The Moon She Waited Under novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: First Shift

Dessa wakes at dawn in the woods as a white wolf with elk lying down around her, Lucan and Osric find her, and Osric says to get her out of sight before Red Creek smells her.

I woke up with my cheek on wet moss and a heartbeat that wasn't only mine.

It was slow and heavy, and it was coming from the ground.

The sky was grey with early light.

The rain had stopped.

I lifted my head, and my head felt wrong.

It was long and heavy at the front, and when I breathed in, the whole valley arrived at once.

I smelled pine sap and wet stone and the creek, and the warm musk of something large and close.

I opened my eyes.

An elk stood ten feet away.

It was a bull with a rack wider than my shoulders, and it was not running.

It was lying down in the grass with its legs folded under it, watching me.

Past it, three cows lay in a row, and a doe, and a pair of fawns, all of them settled in the wet meadow in a ring around me.

None of them were afraid.

I tried to say something, and what came out of my throat was a low, soft sound I had never made.

I looked down.

My front legs were white.

They were thick, and silver-white, and the paws at the end of them were bigger than my hands had ever been.

I held very still while that sank in.

I had never once shifted.

I was twenty-seven, and the whole pack had decided in my teens that I never would, and I had learned to stop checking the mirror for signs.

I was wolfless.

Except I was a wolf.

I stood up, and my legs knew exactly what to do.

The bull elk lowered his head all the way to the grass.

Something moved in the trees.

I wheeled around, hackles up, and a growl came out of me without my asking.

Lucan stepped out of the pines.

He was soaked and mud-streaked, he hadn't slept, and he was carrying a blanket in both hands.

He saw me and stopped dead.

His eyes went amber and then wide.

"Dessa," he said, very quietly.

I stared at him.

I could hear his pulse from where I stood.

I could smell that he was afraid, and that under the fear he was something else.

He was relieved.

He took one step forward, and his shoulders squared, and he did the thing every Alpha does when a wolf in his territory doesn't back down.

"Sit," he said.

The word came out of him with the full weight of his rank behind it.

It rolled across the meadow and shook the dew off the grass.

The elk didn't flinch.

I didn't either.

I stood exactly where I was and looked at him.

Lucan's mouth opened.

He tried again.

"I said sit."

Nothing happened, and he knew it.

I watched the realization go across his face one piece at a time.

An Alpha's order was the one thing no wolf in his pack could ignore, and it had just slid off me and hit nothing.

"What are you?" he whispered.

I didn't know.

I closed my eyes and thought about my hands.

My real hands, with the scar across the left thumb from a kitchen knife in the third grade.

My spine ached, and my jaw clicked, and fur drew back into my skin in a long cold ripple.

Then I was on my knees in the meadow, naked, shaking, with moss stuck to my ribs.

The elk got up and walked away without any hurry at all.

Lucan crossed the grass.

He stopped a full arm's length from me and held out the blanket without looking below my chin.

I took it and wrapped it around myself.

My hands were steady.

"Don't," I said, when he started to speak. "Not a word about the seven moons. Not now."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were."

"Yes," he said. "I was."

Behind him, a branch cracked.

We both turned.

Osric Dane came through the trees on his walking stick, in a rain slicker over his cardigan, breathing hard from the climb.

He took in the blanket, the bare feet, the flattened circle of grass.

He took in the white hairs caught on the bark of a pine at the edge of the clearing.

He walked over and picked one off, and held it up to the light.

His hand was shaking.

"Osric?" Lucan said.

The old man didn't answer him.

He looked at me for a long time.

"I thought I would be dead before I saw this," he said.

"Saw what?" I said.

"Not here." Osric closed his fist around the hair.

He looked past us at the south ridge, where the sun was coming up over Red Creek's land.

"There hasn't been a white wolf in this valley for three hundred years," he said. "Get her out of sight before Haskell's scouts catch her scent."

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