Chapter 4: Full Moon

"Why would I ask him that?" I said.

Reino sipped his coffee and looked pleased with the morning.

"Because he'll say border duty, and everyone's believed it for three years," Reino said.

"The Alpha runs alone, as his father did. It's a custom."

"Then it's a custom," I said.

"Perhaps." He smiled.

"I only think a girl in your position, with no wolf of her own, ought to know exactly what she's standing next to."

"I know what I'm standing next to," I said. "A man who brought wood."

I walked around his truck and kept going until the road bent out of sight.

My hands didn't stop shaking until I reached the Longhouse kitchen.

Leena put a mug of tea in them without a word.

When I told her what Reino had said, she snorted so hard that tea came out of her nose.

"The Alpha runs alone," she said. "Of course he does. His father did too. The old man didn't like anyone watching him shift."

"Reino's just trying to get under your skin."

"He's doing a good job."

"Then don't let him," Leena said, and handed me an onion.

That night the moon came up full over the lake, and Ironwood ran.

You can feel it from anywhere in the territory when a pack goes out together.

A kind of hum rises under the ground, and every wolf in the Longhouse stops what it is doing and goes to the door.

I stood on the porch in my coat and watched them strip off their clothes in the snow and shift.

A hundred and some wolves poured down the bluff in the silver light, gray and brown and black, and vanished into the pines.

I had watched it every month of my life.

It never stopped hurting, and I never told anyone that.

"Come sit by the stove, child," a dry voice said behind me. "Somebody has to mind the pups."

Aino Lehto was seventy-eight, and she stood no higher than my shoulder.

She wore a green cardigan, she leaned on a blackthorn cane, and one of her eyes had gone milky.

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