They Never Wanted a Female Gamma, So I Built the Pack That Beat Theirs novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Ledger

The next morning at the cemetery gate, the arbiter has her sign out of the pack's roll and his hand closes on her wrist; her father says only that she was right to leave.

I was in the cemetery by six the next morning, because there was nowhere else I had ever gone.

The Dzurenda plot sits at the top of the hill above the old breaker ruins, with the black culm bank rising behind it.

The dew was heavy on the stones.

I stood at my mother's grave with the shovel planted in the shale and looked at the date carved there, fourteen years back.

It was the newest grave on the Gamma row, and the shallowest.

I had never asked myself why.

I had been twelve.

I had carried her out of the pit on my back, and my father had dug the hole himself, in one night, and I had thought the shallowness was grief.

The sun came up over the culm bank in a flat orange smear.

Somewhere below me, the church bell of St. Michael's rang the early Mass.

I had slept two hours on the floor of my father's kitchen with the shovel across my knees.

My father was in the county hospital, three towns over.

I should have gone to him.

I had called the ward at five and been told he was resting and had asked for nobody.

That was the first thing that was strange, and I put it away without looking at it.

I was not in the habit of looking at what was strange.

I was in the habit of digging.

"Miss Dzurenda."

I turned.

He was standing at the cemetery gate in the same gray suit, the ledger under his arm, a paper in his other hand.

In daylight his dark hair was going gray early at the temples, and he had the long ink-stained fingers of a man who wrote for a living.

The silver key on his lapel caught the sun.

"I'm Matthias Kovac," he said.

"The Crown's arbiter for the Moot."

"I know who you are," I said.

"I watched you watch me last night."

I said it flat.

He did not look embarrassed.

"I was told to watch everything," he said.

"I did."

He crossed the cemetery with a plain, unhurried walk, around the stones and not over them, which was more than most of the pack did.

He stopped an arm's length from me, in front of my mother's grave.

He looked at the stone and then at me.

"The Black Diamond roll needs your name struck," he said.

"You declined the seat before witnesses.

"Under the Crown's law, a declined rank is struck by the member's own hand within a day."

"And if it isn't?" I said.

"Then the pack can claim you declined under duress and hold you to it," he said.

He held out the paper.

It was a single sheet, an old printed form, with a line for a name at the bottom.

I did not take it.

"Why are you telling me this?" I said.

"The Crown doesn't take sides."

"The Crown does not," he agreed.

"I am only an arbiter.

"I am telling you the law because it is the law."

I looked at him then, really looked.

There was nothing soft in that face.

It was the face of a man who kept his feelings in order, like a ledger.

But his eyes had not moved off me once since he walked through the gate, and the hand that held the paper was not entirely still.

I took the form.

He gave me a pen, a heavy black fountain pen with his initials on the barrel.

I had to lean on the stone to write.

My hand shook, and I hated that.

I signed Z. Dzurenda on the line, and the pen skipped on the grain of the paper.

He took the sheet back.

Then his fingers closed around my wrist.

It was a plain, brief touch, to steady my hand, to blot the ink with his thumb where I had smudged it.

His thumb lay square on my pulse.

I felt my pulse jump under it, and I knew he felt it too.

He did not let go.

Neither did I pull away.

We stood there in the dew with my mother's stone beside us and the whole hill quiet.

"You're not supposed to touch me," I said.

My voice came out lower than I intended.

"I am not supposed to touch a competitor," he said.

"Until the Moot's gavel falls.

"It is the Crown's rule."

"I'm not a competitor."

"No," he said.

"You are not."

He let go.

He did it slowly, one finger at a time.

I rubbed my wrist.

The place he had held burned.

I was furious at myself.

I had a hospital bed to get to and a father who would not say why he had asked for nobody.

And I was standing in a graveyard the morning after the worst night of my life, thinking about a stranger's thumb.

"Thank you for the form," I said.

"Miss Dzurenda."

I stopped.

"I have kept the Moot's ledger for six years," Matthias Kovac said.

"I have never once written a line before the vote was cast.

"Last night I wrote one."

"What did you write?"

He looked at the ledger under his arm and did not open it.

"That the Black Diamond pack made a mistake," he said.

"The Crown will have my head for it.

"Good morning."

He left the way he came, around the stones.

I stood there until I could not hear his shoes on the gravel.

Then I took up the shovel and went down the hill to my truck.

There was a woman waiting beside it.

She leaned on the fender in a bartender's black apron, with a cigarette going and her hair dyed the color of a new penny.

I knew her face.

She had run the taps at the Mahanoy Road tavern for ten years, and the Black Diamond pack had put her out last winter, for a cough the doctor had not been able to name.

She looked me up and down.

"They say you're taking wolves," she said.

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