Harvest Moon
"I, Dane Wilder, Alpha of Silver Ridge, reject you, Mira Larkin, as my mate."
He said it into a microphone.
That's the part I remember most, even now. Not the words. The microphone. A cheap black wireless one, the kind the Lodge used for bingo nights and the Fourth of July raffle, with a strip of silver duct tape around the handle where someone had dropped it. He held it a little too close to his mouth, so the p in Alpha popped through the speakers in the rafters of the great hall like a small gunshot.
Three hundred wolves heard it.
Ten minutes earlier, I'd been standing in the back of the Lodge's great hall in my mother's blue dress, holding a tray of cider cups, trying not to spill.
October twenty-third, 2021. The Harvest Moon. The biggest night of the year at Silver Ridge.
The great hall was built in 1924 from old-growth Douglas fir the size of church columns, and every year on the Harvest Moon it was strung with paper lanterns and dried cornstalks and garlands of red maple leaves, and every wolf in the pack who'd turned eighteen that year stood in a line in front of the stone fireplace while the moon came up over Wilder Lake. And the elder lit the cedar bowl. And the smoke went up. And if the Moon had chosen you a mate in your own pack, you'd feel it.
The pull.
My mother had told me about it when I was six, sitting on the edge of my bed in our little house behind the Lodge kitchen. It's like somebody tied a thread around your heart, Mira-bird, and then somebody else picked up the other end. And pulled.
She'd died when I was nine. I'd never asked her who had pulled hers.
I wasn't in the line. I'd turned eighteen three years before, in the spring, and felt nothing. That was normal. Most wolves never felt the pull at all. Most married somebody they liked, or somebody their parents liked, and were perfectly happy.
I was twenty-one. I was a second-year medical student at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, on a scholarship, the first Larkin to go to college, home for the weekend to help my father in the Lodge kitchen, because the Harvest Moon feast was three hundred people and my father was the Lodge cook, and the Lodge cook's daughter carried trays.
I was carrying a tray of hot cider when the elder lit the cedar bowl.
And the smoke went up.
And somebody tied a thread around my heart.
It didn't feel like a thread.
It felt like being hit by a truck.
The tray tipped. Twelve paper cups of hot cider went down the front of my mother's blue dress and onto the floor and somebody beside me yelped and I didn't hear it. I didn't hear anything. I was standing in the back of the great hall of the Silver Ridge Lodge with cider soaking through my dress and my heart being dragged out of my chest by a rope, and I was looking across three hundred heads at the high table under the antler chandelier.
At him.
Dane Wilder. Twenty-five. Alpha of Silver Ridge for eleven months, since his father's heart gave out on a hunting trip. Black hair. Green eyes. Six foot three. In a dark wool coat with the Wilder crest on the lapel, a silver W in a circle of pine. Sitting at the center of the high table beside his mother, Vera, in her pearls.
He'd felt it too.
I saw it hit him. I saw his hand, on the table, close into a fist. I saw his head come up and turn, slowly, like a compass needle finding north, until his green eyes found mine across the hall.
For one second—one—his face opened.
I'd known Dane Wilder my whole life. Not well. The Alpha's son and the cook's daughter. He'd been four years ahead of me at the pack school. He'd once, when I was ten, pulled me out of Wilder Lake when I fell through the ice by the boathouse, and carried me to my father's kitchen wrapped in his own coat, and never said a word about it after.
I'd never seen his face do what it did then. Like a door kicked open.
And then he looked to his left.
On his left, at the high table, sat Cora Blackwell.
Twenty-two. Platinum hair, ironed straight. Pale blue eyes. A white cashmere dress that cost more than my father made in a month. The only daughter of August Blackwell, Alpha of the Cascade Crown Pack in Bend, who owned four ski resorts and half the real estate between Sisters and Sunriver, and who had been negotiating, for two years, to merge the Cascade Crown with Silver Ridge.
Everyone knew how the merger would be sealed. Everyone had known since summer.
