The Spring Between Us

Chapter 19: A Kiss Under Red Rock

The board came up with a sound like a tooth being pulled.

Under it was a space no bigger than a hat box, lined with oilcloth, and in the space there was a bundle wrapped in a second layer of oilcloth and tied with string. I lifted it out and set it on the floor and untied the string, and the oilcloth came away and inside it there was a sheet of hide, older and darker than the one in the attic, and a small brass case.

The hide was the pact.

I knew it before I had read a word of it. It was written in two hands, one at the top and one at the bottom, and between them there were marks and lines and a drawing of the canyon with the spring and the quarry and the mesa all on it, and at the bottom of it there were four names and four marks pressed into the hide.

The top two names were the Alpha of the Kızıltaş pack and the Luna of the Çöl pack, and they were written in the same year, two generations back, and beneath their names somebody had drawn a small silver crescent. The bottom two names were newer. One of them I did not know. The other was my father's.

I sat on the floor of my mother's room with the hide in my lap and my hands shaking. My father had been one of the pair. My father had been bonded to a woman I had never heard of, and my mother had carried a mark and would not say whose, and the whole of it was more than I could hold in my head at once.

The brass case had a clasp on it. I opened it. Inside there was a rolled paper, and the paper was a letter in my mother's hand, dated four weeks before she died.

Derya. If you have found this then I did not get to the Council in time. The pact is real and it is older than the Council and it says the water under this canyon belongs to the two packs and to no one else. The Council took the pact from the record room in my grandmother's time and hid it. I have found a copy and I am going to take it to the Council of Alphas and make them read it aloud in front of both packs. If I do not come back, take it to Hank. Not to Ruth and not to Silas. To Hank. He is the only wolf in this canyon whose blood is on that paper.

I read it twice. Then I folded it and put it in my pocket and sat on the floor with my back against the bed and my hand over my mouth.

There was a knock at the door. I did not answer it, and the door opened anyway, and Cal came in with his sleeve rolled up and a bandage on his forearm and his face still pale under the freckles.

"Luna," he said. "I am sorry to come in without being asked. Mira said I should find you and not let you be alone."

"Cal." I could not look at him. "I bit you."

"You did." He sat down on the floor across from me with his back against the wall. "It hurt and it bled and Mira put something on it that stings worse than the bite. But I am not angry with you and I want you to stop looking at the floor like a dog that has been kicked."

"I could have killed you."

"You could have." He said it plainly. "You did not. Berik got between us and you stopped. That is the thing I keep thinking about. You stopped." He looked at the hide in my lap. "What is that?"

I told him. I told him about the pact and the two pairs and my father's name at the bottom, and Cal listened with his back against the wall and his bandaged arm in his lap, and when I was done he said, "Your mother's letter says take it to Hank."

"Yes."

"Then we take it to Hank." He got up. "Not through the gate. Ruth has warriors on the gate now and she is standing in the yard talking to every wolf who comes past. There is a way out through the old wash behind the stable. I used it when I was a boy to get to the creek without my father seeing me."

We went out through the wash with the pact inside my jacket and the brass case in my pocket and the sun going down behind the mesa. We took the horses and rode south along the fence line and then down the long slope to the creek bed, and the mark on my arm was warm and pulling and I knew where I was going before I saw the lantern.

He was at the place where the creek bed turned under the red rock overhang, where the old miners had cut a shelter into the cliff, and he was alone. He had a fire going and his horse tied in the rocks and he was sitting on a flat stone with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, and when he heard the hooves he came up off the stone fast.

"Derya." He looked past me at Cal, and at the horses, and then at my face. "What happened?"

Cal stayed with the horses. I walked to the fire and sat down on the stone and told him. I told him about the hall, and the bite, and Ruth, and my mother's floor. I gave him the pact and the letter and watched him read it by the firelight with his jaw getting tighter and tighter, and when he was done he sat back and looked at the rock overhang above us for a long time.

"My father is the other name," he said.

"Yes."

"My father has been dead for twenty years and I have been told all my life that he died of a fever in the winter and that my mother ruled alone after him." He turned the hide over in his hands. "This says he was bonded to your father. This says the two of them swore the old pact again on the water." He looked at me. "Derya. My mother knew. She has been sitting in her house by the spring for twenty years and she knew, and she never told me."

