THE FORGED LUNA

Chapter 10: The Cellar

Wren stared at him. The pond, the geese, and Theo’s laughter all seemed to pull away from her, like a tide going out.

“Tell me,” she said. “Everything you remember.”

“Little enough. I read it once, in my office, with the door locked.” Abernathy took off his half-moon glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “No claw marks, Miss Hollis. No bite marks. Your father died of a single blade wound beneath the ribs, a silver-edged knife. A wolf in its fury does not carry a knife.”

The words went through her like cold water. She had spent six years believing her own hands had done it. Her hands, now clenched at her sides, felt like someone else’s.

She tried to remember. She always tried. There was a rain-streaked window, a smear of red on the glass, her mother’s voice saying her name. Then white noise, like a radio between stations, and the smell of burnt hair.

“Then who?”

“I do not know. But whoever stole that folder last night knew exactly where to look.” He closed the leather case. “Do not go back to that house, Miss Hollis. My sister keeps a farm two hours north, and no one but me knows its name. I can have a car at the park gate in ten minutes.”

Wren looked at Theo, small and red-cheeked beside the pond, a crust of bread in his fist.

“I cannot leave him.”

“Miss Hollis.” Abernathy’s voice was very gentle. “Before the Moon, you swore he is not your child. If you take him, the law calls it kidnapping, and Mr. Hale will have every wolf in the district hunting you by morning.”

It was a clean, hard truth, and it cut deeper than any blade. She had given up the boy with her own mouth, in a room full of silver light.

“Then I will take him anyway,” Wren said. “Tonight. When the house is asleep.”

Abernathy studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, like a man signing a contract. “Midnight, at the east gate of the Hale grounds. Bring nothing that smells of that house.”

She went home with a plan, a smile, and a sleepy child riding on her hip.

On the walk back, Theo chattered about geese and swans and whether a duck could be a pirate. Wren answered in the right places and memorized the weight of him against her shoulder. If tonight went wrong, she wanted to have held him properly. At the gate he looked up at her with serious gray-green eyes.

“Mama, are we going on an adventure?”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re holding me really tight.”

The plan lasted until a quarter to five.

Theo napped. Wren packed. She worked in the nursery with the door closed, folding his small clothes into her market bag, then adding a dinosaur, two storybooks, and the blue blanket that smelled of milk and rain. Her hands moved faster than her thoughts. Every cupboard door she eased shut sounded to her like a gunshot.

Under the mattress she found the envelope she had kept for five years, grocery coins skimmed a few at a time for a day she had never let herself name. It was not enough to buy a life. She pushed it into the bag and told herself it was enough to start one.

Then, downstairs, a car door slammed. Two car doors.

Gideon’s voice carried up the stairwell, clipped and furious, a tone she had never heard from him. “Where is she?”

Behind her ribs, her wolf rose, bristling, and for one wild second Wren felt her gums ache with the memory of teeth.

“Upstairs, sir. The nursery, I believe.” The cook’s voice held a small crack of pleasure. “She took the old green shawl this morning and left her coat. I thought it odd.”

Wren zipped the bag. Too slow.

The door opened. Gideon stood on the threshold with his collar crooked and a bundle of white cloth in his fist. Handkerchiefs, stiff and stained gold. Marlene stood behind him in her cream coat, Wren’s brown one over her arm.

“The charm has been silent since half past eleven,” Marlene said, almost sadly. “A charm on a hook hears no heartbeat. I thought, surely not. Surely our Wren would not.”

Gideon threw the handkerchiefs at her feet. They struck the floor with a dry little slap. “Three days. You have been spitting it out for three days.”

“It made me ill,” Wren said. “I did not want to worry you.”

“Of course you did not,” Marlene murmured, and bent to pick up one handkerchief between finger and thumb. She sniffed it delicately. “And Mr. Abernathy? Did he make you ill too?”

“Enough,” Gideon snapped. “The tonic. Abernathy. The bag.” He seized her wrist, hard enough to bruise. “Where were you taking my son?”

Wren did not flinch. She had no breath left to flinch with. She had heard that word through a wall, and it had already done its worst.

It was Marlene who noticed. Her gentle eyes sharpened into something cold and exact.

“She did not blink,” Marlene said softly. “Gideon. She did not even blink.”

Silence. Gideon’s grip slackened, then tightened again. “The Registry,” he said slowly. “Dunmore swore no one was listening.”

“The wall was thin,” Wren said. It was the only truth she had left, and she handed it over without a tremor.

Gideon’s face did something terrible. The warmth drained from it all at once, like water through a cracked cup, and what remained was a stranger’s, pale and tight and almost bored.

“Then we do this properly,” he said.

She screamed once, for Theo, before Marlene’s cool palm closed over her mouth. “Hush, dear. You will wake him.” They took her down the back stairs, through the kitchen and the cold pantry, past the cook, who found something fascinating in the floor.

Her slippers slapped the stone steps. Each stair was colder than the last.

The cellar smelled of damp stone and old wine. A single bulb swung overhead, throwing the shadows of the racks across the walls like prison bars. Wren had been down here a dozen times for preserves and never once smelled what she smelled now.

Behind the last wine rack, in a wall she had always taken for bare brick, stood a door.

It was low and black and banded with iron, bound with a coil of silver wire, and over the lock someone had carved a lily. Behind it, thin as breath, came a scent that made her wolf wake and lunge against her ribs. Milk. Blood. Her own scent, old as dust, soaked into the stone.

Her wolf strained toward it, whining, and for a moment Wren forgot the stairs and the two people behind her. She knew that smell. She had been in that room. She did not know how she knew.

“Do not look at that,” Marlene said sharply, and turned her chin with two fingers.

From her medical bag she drew a pair of cuffs, plain and bright. Silver. Wren’s wolf snarled, high and thin, before the metal even touched her. Gideon pinned her arms. The cuffs closed around her wrists with a soft double click, and the pain hit like boiling water.

She bit her lip until it bled. Then she begged anyway.

“Theo,” Wren gasped. “Please. If he wakes and I am gone, he will be frightened.”

“He will wake to his mother,” Marlene said gently. “He will not notice the difference.”

They chained her to an iron ring in the wall. Marlene stroked her hair once, almost fondly, and went up the stairs, her heels clicking all the way to the top.

Gideon went last. On the bottom step he stopped, one hand on the rail.

“Gideon,” she whispered. “I loved you. Truly.”

At the top of the stairs he paused with his hand on the door, and for one moment he looked almost like himself, tired and handsome and sorry.

Then the bulb went out, the key turned, and the lock clicked.

“You were supposed to be grateful,” Gideon said.