Chapter 9: The Redfern Garden

I did not wait until Friday.

By Monday I had learned three things.

The council had posted a notice at the hall that I was "released from my duties" and had no standing to enter the pack house.

Maureen had put my mother's recipe box into the fire, and Pia had found the ash behind the stove.

And no other pack within a hundred miles would take a rejected Luna who had shamed her own Alpha on the night of a feast.

"They're afraid of Maureen," Pia said, sitting on the clinic table with her feet swinging. "That's why. She holds the grain contracts."

"Then I need a pack that isn't afraid of her."

"There's one."

I looked at the white card on the table.

I had read the line on it forty times. Redfern, River Road. A phone number written by hand.

"I want proof first," I said. "Whatever Maureen was hiding when she burned that box, it's why she kept me quiet. I'm going to find out what it is."

"You can't do that from a cot behind the cough syrup."

"No."

"So call him."

I called him from the clinic phone, because my own was on its last bar.

He answered on the second ring.

"Brask."

"It's Clara Dunning. I'll take the room."

"Good." There was no triumph in his voice. "I'll send a truck."

"I'll drive myself."

"Then I'll leave the gate open."

It was a three-hour drive.

The road ran north through the pines, along the river, past burned barns and fenced pasture.

The border post had a Redfern flag on it, a red fern on grey. A young guard looked at my plates, and lifted the bar without a word.

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