The Last New Moon

The jar on the top shelf of the pantry is empty, and you have been pretending it isn't for three days.

You know exactly what it looks like without turning around. A pint mason jar, the lid rusted at one edge, a ring of gray-green sediment at the bottom where the moonsedge settled. Tucked behind it, a recipe card in old-fashioned slanted handwriting you could recite in your sleep.

Moonsedge, steeped at the new moon. Never miss one.

You missed one.

"Order up," Mags calls through the pass, and you blink, and the griddle is smoking, and the hash browns you were supposed to flip are on their way to charcoal.

"Got it." You scrape, flip, plate. Your hands know this kitchen better than your head does. Six years of five a.m. starts will do that.

"You're somewhere else this morning, honey." Mags Quigley leans in, silver braid over one shoulder, reading glasses on her head and another pair on her nose. She's sixty-two and has never once asked you a question she didn't already half know the answer to. "That's twice you've burned the hash."

"Didn't sleep."

"The fire smoke?"

"Something like that."

It isn't the smoke. The wildfire on the ridge is out now, three weeks gone, leaving a black thumbprint on the mountain above Gilt Hollow where the high meadow used to be. The only meadow within two hundred miles where moonsedge grows. You drove up there the day after the fire crews left and stood in the ash with an empty basket and told yourself you'd find more. You'd drive to Idaho. You'd call the botanist in Missoula.

You didn't.

You don't let yourself think about why.

Under your collar, at the curve where your neck meets your shoulder, the old mark is burning. Not hurting, exactly. Waking up. Like a hand pressed to a window that has been dark for six years.

It's nothing, you tell it. Go back to sleep.

It doesn't.

By ten the breakfast rush has thinned to the regulars: the two retired miners who argue about the Broncos at the counter, the woman from the county road crew who orders pie for breakfast and dares anyone to say something. August sun lies across the red booths. The bell over the door rings every time somebody breathes on it.

Outside, on the sidewalk, your children are running a business.

"Fifty cents," Bodie is telling a man in a feed-store cap, with the confidence of someone who has never been told no in a way he believed. "Or a dollar if you want ice. Ice is extra because it's hard to make."

"It is not hard to make," Elke says from behind the card table, arms crossed. "You put water in the freezer."

"It's hard to wait for."

The man pays a dollar. Bodie looks at you through the window like he just closed a merger.

They're five. They'll be six in October. Bodie has sandy hair that sticks up in back no matter what you do to it and talks to everyone. Elke has hair as black as a crow's wing and talks to almost no one, and when she does it's usually to correct them. They have the same eyes. Everyone in Gilt Hollow says so: what striking eyes, where did they get those eyes. Storm gray, with a thin ring of gold around the pupil that catches the light like a coin at the bottom of a creek.

You always smile and say, Their father.

You never say more than that.

"They're going to bankrupt the Kwik Stop," Mags says, coming to stand beside you at the window with a coffee pot. "Twelve dollars before ten. I should hire them."

"Child labor laws."

"In the Hollow? Honey, the Accord doesn't cover lemonade."

You laugh because she wants you to. Gilt Hollow is neutral ground: an old gold camp in a high valley that no pack can claim, under a treaty older than the state. Wolves pass through. Humans live here and mostly don't ask. Mags knows exactly what the Hollow is and has said, more than once, that she has buried a husband and survived the eighties and she is not afraid of anything with a tail.

You love her more than you can say. You have never told her the whole truth either.

Your mark throbs. Hard. You put your hand over it without meaning to.

Mags glances at you. "You okay, Ava?"

"Fine."

Elke's head comes up outside.

It's a small movement. Anyone else would miss it. But you've been watching your daughter for the last month the way you'd watch a pot about to boil: the fevers that come at night, the flash of gold in her eyes when she's angry, the way she sniffs the air now like it's telling her things. Bodie too, though he hides it worse. Their wolves are waking. Years earlier than they should.

Elke is sniffing the air now. Her small face goes very still.

Then you hear it. An engine. Big, low, coming down Assay Street too fast for a town with one blinking yellow light.

A black SUV.

It brakes so hard the tires chirp. It stops crooked across two spaces in front of the Gold Pan, and you see the plate before you see anything else: Montana, and in the corner, small, a sticker of a wolf's head inside a pine tree.

Every drop of blood in your body goes cold and then hot.

No.

"Who parks like that," Mags says.

The driver's door opens.

He gets out slowly, like a man who has been sitting for a very long time. Black hair, too long, as if he's been cutting it himself and stopped bothering. Black T-shirt, wrinkled. A shadow of beard. He is enormous, he was always enormous, six foot four and built like the mountain decided to stand up, and he is so beautiful it still knocks the air out of you, even now, even like this. The woman from the road crew actually puts down her fork.

He looks like he hasn't slept since spring. He looks like he hasn't slept in six years.

He stands in the street with one hand on the open door, and he breathes in.

You know that breath. A wolf tasting the air. A man afraid to believe his own nose.

"Ava," Mags says sharply, "you've gone white as a plate."

You can't answer her. You can't move. The mark on your neck is a brand.

He turns toward the sidewalk. Toward the card table. Toward the hand-lettered sign that says LEMONAID in Bodie's enthusiastic capitals.

He crosses to it in four long strides and then stops, as if he has walked into a wall.

Bodie, who fears nothing, holds up a paper cup. "Fifty cents. Or a dollar with ice."

Torben Dunholt goes down on one knee on the sidewalk, very slowly, until his face is level with your son's. He doesn't take the cup. He's looking at Bodie's eyes. Then at Elke's. Elke, who hides from strangers, who once bit a substitute teacher, doesn't hide. She stares right back at him with her arms crossed and her chin up.

Bodie tilts his head. "Mister? How come you have our eyes?"

Through the glass, you see the Alpha of the Dunholt pack put his hand over his mouth.

Then he lifts his head, past the children, past the sign, through the diner window, and finds you like he always found you, in any room, in any crowd, like there was a rope between you and he only had to pull.

His lips move. You can't hear it through the glass. You don't have to.

He says your name the way a man reads it off a headstone.