His Curvy Luna

WILLA

The dress is gone. I know it the second I step into the attic and see the wrong shape hanging behind the door.

Grandma’s dress was the color of teal green, heavy cotton, and unlike most things, cut big enough that I didn’t have to breathe in to wear it.

It’s the same kind of body my grandmother had when she stood behind the pastry board with her sleeves shoved up and her arms strong enough to knead ten pounds of dough.

What’s hanging behind the door now is a slip of pale blue satin that couldn’t have taken more than a yard of fabric to make. It catches the last of the light through the little window and shines like something that was never meant to be worn to a moon ceremony.

I cross the room and lift the sleeve between two fingers. The tag is still stapled to the collar. Size 4. I couldn’t get one thigh into a size 4 if you greased me and pushed.

Clipped to the tag, on a folded square of the diner’s order-pad paper, is a note in my stepsister’s handwriting.

Hope you can squeeze into it! xoxo

Jules is two years younger than me, and this is exactly the sort of kindness she likes to do up in a bow.

I stand there holding the sleeve for a while. Long enough that my arm starts to ache.

When I turn around, Colleen is at the top of the attic stairs. Colleen is my stepmother, Jules’s mother, the woman my father married a year after my own mother left.

She’s already dressed for the valley, hair pinned up, her good gray shawl around her shoulders. Her eyes run over my body, and that usual disgust—the kind that surfaces any time she looks at me—fills her face.

My hand goes straight to my middle, tucking my stomach in. I ate a slice of pie before I came up here, and now I’m sure she can see it on me.

“Go on, cover it,” she says. “Your hands aren’t big enough to hide the half of it.”

The words hit the way they always do, even after all these years.

“I hope you’re not planning to ruin that dress trying to squeeze into it.” I shake my head fast.

I put the blue thing back on the hook. “I’ll wear Grandma’s other dress,” I say.

“Of course you will. Nothing else fits you.” She turns and heads back down the stairs, her heels ticking against each step.

Grandma’s dress is folded in the cedar chest under the window, right where I keep it, because I know better than to leave anything I love hanging in the open in this house.

I shake it out. There’s a soft crease across the middle, and it smells like cedar with flour underneath. I pull it over my head and reach back for the buttons, my fingers find every one of them without looking. It fits. It has always fit. That’s the whole point.

By the time I come down into the valley, the sky has gone the deep bruised blue it turns right before full dark. The whole pack is already gathered along both banks of the creek.

Three hundred people, give or take, coats thrown over their good clothes, because it’s the end of October and the cold comes up off the water.

Not all of them are pack members. The ones who aren’t came down for the hunting. Rifle season opens at first light, and the town always sees it in the night before—hunters, ranchers, the church ladies handing out coffee and foil-wrapped bread to send the men off fed.

To them, tonight is the last easy night before weeks of cold mornings in the trees. It’s the closest thing this town has to money, and they treat the evening before like a holiday.

For us, tonight is something else entirely. We call it the Harvest Moon. It’s the one night of the year the Moon Goddess is supposed to look down and hand you the person you were made for—your mate. Picked out of every soul alive and pressed into your path like it was always meant to be yours.

For twenty-four years, I’ve stood at the edge of this creek on Harvest Moon, and for twenty-four years, nothing has happened to me.

And even if it were true, the Goddess would need something of mine to work with, and she’s never once shown any interest in giving me my wolf.

Most werewolf children get theirs around thirteen—an extra heartbeat inside the chest, a second voice in the head. Jules got hers at thirteen, silver-gray, and the whole town has been gushing over it for nine years.

I waited until sixteen, then eighteen, then twenty, and nothing ever came. The pack has a word for people like me: latent. Silent blood.

The old women in the infirmary examined me three times and shook their heads three times.

So I’m not holding my breath about a mate, because when you’ve already been passed over for the main course, you stop expecting dessert.

I find a spot near the water on the far side from the crowd, where the bank is soft, and I won’t be in anyone’s way. There’s a low log there, half-sunk in the grass. I lower myself onto it carefully, the way I always sit on anything that looks like it might not want me.

The log holds for a breath. Then it gives a long splintering crack that goes off like a gunshot in the cold air. I drop the last few inches onto the ground with a sound everyone hears.

Every head on the near bank turns. For one awful second, nobody says anything, and I’m already scrambling to get my feet under me, my face going hot.

Then a boy near the cider tables points. “She broke it!” He’s maybe sixteen, and he’s laughing so hard he has to grab his friend’s arm. “She’s so big she broke a log clean in half!”

The laugh spreads the way those things do, catching from person to person until it feels like the whole bank is in on it.

I get myself upright and brush the dirt off Grandma’s dress, and keep my eyes down on the water. Tears sting my eyes, but I push them back.

Then the wind shifts.

It comes down off the ridge, cold and clean. It carries something that goes straight through me before I can name it.

Sun-dried tobacco, and cedar, underneath both of those, sharp and metallic, gun oil. The three braid together into one scent.

It runs down my spine like somebody’s poured warm water at the base of my neck and let it spill all the way down, setting fire to everything it touches.

I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. I’ve never held a rifle. I don’t know why I recognize gun oil, or why my knees have gone soft under me.

But I know that scent—not in my head, because my head has no idea, but in my bones. My bones sit up.

Across the creek, Grayson Holt lifts his head.

He’s the largest landowner for forty miles and the hardest man in this town by a wide margin.

He runs the Holt place up in the high country. He comes into the diner maybe once a month, sits at the far end of the counter, drinks his coffee black, and leaves cash folded under the saucer.

The joke around here is that the last time Grayson Holt smiled, Ford was still building the old F-250, and nobody laughs when they say it, because nobody’s sure it’s a joke.

He’s looking at me now, straight across the water, over the heads of a hundred people.

The whole valley goes quiet. Three hundred people are standing along this creek, and every one of them has felt the air change.

Every one of them turns to look at the same thing: at him looking at me, and at me looking back. At the space over the water between us that has suddenly gotten very small.

The Moon Goddess has matched me with the Alpha.

My arm comes up. I reach across the creek toward him. I swear it’s instinct, not me. My hand goes out on its own.

He doesn’t reach back.

He doesn’t wait, either. He gives my heart no time to climb down out of my throat. He opens his mouth, and the old words come out of him fast and flat. Not one syllable softened.

“I, Grayson Holt, reject you, Willa Hale, as my mate and Luna.”