"She will tell you now. She is at my pack house with a cup of tea and she has already adjourned the inquiry once because I was making a mess of it."

"That is my mother." He almost smiled. Then his face went serious again. "There is something I have to say to you and I have been putting it off since the pasture and I am not going to put it off anymore."

"Not tonight."

"Tonight." He put the pact down on the stone between us and turned to face me. "At the Council gathering three months ago I saw you across the hall and I knew. I told you that at the spring house. What I did not tell you was that I went home that night and sat in my own hall and told myself it was nothing, that a bond between rival Alphas is a lie and a trap and a Council story, and that I would forget it by winter. And then I did not forget it. I have not slept properly in three months. I have been watching the border and telling myself it was the water, and then you came over the rim with your poison in your pocket and I smelled you in the dark and I knew exactly what I had been waiting for."

"Hank."

"I am not asking you for anything." His voice had gone rough. "We made a rule at the gate. No touching, no nights, nothing until Silas is finished. I meant it and I still mean it. But I am not going to sit under this rock with the two of us alone and pretend I do not want to."

I looked at him across the stone. The fire was low and the red rock overhang was lit from underneath and the mark on my arm was hot and steady, and my wolf had come awake and she was not pressing at my skin tonight. She was quiet. She was watching.

"The rule was for the pack," I said.

"It was."

"The pack is not here."

"No." He looked at me. "It is not."

I reached across the stone and put my hand on his face, and the moment my palm touched his jaw the mark on my arm flared and the whole canyon went warm, and I heard his breath go out of him.

Then he kissed me.

I had been kissed before. I had been kissed in the yard by a warrior when I was seventeen and it had been dry and brief and I had laughed about it with my mother afterward. This was not that. This was the bond coming down through both of us at once, and it was not gentle, and I did not want it to be. His hand went into my hair and his mouth found mine and I pulled him closer and he came, and the fire and the rock and the canyon went away and there was only the heat of him and the smell of juniper and the mark on my arm burning like a coal.

I do not know how long we stayed like that. Long enough for the fire to burn down. Long enough for my coat to come off my shoulders and his hand to find the small of my back. He pulled away first, with his forehead against mine and his breathing ragged.

"We made a rule," he said.

"I know."

"We are breaking it."

"I know." I did not let go of his jacket. "Hank. There is a thing I have to say too, and then I will stop. When I came over that rim with the poison in my pocket I had nothing. My mother was dead and my pack was turning from me and I did not have a single wolf I could trust. I have been alone for three weeks. And then you stepped out of that spring house with a tin cup in your hand and looked at me like weather coming in, and I have not been alone since." I looked at him. "I do not know what we are going to do about the Council or the packs or any of it. But I am not going to pretend I do not want to be here with you. I am done pretending."

He kissed me again, softer this time, and when he let me go he picked up the pact from the stone and put it in my hands.

"Then we finish this," he said. "Tomorrow I will go to my mother and put this paper in front of her and make her tell me what she knows. You will go back to your pack house and you will not let Ruth see you flinch. And when the inquiry sits again at sundown, you will bring the pact and I will bring my mother, and we will put it on the table and make them all read it."

"And if Silas tries to stop us?"

"He will." Hank looked at the fire. "He has been coming to this canyon for nine years and he will not give up the water without a fight. The question is what kind of fight."

Out in the dark beyond the firelight, Cal's voice came sharp. "Luna. Rider coming."

We were on our feet before he finished. Hank put his hand on my arm and pulled me back into the shadow of the overhang, and we stood there with the fire behind us and the dark in front of us and heard the hooves come down the creek bed at a walk.

A single horse. A single rider. The horse came into the firelight and stopped, and the rider got down without hurrying and took off his hat, and his silver hair was bright in the firelight and his pale blue eyes were pleasant and calm.

"Luna," Silas said. "Alpha. I thought I would find you together." He reached into his coat and brought out a folded paper with a Council seal on it. "The Council of Alphas has instructed me to deliver this to the Luna of the Kızıltaş pack before the inquiry resumes at sundown. It is a formal demand. Under the old law of the truce, the Council requires proof of any mate bond between the Alphas of rival packs, and it requires that the proof be given in public, before the Council, within three days." He held the paper out. "The Council is very interested in what it will find."