Love beyond the moonlights

Elena Rose had learned to tell the hour by the sound of her aunt's footsteps.

Heavy and slow meant evening, when Margaret came home from the roadhouse smelling of fried onions and cheap whiskey. Quick and sharp meant morning, when there were chores to be found and faults to be counted. And no footsteps at all, only a long, listening silence on the other side of the bedroom door, meant that something had gone wrong and Elena would be blamed for it.

Tonight the silence stretched until the candle in her hand had burned down a finger's width.

"Elena." The door opened without a knock. "You have been standing at that window for an hour."

"I was only looking at the moon."

"Don't." The word came out too fast. Margaret crossed the room and yanked the curtain closed, and for a heartbeat her face was lit from below, and Elena saw something she had never once seen there. Fear.

"It's only the moon, Aunt Margaret."

"It is not only anything." Margaret's fingers tightened on the curtain. "Tomorrow night you stay in this house. You don't go to the roadhouse, you don't go to the market, and you don't go anywhere near the trees. Do you understand me?"

Elena understood nothing. But she was twenty-two years old and had spent every one of those years learning that questions were a luxury, so she nodded and said, "Yes, ma'am."

When the door had shut, she pressed her palm to the window glass through the curtain and felt the cold of the night. Somewhere beyond the sleeping town of Pinehollow, the forest began, black and endless, and in the sky above it the moon was swelling toward a color she had never seen it wear.

Red. Faintly, wrongly red, like a coin held up to a fire.

The house had never been a home. It was a narrow wooden box at the end of Marrow Lane, with a leaking roof, a locked door at the bottom of the cellar stairs that Elena was forbidden to touch, and a single photograph of nobody on the mantel, a frame holding only a pressed silver leaf.

She had come to it at the age of five, carried through the snow in someone's arms. That was all she remembered. A voice singing low and broken. A scent like rain on warm stone. Then Margaret's door, and Margaret's face, and the words that had become the first law of her life: You are lucky I took you. Nobody else would have.

She had believed it for seventeen years.

She believed it still, mostly. But lately, in the hour before sleep, she had begun to feel something else, a restlessness under her skin as if her own body were a coat that no longer fit. Her hearing had sharpened until the neighbors' quarrels came through three walls. Smells arrived like blows: the iron in a butcher's cart, the sweetness of a stranger's perfume, the rot beneath the river ice. And at night, just as she slipped under, there was the dream.

A great silver wolf, standing on a ridge of snow. It never moved and it never spoke. It only looked at her with eyes the color of the moon, as though it had been waiting a very long time.

Elena had told no one. There was no one to tell.

At the roadhouse the next evening, Margaret's warning was already forgotten, because Margaret herself had forgotten Elena. A wedding party had taken over the long table, and the owner, a bald and sweating man called Dunmore, kept bellowing for more ale.

"Rose! Table nine!"

Elena carried six tankards at once, a trick that had taken a year of burned wrists to learn, and she was halfway across the room when the lamps flickered.

Every one of them. All at once.

Conversation faltered. A glass slipped from somebody's hand. And in the sudden hush, Elena heard it clearly through the wall and the wind and the whole length of the dark: a long, rising howl, far away in the forest, answered by another, and another, until the whole night seemed to be singing.

The tankards trembled in her hands. Nobody else in the room looked up.

Nobody else can hear it.

The thought arrived whole and cold. Elena set the ale on table nine with great care, because she did not trust her fingers to hold it any longer, and walked straight through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard.

The air bit at her face. Above the roofs of Pine hollow the moon hung low and enormous, and it was red, truly red, the color of a wound just opened.

Her wrist began to itch.

She pushed back her sleeve. There was nothing there but pale skin and the thin blue veins she had looked at ten thousand times. And yet the itch deepened, warm, then hot, as though something beneath the skin were turning toward the moon the way a flower turns toward light.

Behind her the kitchen door banged open. "Rose! Get back in here, or by every god you're finished!"

Elena did not turn. Out in the forest, the howling had stopped. In its place was a silence so deep and so attentive that it felt like a held breath.

Something was coming.

And for the first time in seventeen years, Elena Rose was not afraid of her aunt's silence. She was afraid of what lay beyond it.

Margaret was waiting in the kitchen when Elena finally came home, and she was not alone with her anger.

The lamp was unlit. The table had been dragged against the cellar door. And on the table sat a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth and tied with black cord, set down as carefully as a sleeping child.

"You left your shift," Margaret said.

"Something was wrong. I felt..." Elena stopped. There was no way to say it that would not sound like madness. "Dunmore will dock my pay. I'll make it up."

"You will make nothing up." Margaret's voice was strange, thin and tight. She had not slept. Elena could see it in the grey skin under her eyes. "Listen to me. There is a woman who keeps a cottage on the north road, past the second bridge. Old Hester. You will take this to her tonight."

"Tonight? You told me to stay inside."

"I know what I told you."

"The moon is..."

