released on the right note," I said. "It's the only dignified thing about this whole afternoon."

Nils stared at me.

For a moment I thought he would say something real.

Instead he straightened his collar and said, "Run two."

Run two was louder.

The choir rose.

The drone held.

Nils got to the note and held it, nearly, and across Kettle Lake a dog answered.

Then another one did.

By the time he ran out of air, every cabin along the north shore had a dog on its porch with its head tipped back.

Somewhere in the woods a loon joined in, and it sounded the most confident of any of us.

"That counts," Petra said.

"It doesn't count," I said. "He was flat and the dogs were on pitch."

"Run three," said Nils. "Everybody. Full."

Run three was a mistake.

The choir took the rise at full volume.

The drone shook the lawn chairs.

Nils threw back his head and let go of the note, and it was almost beautiful.

Then the volunteer fire siren in Ishpeming went off, nine miles away, because someone had decided it was a call.

We all stood in the field and listened to the siren climb.

A county cruiser came up the lodge road with its lights on.

A deputy got out and walked across the grass with a flashlight.

"Is somebody hurt?" he said.

"No," Ulla said.

"It sounded like somebody was dying."

"That's the note," I said.

The deputy looked at three rows of choir, a man in an ironed shirt and a woman standing outside a gate on purpose.

"Okay," he said. "I'll tell dispatch it's a choir."

When the field emptied, my grandmother was still in her lawn chair at the edge of the trees.

Hilkka Laitinen was seventy-nine.

She wore a quilted vest, and she had flour in the creases of her knuckles that no soap had reached in sixty years.

She had watched the entire rehearsal without saying anything.

I sat down next to her.

"You were nine when I made you that rule," Hilkka said.

She meant the Spring Naming.

I had been the pack's Bread Bearer that year, and on the third step of the Long Hall I tripped.

The loaf rolled the whole length of the aisle and stopped against the old Alpha's boot.

"I made it that same night," Hilkka said.

"You were under the kitchen table with the dishcloth over your head, and the pack was calling you Loaf," she said.

"I told you nothing would ever go wrong in front of people again if you did it three times first."

"It worked."

"It worked." She patted my knee. "I'm only sorry you needed it."

I didn't say anything.

The light was going on the lake.

Petra came up the path, walking fast, holding a sheet of paper at arm's length.

"Aino. This was taped to the lodge door."

It said RUN SHEET, REVISION FOUR across the top, and it was signed in Ulla's flourishing hand.

The Anointing Feast had been moved up two days, to Thursday the nineteenth.

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