Cora looked at Dane. Then she looked across the hall at me. At the cider on my dress. At the cook's daughter.
Then she smiled, and leaned over, and whispered something in Dane's ear.
And Vera Wilder, on his right, put her hand on his arm. Lightly. With her pearls catching the lantern light.
I watched his face close.
Like the door had never been opened at all.
He stood up.
The hall went quiet. The Alpha standing during the Harvest Moon meant something. Three hundred wolves turned toward the high table.
He picked up the microphone. The bingo microphone, with the duct tape.
He didn't look at me when he said it. He looked at a spot on the back wall above my head. His voice was flat and even, and the p popped through the speakers.
"I, Dane Wilder, Alpha of Silver Ridge, reject you, Mira Larkin, as my mate."
The silence lasted maybe two seconds.
Then somebody laughed.
I never found out who. Somebody near the front. A short, startled laugh, the way you laugh at a joke you didn't expect. And then somebody else. And then a whole table, the young wolves by the fireplace, laughing and turning around to look at me, at the cook's daughter in the back with cider all down her mother's dress.
Mira Larkin? The healer's kid?
Did you see her face?
Like the Alpha would ever—
At the high table, Cora Blackwell had her phone out. Held low, under the table edge. Filming.
Vera Wilder was smiling. Not much. Just a little. The way you smile when a problem has solved itself.
And Dane stood there with the microphone in his hand, looking at the back wall, waiting.
Waiting for me to say it.
That's how it works. Everybody knows. The Alpha speaks the rejection. The rejected wolf answers. I, Mira Larkin, accept your rejection. And the thread is cut. Both ends. Clean. Like it never happened.
Three hundred wolves were waiting for me to say it.
My heart was being torn out of my chest by a thread I'd felt for eleven seconds.
I looked at Dane Wilder.
He looked at the wall.
I didn't say it.
I put down the empty cider tray on the nearest table, very carefully, so it wouldn't make any noise.
I walked out.
Through the back of the hall. Through the double doors. Past the coat racks and the boot trays and old Mr. Abernathy at the door, who looked at me with his mouth open and didn't say anything. Out onto the Lodge's wide front porch, into the cold.
It had started to snow.
The first snow of the year. Early. Big soft flakes coming down out of the black sky over Wilder Lake, catching the light from the Lodge windows, landing on my hair and my bare arms and my mother's ruined blue dress.
Behind me, through the doors, I heard the noise of the hall come back. Voices. Somebody turning the music back on. Somebody calling Dane? Dane, where are you going— and Vera's voice, sharp, Sit down, darling.
I walked down the porch steps and around the side of the Lodge to the kitchen door.
My father's kitchen. Where I'd grown up. Where my mother had taught me to make bone broth and mix poultices for the pack's sprains and burns, before she died. Where I'd carried trays for eleven years.
The kitchen door was closed.
I tried the handle. It was locked.
Through the window, I could see my father. Tom Larkin. Forty-seven. In his white apron, at the big steel stove, with his back to the door. He'd heard. Of course he'd heard. The kitchen had speakers too.
I knocked.
He didn't turn around.
I knocked again.
He put down his spoon. He turned around. He looked at me through the window in the kitchen door, with the snow coming down behind me, and his face—his tired, flat, beaten face—did something I'd never seen it do.
It closed. Just like Dane's.
"You shamed us," he said. Through the glass. I could barely hear him. "In front of the whole pack. In front of the Alpha's family. What were you thinking, Mira? Standing there? Not answering?" He shook his head. "Go back to school. Don't come back here. I can't—" He stopped. "I can't have this in my kitchen."
He turned around. He picked up his spoon.
I don't remember deciding to go to the boathouse. My feet took me there, down the path along the shore, to the place where he'd once pulled me out of the ice.
He was already there.
Dane Wilder, in his dark wool coat, with snow in his black hair and his chest heaving as if he'd run the whole way. As if the thread had dragged him down the hill the same way it was dragging me.
