From Ashes to Their Luna novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: One More Day
A small sound in the hallway earns Nessa a beating from her sister and three brothers while the pack walks past; she decides it is the last one, steps out at the border treaty gathering, and a black wolf at the line says her name.
I made one small sound at my sister, and that was my whole crime.
Margot was smoking in the hallway outside the dining hall, directly under the no-smoking sign, while half the pack filed past her to breakfast.
I was carrying a tray of cups back to the kitchen.
The "tsk" got out before I could stop it.
"Caught me," Margot said, and grinned.
She held the cigarette out at arm's length, like a dead mouse.
"Don't tell Dad. I'll bring you a bun from the dinner table."
I almost smiled. She was the only one of them who ever made me almost smile.
Then Anson came out of the dining hall behind her and looked at my face.
"Did you just make a noise at her?" he said.
Several people in the hallway found something interesting on the wall.
My oldest brother's fist went into my stomach before I had the tray down.
The cups hit the floor and the air left me in one hard rush.
"Looks like our little sister has an attitude problem," he said, to nobody and to everybody.
My second brother, Garson, hit me in the ribs from the right, low and fast, and I stumbled sideways.
My third brother, Dalton, was waiting there. He shoved me into the wall with both hands.
None of them hit my face. None of them ever hit my hands.
In fourteen years I had never asked why.
A woman from the laundry came past with a basket on her hip. She looked at the carpet until she was around the corner.
Margot crushed the cigarette under her heel and crouched to help me with the china.
"Go drink your tea," she said quietly. "Then be in the cellar before dark. It's easier if you just go."
"The Stonepine Alpha is coming tonight to sign the border treaty," Anson said. He was the oldest, and the Beta, and he liked saying so. "Dad doesn't want the Council looking at you."
"Looking at what?" I said.
Garson laughed. "Exactly."
I knelt and picked the broken china out of the carpet one piece at a time.
My ribs had a bright, hot line down the left side. I breathed around it.
The pack healer was waiting at the kitchen door with the cup, as she did every morning.
She was old and small and smelled of dried thyme. She was the only person in that house who ever put bread in my pocket.
"Drink it all, love," she said. "It keeps the cough down."
Garson leaned in the doorway behind me and watched me finish it.
The tea was bitter and tasted of tin. I drank it to the bottom, and Garson nodded and left.
The healer pressed a heel of bread into my hand and bent close.
"One more day," she whispered. "You just get through one more day, Nessa."
I had been getting through one more day for fourteen years.
I kept count on the inside of the pantry door, in pencil, behind the flour tins. Every night I added a line.
That night I stood in front of it and held the pencil for a long time.
Then I put it back on the shelf.
I didn't make the mark.
Tonight there would not be one more day. I would not be here for it.
So I stepped out.
At dusk Dalton marched me down to the cellar and locked the door behind me.
"Don't scream," he said through the wood. "Nobody's coming."
He was right about that. Nobody had ever come.
Upstairs the pack house filled with boots and voices. The Stonepine Alpha's car had been seen on the ridge road.
I waited until the floor above me went quiet.
Then I crossed the cellar to the coal door in the east wall.
I had been oiling its hinge with kitchen lard for three months, one dab at a time, whenever I was sent down for potatoes.
It opened without a sound.
The east wood was cold and black and smelled of snow. I had no coat except the thin grey one my mother's friend had given me years ago.
I did not have a wolf, either. Everyone said so. I had never once shifted, never once heard the pack in my head.
So I ran on two legs with a bad rib, and I did not stop.
Behind me a horn sounded from the hall. The treaty was starting.
The creek was the border. It was only twenty feet wide, and my feet had never touched the far side of it.
I was halfway down the bank when something moved on the other shore.
A black wolf stood in the shallows, bigger than any wolf I had seen.
It looked at me, and every hair on my arms stood up.
Then it dropped its head, and the shape of it ran together and rose, and a man stood in the creek in a dark wool coat.
He was tall, with black hair and a scar that split his right eyebrow. His eyes were grey with gold in them, and they did not leave my face.
"Nessa Aldercott," he said. "I'm Kieran Stroud."
Nobody had ever said my name so carefully.
"Eleven days," he said. "You turned twenty-two eleven days ago, and I have been standing on this side of the line ever since."
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