Chapter 3 The Luna Wearing My Ring

Elias stood in the doorway of the general store with the cold coming off his coat, and he did not look like a man who had come to throw me out.

He looked like a man who had come to ask a question he already knew the answer to.

"I asked him what he'd done with Damon," I said. "You heard me. You were close enough."

"I was across the street." Elias pulled the door shut and latched it. "I heard you say a name I haven't heard spoken out loud in three years. That's why I'm here."

"Then you know something's wrong."

"I know you're trouble." He walked past me to the counter and leaned against it. Dark blond hair, a little long at the collar. Grey eyes that did not settle on anything for long. A narrow face with a hard jaw and a mouth set in a straight line. He stood like a soldier who had been at attention since the war ended. "The pack's had a hard three years, and a woman with a grudge and a silver bullet is the last thing we need."

"Who said anything about silver?"

"Your hand went to your pocket twice tonight. You're not the first wolf I've met who carried something they shouldn't." He folded his arms. "There's a rule here. No silver inside the pack house. No silver on pack land unless it's in the assay office or the mine. If the Alpha finds out you're carrying, he'll have you in the cage before the moon rises."

I thought about the cage. I thought about the way he had said it so easily.

"Then I won't let him find out," I said.

Elias looked at me for a while. "You're not going to tell me what you're really doing here."

"I'm hauling ore. I sell it, I get paid, I move on. That's what couriers do."

"Couriers don't usually come back to the town that threw them out."

I felt my jaw tighten. "You know who I am."

"I know who you were." He pushed off the counter. "I was a Gamma when they sent you out. I stood on the wall and watched you walk down the road with one coat and no horse, and I didn't say a word, because the Alpha gave an order and it wasn't my place to question it." He paused. "I've had three years to think about that."

"And what did you conclude?"

"That I should have said something."

The bell over the door rang before I could answer, and Elias's whole body changed. His shoulders went back, his face went smooth, and he took two steps away from me like a man putting distance between himself and a fire.

The man in Damon's coat came in first. Cora came behind him with her basket still on her arm, and after Cora came a knot of pack members who had clearly been summoned from their suppers, because one old woman was still wearing an apron over her good dress.

And behind them, holding the hand of a tall woman with grey braids, came Ruth.

She was wearing a different dress now, a deep green one with a white collar and little pearl buttons, and her hair had been brushed again and pinned back with a ribbon that matched. She looked like a child from a catalogue photograph. She looked at me, and there was nothing in her face. No recognition. No curiosity. Just the flat polite blankness of a child who has been told to be good in front of strangers.

"Pack," the man said, and his voice filled the store. "I want you all to meet the courier who came through tonight. Ada. She used to live here, before my time. She's passing through and she'll be gone by morning, but I thought it only proper that she should see how Cobalt Ridge has prospered under its new leadership."

I kept my face blank. I had a lot of practice at it.

Cora stepped forward and smiled at me, and the ring on her hand caught the lantern light. "We're so glad to have you, even for one night. The Alpha doesn't like strangers, but I told him a woman traveling alone deserves a warm meal."

"That's kind," I said.

"My name is Cora. I'm the Luna here." She said it proudly, and then she did the thing I had been dreading since I saw her on the street. She held out her hand for me to shake, and the ring sat on her finger, and I had to look at it.

It was my ring. The crescent was cut thin and fine on the left side of the band, and there was a scratch on the inside where I had caught it on a nail the winter before they sent me out. I had worn that ring for four years. I had twisted it around my finger when I was nervous.

I took Cora's hand and shook it. Her grip was soft. She had never had to haul ore or break a horse or hold a child down while a healer set a bone.

"Pretty ring," I said.

"Thank you. It was my mother's." Cora let go and tucked her arm through the Alpha's. "Silas had it made for me when we were mated. He's very good to me."

Silas. So that was the name he was using now. A new name over an old skin.

The old woman in the apron was watching me. White hair pulled back in a knot, brown eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by anything, and she was looking at me the way a farmer looks at a sky that has gone the wrong color.

"Well," Silas said. "Now that we're all acquainted, I think we can let the courier rest. She's got a long road ahead of her." He turned to Ruth and put a hand on her shoulder. "Say goodnight to the lady, sweetheart."

Ruth looked up at me. Her green eyes were my eyes, and her chin was my mother's chin, and she was standing in a green dress with pearl buttons and she did not know me.

"Goodnight, lady," she said.

There was a knot in one of the floorboards that I had stared at a hundred times when I worked behind that counter as a girl. I stared at it now until the heat behind my eyes went away and my face was mine again.

"Goodnight," I said.

Silas turned Ruth toward the door with a hand on her back, and the pack parted to let them through, and Cora followed with her basket. The old woman in the apron did not move. She stood in the doorway with her brown eyes on me, and when the rest of them were gone she said, quiet enough that only I could hear, "Mabel. Kitchen. An hour after the lamps go out."

Then she left, and the door swung shut, and Elias was still standing by the counter with his arms folded and his grey eyes fixed on the empty street.

"You saw the ring," he said.

"I saw it."

"And you didn't say anything."

"What would I say?" I turned on him. "That he took my ring and put it on another woman's hand? That he took my daughter and gave her a new dress? That he's wearing a dead man's face and I can smell it every time he breathes?" I stopped. My voice had risen, and I had not meant it to. "I said nothing because saying something would have got me killed, and I have a reason to stay alive."

Elias looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, "Meet me behind the assay office tomorrow at first light. Before the Alpha wakes up. There's something I need to show you."

He turned and walked out into the snow, and I stood alone in the general store with the lantern guttering and the ore sack at my feet, and I heard, faint and far away, through the mind-link I had thought dead for three years, a voice I knew better than my own.

Ada.

The wolf at the tree line. The voice in the mine. The name I had whispered to myself in barns and ditches and strange towns for three years, and now it was speaking back to me, and it was saying my name like a prayer.