"Mira." His voice cracked on it. "I'm sorry. I had to. The mill. Six hundred jobs. I had to—"
"Then why are you here?"
He didn't have an answer. He just looked at me the way he had for those eleven seconds in the hall, with the door kicked open, and the thread pulled tight between us, and I stopped being able to think about anything at all.
What happened in that boathouse is mine. I'm not going to tell it here.
Afterward, he held his coat around both of us and didn't say anything for a long time. Then his phone buzzed in his pocket. And buzzed. And buzzed. Mother. Mother. Cora.
He stood up. He didn't look at me.
"Tomorrow they announce the engagement," he said, to the boathouse wall. "This can't change anything. I'm sorry."
And he went back up the hill to the Lodge, and left me there in his coat.
I took it off and left it on the boathouse floor.
I walked down the Lodge road in the snow.
I didn't have a coat. My coat was on the rack inside the hall. I didn't have my car keys; they were in my coat. I didn't have my phone; it was in my coat too. I had my mother's blue dress, soaked with cider and going stiff in the cold, and her silver crescent-moon pendant around my neck, and a thread in my chest that someone was still pulling on.
Hard.
It didn't stop. That was the thing nobody told you. He'd rejected me. I hadn't accepted. And the thread didn't break. It just—stretched. Further and further, the further I walked from the Lodge, until it felt like it would tear me in half.
I walked four miles in the snow. Down the Lodge road. Through the gate. Onto Highway 26, heading west, in the dark, in the first snow of the year, with the logging trucks going by and spraying slush.
At 2:14 a.m., a truck stopped.
An old green Ford pickup with Washington plates and a dented tailgate. The passenger window rolled down.
Inside, behind the wheel, was the smallest, oldest woman I'd ever seen. White hair in a long braid. A face like a walnut. A clay pipe clenched in her teeth, unlit. A wool cardigan with leather elbow patches over a flannel nightgown.
She looked at me. At my dress. At my bare arms. At the crescent moon around my neck.
Her eyes narrowed.
"Well," she said, in an Irish accent so thick I could barely understand it. "You're Hanna Larkin's girl."
"How do you—"
"I felt a thread tear across three counties at nine-forty tonight and it woke me up out of a sound sleep in Seattle." She took the pipe out of her mouth. "Get in the truck, child. You'll freeze. And you're going to need a doctor."
"I'm not hurt."
The old woman looked at me for a long moment. At my stomach. Then back at my face.
"No," said Grandmother Orla. "But in about nine months, you will be."
July 2022. Seattle.
The twins were born at 3:12 and 3:19 a.m. on July nineteenth, in the healing house of the Moon Council of the Northwest, on a hill above Puget Sound, in a room with a window open to the salt air.
A boy first. Black hair. Furious.
Then a girl. Dark brown hair. Silent for eleven long seconds—I counted—and then screaming louder than her brother.
And in between the two, at 3:15, while Grandmother Orla held my hand and said Push, child, push, you're a Larkin, act like it—something happened.
I don't remember it. Orla does. She told me later.
She said the light in the room went white. Not bright—white. Like moonlight on snow. She said that for about four seconds, lying on the bed in the healing house in my hospital gown, I wasn't a woman. I was a wolf. Silver-white, every hair, from nose to tail, with gray eyes, and the sound that came out of me rattled the windows.
And then I was me again. Holding a screaming baby girl. With a streak of pure white hair at my left temple that hadn't been there an hour before.
Grandmother Orla sat back in her chair. She took out her clay pipe. She looked at me for a very long time.
"Well," she said. "That explains a great deal."
October 2026.
The summons came on a Tuesday. By courier. To my apartment in Portland. Sealed with the Moon Council's crescent in silver wax.
To Dr. Mira Larkin, Chief Healer of the Moon Council of the Northwest:
The Silver Ridge Pack has formally requested the Council's Chief Healer under Article Nine of the Accord. Their clinic reports an outbreak of unknown poisoning among the pack's young.
And their Alpha is dying.
