The Sickened Luna's Last Chance novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Creek

Her father Osmund refuses her too, and Hester says the one thing left is rejection.

Dunne Gage caught up with me in the parking lot, still wearing his council jacket.

He was the Redfern Beta, six and a half feet of beard and dry silence, and in two years he had said maybe forty words to me.

"You can't drive like that," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You're grey. Get in the truck."

I should have told him no.

I got in the truck.

He drove down the valley road with both hands on the wheel and didn't ask where.

After ten miles he said, "He didn't send me."

"I know."

"I'm telling you anyway."

I looked out at the dark pines.

"Thank you, Dunne."

He nodded once.

Ashdown Creek was a cluster of old farmhouses on a bad road, with a feed store, a chapel and a mill that hadn't run since I was a kid.

My father's house sat at the top, with every light on.

He had beaten me home by ten minutes, which meant he'd left the hall the second I walked out.

He was in the kitchen, standing at the sink with his back to the door.

"Dad."

"Your mother's bowl is still in the cupboard," he said. "Did you know that? I never had the heart to move it."

My mother had died when I was nine.

"I need you to listen to me," I said.

"I heard it all. I was in the third row."

"Then you know what I'm going to ask."

He turned around.

Osmund Ashdown was fifty-eight and built like a stump, with a grey beard he trimmed with kitchen scissors.

His eyes went everywhere in that room except to me.

"The Waking," he said.

"You're an Alpha. You can give it."

"I can."

"Then do it. Tonight. Here, at your own table."

He rubbed his beard.

"Linnea. Sit down."

"I'll stand."

"Fine." He breathed out through his nose. "I can't."

"You can't, or you won't?"

"The Creek is on Redfern's lease." He said it quickly, like pulling a nail. "Forty acres of our winter range, the mill road, the water rights. All of it is the contract. If a Waking goes wrong, or goes right, in the wrong house, the council says you've broken the terms. Redfern calls the lease. We lose everything."

I stared at him.

"I'm your daughter."

"You're a Luna."

"I'm dying."

"Hester said maybe."

"Hester said a year."

"Hester has been wrong." He picked up a dish towel and wrung it. "I have sixty people. Sixty. One old man has a bad lung. Two boys down the road don't even own boots. You were always going to be the one who got out, and you did. You've had two years in a good house with good food, and Torin Stannard isn't a cruel man."

"He's a cold man who let me fall on a floor."

"He's the Alpha of two hundred."

"And you're my father."

He didn't answer that.

I had spent my whole life standing in this kitchen waiting for him to answer that.

"Let me say it plainly," I said. "A man who loves me might say no for a good reason. You aren't saying a reason. You're saying a number."

"That isn't fair."

"Did you know?"

His hands went still on the towel.

"Know what?"

I watched his face.

For one half second, something in it ran for cover.

"That I was sick," I said. "Before today."

"No." His voice came back loud. "No, of course I didn't. Don't be dramatic."

I looked at the towel.

I looked at the knuckles that held it.

I thought, he's lying about something, and I don't know what.

"I'm going," I said.

"Linnea, wait. Stay the night. We'll talk to Torin together."

"I just watched Torin say no. I'm done asking men for my own blood."

I walked out into the yard.

The wind had come up cold off the hills, and I stood in it shaking, trying to decide which way to be angry.

A truck door opened behind me.

Hester had followed us, of course.

She leaned on the fender with her braid over one shoulder and a thermos in her hand.

"Well?" she said.

"Neither of them will do it."

"I thought not." She unscrewed the thermos and held it out. "Drink that. It's mostly tea."

I drank.

It was mostly whiskey.

"There's something I haven't said," Hester told me. "I didn't want to say it in a hall full of wolves."

"Say it now."

"I've been healing for forty years. A dormant wolf doesn't wear a woman down. It sleeps, and the woman lives, and the world calls her wolfless. What I felt in your chest isn't a sleeping wolf. It's one that's been tied off at the root and drained."

My skin went cold.

"By what?"

"I don't know yet." She took the thermos back. "But if the thing draining you is the bond you're standing inside, there's one way to find out."

"How?"

"Reject him," Hester said. "On the stone, in front of the Moon Court. If I'm right, you'll know by morning."

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