Luna Paige's Arc

Chapter 7 of 10

The black wolf did not leave. It followed them home. Luna walked back through the trees with her brother at her hip and the stranger three paces behind, silent as a shadow. At the garden wall her brother stopped and turned. He would not enter the house with it. She understood. She sat on the low stone bench and faced the black wolf alone. "If you were sent to take him, you'll have to go through me," she said. The black wolf lay down in the grass. It set its head on its paws and watched her. Not hunting. Waiting. Michael came out barefoot, a blanket over his shoulders. He saw the second wolf and stopped on the step. Color drained from his face, then came back hard. "Another one," he said. "Wonderful. Should I put the kettle on." "Don't joke." "I joke when I'm scared. You know that." He came down anyway and stood beside her. The black wolf's eyes tracked him and stayed on him. Its tail moved once against the grass. Luna went still. She had seen a wolf look at a person like that only once before, in her own house, at her own brother. She reached into her pocket for the book she had been reading to Michael in his fever. She thumbed to the page she wanted and read the line under her breath. A claim answers a claim. A true name lifts a false one. She stood up. "Michael," she said. "Say your name to it. Your full name. Look at it when you do." He glanced at her. He did not argue. He never argued when she used that voice. "Michael Carney," he said to the wolf. The black wolf rose. It walked to him and pressed its forehead against his knee the way her brother had pressed against hers in the dirt. Then it stepped back and shook itself, hard, like a dog coming out of water, and where the wolf had stood a man was kneeling in the grass. Brown hair. Bare feet. Michael's own face, younger by a year, staring up at him. Michael sat down on the step. "That's my brother," he said. "That's my brother who died at sea." The man in the grass nodded once. He could not speak yet. The curse on him was older than Luna's and quieter, and it had used her three-week clock to find its way home. Luna knelt beside Michael. She took his hand. She had come here to break her own curse and she had broken someone else's instead, and her own still sat on her skin like a second coat. "The pack will still come," she said. "For my brother. For me. This doesn't change that." "No," Michael said. He did not let go of her hand. "But now there are two of us who owe you a wolf."