The Alpha's Unwanted Luna novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The South Fence

Ismay watches Blackmoor's south wards fail from across the border strip and refuses to go back, until Eamon crosses the line without leave.

From the overlook on the neutral strip you can see the whole south fence of Blackmoor.

I stood there at sunrise in a borrowed Ashcrest coat, with Linus at my elbow and two of Fergus's sentries ten paces back.

The nine stones should have glowed at that hour, faint and gold, like low coals along the ridge.

Seven were dark grey.

The other two flickered.

"It's worse than I thought," I said.

Linus pulled the coat sleeve down over his scraped knuckles.

"Dacia says it's your fault," he said. "She told everyone you cursed the stones when you left."

"Stones can't be cursed. They can only be tended or not."

"I know that. I tried to say it. She said I was a Garland and my opinion was a leftover."

My jaw tightened.

"What else?"

He told me, fast, with his eyes on his shoes.

At six that morning the hall had run out of coffee, and the steward's office had discovered that the grain order could not be paid.

Dacia had marched down to the bank in town with the pack's checkbook and tried to move money between accounts.

The clerk had asked for the Luna's signature on each card, because that was how I had set them up a year ago.

I had done it to keep the lumber contracts safe from a fraud scare, and I had never told anyone.

"She called you a thief in the lobby," Linus said. "In front of a lady with a stroller."

I laughed once, a short ugly sound.

"I'm sure she did."

"Izzy." He grabbed my sleeve. "Come back. Just for a night. Just to raise the stones. You don't have to speak to him."

I looked at his face, freckled and sixteen and scared out of its wits, and I wanted to say yes.

I knew exactly how that night would go.

I would walk through the gate, and I would bleed onto nine stones, and by midnight the lamps would burn gold again.

Eamon would stand on the porch and watch the wards light and say nothing.

At breakfast Dacia would take credit for every one of them.

"No," I said.

Linus's face crumpled.

"I didn't fall over, Linus. I left. Somebody has to hear the difference."

I put my hands on his shoulders.

"But I'm not leaving you with nothing. Listen to me."

"I'm listening."

"Get every Garland family into the hall's inner ring today."

"The foundation there has iron laid under the stone, and it holds without any help from me."

"Put someone on the roof who can smell the wind, and wake an adult if it turns."

He stared at me, and then, slowly, he nodded.

I was proud of how steady my voice was.

My palm was burning again.

The two flickering stones went out, one after the other, and a murmur ran along the Blackmoor ridge, thin as wind in dry grass.

I heard an engine.

It was coming up the service road from the south, fast, with no regard for the ruts.

A black pickup crested the rise and skidded to a stop at the border post.

The door swung open before it had finished rocking.

Eamon got out.

He had not slept either.

His rust-red hair stood up on one side, and his black henley was wrinkled.

There was a streak of ash down his forearm, over the old burn scar.

Six Blackmoor wolves came loping up the road behind the truck.

They were caught halfway between man and wolf, shoulders hunched, teeth too long.

Eamon walked straight to the line.

It was a row of low white stones set into the grass, three feet apart, the oldest boundary between two packs in the county.

He did not stop.

He put his boot over it, and then the other.

Then he stood on the neutral strip with his eyes locked on me across forty yards of frosted grass.

"Ismay," he said, and my name sounded rusty in his mouth. "You're coming home."

Behind me every Ashcrest sentry rose, claws out, and from the cabin porch I heard Fergus Ashworth say, very calmly, "You've crossed without leave."

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