"I know what the moon is!" The shout cracked down the middle. Margaret pressed her hand to her mouth, and in the quiet that followed Elena realized with a lurch that her aunt's hand was shaking.

"Aunt Margaret. What is in the bundle?"

"What I should have buried years ago." Margaret turned away. "It must be at Hester's door before midnight. Go the long way, by the road. Do not leave it, do not step into the trees, and do not speak to anyone you meet. Not one word. Say you understand."

"I understand."

"Say you will not run."

It was an odd thing to ask. Elena looked at the bundle, at the cord pulled tight, at the back of the only person who had ever fed her, and felt the first thin crack of something like suspicion.

"I won't run," she said.

Margaret nodded without turning. Her shoulders loosened, not with relief, Elena thought, but with the terrible slackness of someone who has just signed a paper she cannot take back.

* * *

The north road was empty.

Elena walked quickly with the bundle held against her ribs. It was lighter than she expected and it was warm, as if something inside it were breathing. The red moon rode above the pines and threw her shadow long and thin across the frost, and her wrist burned the whole way, steady as a pulse.

By the second bridge, she knew she was being followed.

She did not hear footsteps. It was subtler than that, a pressure on the back of her neck, the way a room feels different when someone has stepped into it. The forest ran thick and black along both sides of the road. Nothing moved. Not a branch, not a bird.

That was what frightened her most. There were no night sounds at all.

"Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. "Is someone there?"

The trees gave nothing back.

She quickened her pace. Her breath smoked. Ahead, a thin yellow light showed where Hester's cottage sat in a hollow, perhaps half a mile away. Half a mile. Five minutes at a run.

Do not run.

She was almost sure it was only Margaret's voice in her head. But she walked, stiff-legged, with her heart pounding, until the pressure behind her shifted to the left and then the right, circling, patient, unhurried.

Not one presence. Several.

Then, from the dark between two pines, a low sound rolled out, no louder than a cart wheel on gravel. A growl. A great, rough, hungry growl that seemed to come from everywhere.

Elena stopped.

Two lights opened in the black. Yellow. Level with her chest. Then two more, and two more beside them, until a ring of eyes had drawn closed around her on the empty road, and a smell reached her, wet fur and old blood and something worse, something sour and mad.

"I'm only carrying a parcel," she heard herself say. It was the stupidest thing she had ever said.

The largest shape stepped into the moonlight. It was a wolf, but no wolf had ever stood so high at the shoulder, or carried that thin ribbon of drool from a mouth too wide, or looked at her with something so nearly human behind its eyes.

It grinned.

And Elena, who had promised her aunt she would not run,

Living her aunt full of fear and regret.

The forest took her in like a mouth closing.

Elena had meant to keep to the road. She had meant it with every shred of sense she possessed. But the great wolf had lunged from the left, and her body had swerved right before her mind could argue, and now the road was gone behind her and there was only the black rush of pines, the slap of branches, and the sound of breathing that was not her own.

Many breaths. Heavy, wet, and close.

She ran as she had never run in her life. Frozen roots caught at her ankles. Needles whipped her face and left lines of fire across her cheeks. The bundle was crushed under one arm, and some distant, stubborn part of her was still thinking I promised to deliver it, which would have been funny if she had had any breath left to laugh.

A wolf burst out of the dark on her right. She felt its jaws snap shut an inch from her sleeve and heard the cloth tear. Another wolf came from the left, and another behind, and she understood with perfect clarity what they were doing. They were not chasing her. They were steering her.

"Please," she gasped, to no one. "Please."

Her foot found a patch of ice under the snow.

The world turned over. She struck the ground on her shoulder and skidded, tumbling, until a stump stopped her with a crack that made white light burst behind her eyes. The bundle flew from her arm. It hit a rock and split along its seam, and a pale grey dust spilled out across the snow, a dried herb she did not know, bitter and green and sharp enough to make her eyes stream.

The wolves stopped.

All of them, all at once, as though a hand had pulled a cord. Elena lay on her side, her lungs burning, and watched the huge shapes hover at the edge of the moonlight with their heads low and their nostrils flared.

The dust drifted. The wind took it. The bitter smell thinned, thinned, and was gone.

And then something in Elena's chest turned over like a key in a lock.

Warmth flooded her. It poured through her ribs and down her arms, a feeling like waking from a lifetime of sleep, and every smell in the forest rushed in at once, bright and enormous: pine sap and wolf musk and blood, her own blood, and under it all a new scent that belonged to no one but her, cold and sweet like snow falling on silver.

The leader of the pack lifted his head. A low sound came out of him, almost a whimper.

"Different," he said.

He said it in words. A man's voice, hoarse and ruined, rolling out of that vast mouth. Elena's mind refused it, and for one moment she believed she had struck her head harder than she thought.

"Different. The herb is gone. Smell her. Smell what she is."

"Moon-blooded," said another voice from the dark, awed and greedy. "Look at her eyes."

What about my eyes? Elena thought, stupidly, and pushed herself up on shaking hands.

The leader began to grin again.

"Doesn't matter what she is," he said. "She's meat."