Last Chance Luna: The Bond Wouldn't Heal Her novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Last Moon
At the Hunter's Moon Gathering the Alpha takes Elke's hand and the bond lights, the pack cheers a cure, and she stands up and tells all seventy of them it will not work like that.
The old healer told my mother the bond mends what is broken, and my mother believed her.
That is why I was standing against the grange hall wall on the night of the Hunter's Moon with my cane in my hand.
I was twenty-seven.
I had been sick for six years.
The disease has a long name that means my own body eats the muscle off my bones, and there is no cure for it.
There are pills, and there is a needle in my arm once a month, and they keep it slow.
They do not make it stop.
I had told my mother that a hundred times.
She said the Moon was my last chance.
The saying was that the bond had to be found before a wolf turned twenty-eight.
I turn twenty-eight on the twenty-first of November.
So I wore my good cardigan and let her tie a green scarf around my neck, and I went.
Seventy wolves of the Coulee Pack stood along the walls under the paper lanterns.
The unmated ones lined the east wall, and I was the only one in the row who was leaning on something.
Nobody said anything.
Everybody looked at the cane and then looked somewhere else, politely.
At the far end of the hall Frieda Tollefson stood in her gray wool coat with her white bun pinned tight.
She smiled at me.
Her granddaughter Pia stood beside her, tall and blond and perfect, in a camel coat.
Everyone knew who Frieda wanted the Alpha to pick.
Then the moon cleared the window, and the hall went quiet.
Roe Sundby came in from the kitchen door.
He had taken his cap off, and his light brown hair was damp from the sink.
He was six foot three, long and sure.
He walked the room the way he walked a barn, with no hurry in him at all.
He had been Alpha for four years, since his father died.
I had known him all my life, the way you know the quiet man who delivers the milk.
He nodded to each wolf as he passed.
He passed Pia.
He passed two women from the creamery, and a boy who had only just turned twenty-one.
His boots came down the east wall one slow step at a time.
I looked at the floor.
His boots stopped in front of mine.
"Elke," he said.
His voice was low and a little rough.
I made myself look up.
His eyes were very blue, and they were not looking at the cane.
They were on my face.
"Roe," I said.
"Give me your hand."
It was not an order.
It was the way you ask someone to hand you a wrench.
I let go of my cane and held my hand out.
The cane fell against the wall with a clatter that went through the silent hall.
His palm slid against mine, warm and dry and calloused.
The world dropped away under my feet.
Heat poured up my arm and into my chest.
It met a hum under my breastbone that rose until my whole ribcage shook.
His breath went out of him in a rush.
His fingers closed around mine, hard, and I saw his throat move.
A thin silver crescent had risen in the center of my palm.
It had risen in his too.
"There," said someone by the door, in a thick, happy voice.
The hall broke open.
Seventy wolves started shouting at once.
My mother's voice rose over the others, high and cracked, and I saw her with both hands over her mouth by the coffee urn.
"The bond has found her!"
"She's mended, she's mended!"
Frieda Tollefson stepped out into the middle of the floor and raised both arms.
"The bond mends!" she called. "We have all seen it. Our Luna will walk without a stick."
People laughed and cried.
A man near me clapped Roe on the back.
Someone pushed the cane toward me, and then somebody else took it away and said she would not need it now.
I stood there with my hand in Roe's and my legs shaking.
I knew exactly what was about to happen.
They were going to wait a week.
Then they were going to wait a month.
Every morning they would look at me for the miracle.
Every morning I would still be sick, and the pack would decide it was my fault.
I had watched that happen to other people.
I was not going to let it happen to me.
"Stop," I said.
Nobody heard me.
"Stop!"
It came out louder than I had ever managed in that hall, and the room went still.
I took my hand out of Roe's, and my knees almost went, and he put a hand under my elbow without a word.
I let him.
Then I turned and faced seventy wolves.
"It doesn't work like that," I said.
My mother's face crumpled.
"The bond is real," I said. "I felt it. I'm glad of it."
"But I'm not mended. My muscles are still wasting."
"I still need my cane, and my needle, and a chair when my legs quit. That will be the same tomorrow."
Someone whispered.
"If you wait for me to get better," I said, "you will wait my whole life."
Frieda's smile had gone thin.
"Child, give it time."
"No."
I swayed, and Roe's hand tightened on my arm.
"I'm sick," I said. "That is just a fact about me, like my hair. If you want me, you take me sick."
Silence.
I turned my head and looked up at the man beside me.
He had not moved.
His face gave nothing away, except for a muscle ticking in his jaw.
"I'm sorry," I said, low, only to him. "You were expecting a cure. Everyone was."
"No," Roe said.
"What?"
"I didn't ask it to," he said.
He said it clearly enough that the front row heard it.
He bent and picked my cane up off the floor and put the handle in my hand.
Then he took my other hand again, silver crescent against silver crescent, and held it where everyone could see.
"Elke Halvorsen is my mate," he said to the hall. "She's the Luna of this pack. That's all there is."
He did not wait for the cheering, or the whispers, or my mother's wail.
He walked me out of the grange hall at my own speed.
The October air was cold and smelled of leaf smoke.
His truck sat under the lamp, with the passenger door already unlatched.
I stopped with my hand on it and looked at him.
"Take me home," I said. "I mean to my place, behind the bakery. I'm done in. But I'd like you to come in."
His throat moved.
"I'll walk slow," Roe said.
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