Last Chance Luna: The Bond Wouldn't Heal Her novel · Chapter 17 of 24
Chapter 17: Twenty-Eight
By ten o'clock on the night of my birthday, there were sixty-one trucks in the farmyard.
Roe had counted.
He had stood on the porch with his arms folded and counted them in.
The pack had built a bonfire in the paddock and brought lawn chairs, and someone had a thermos of cider.
They were being polite about it.
They talked in low voices and did not look at me too hard.
I sat in the good chair by the fire with a blanket over my knees.
My mother had made a cake with twenty-eight candles and would not let anyone light them yet.
"They're waiting for midnight," I said to Roe.
"I know."
"They think it's going to happen."
"Some do. Some just came for the cake."
"That's the part I like."
He crouched beside the chair and tucked the blanket under my feet.
His hands were warm.
The fire popped.
Across the paddock Nils was feeding a log into the flames and pretending he hadn't heard us.
At a quarter to midnight, the old healer came across the grass.
She was small and bent in a black coat, and she leaned on a cane of her own.
The crowd went quiet as she passed.
She stopped in front of my chair.
I had known her all my life.
She had delivered half the people in that paddock.
She looked at me, and then she looked at the fire,
and then she did something that I think cost her more than anything she'd ever done.
She got down on her knees on the cold ground.
"Get up," I said. "You'll hurt your hip."
"No. Let me say it from here."
She folded her hands.
"I told your mother that the bond mends," she said. "I said it because my teacher said it to me, and her teacher before her."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Last Chance Luna: The Bond Wouldn't Heal Her are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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