Escaping the Arrogant Dark Moon Alpha novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Moot Eve

I didn't answer him.

I walked Tobin up the cellar stairs and out into the cold, and neither of us looked back.

He made it as far as the trees before his knees went.

I caught him under the arms and sat him down in the snow.

"I'm fine," he said.

"You're not."

"I'm out." He held his wrists up in the moonlight, raw and red. "That's the same thing, tonight."

I packed snow around them until he stopped shaking.

The elders never answered the email.

Not that week, not the next.

Ginny refreshed her inbox so often that the strays started timing her.

Eleven days before the Moot, I stood in the black frame of the burned barn and turned a key.

For a month I'd lived under that cat.

The burned cat's drive train, the county wreck's body, a seat out of a junked logging skidder.

The headlight on the left was a tractor light the hardware store owner had given me.

Half of Larch Creek stood in the parking lot to watch, humans and strays together, holding coffee.

The engine turned over once.

Twice.

Then it caught with a roar, and blue smoke rolled out through the bent steel.

The parking lot cheered.

The owner cried into her sleeve again.

"That's two," she said. "Don't make it a habit."

On the eighteenth of March, the night before the dark moon, Ginny taped a piece of cardboard to the Tamarack's door.

CLOSED. FAMILY BUSINESS.

"First time in five years," she said. "If the roof caves in, it's your fault."

The strays had been arguing about it for a week.

I'd wanted to go with Tobin and the liftee and nobody else.

The old dishwasher had said no first.

Then the housekeeper, then the waitress, then the lift mechanic whose brother died in the shack.

"You stood at the cairn alone," the patroller said. "You don't stand in front of the Council alone."

"He'll arrest anyone who walks in with me."

"Then he'd better bring a lot of handcuffs," said Ginny.

So it was all of them.

The four, the two, the three, and Ginny with a cooler of sandwiches and her grandmother's cut-up charter in a grocery bag.

That night I drove the new cat to the top of the hill one more time.

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