THREE YEARS OF MONDAYS
1205 Words
My father used to say that a lie held long enough becomes its own kind of truth.
He was wrong. It just becomes exhausting.
I woke up at five forty-three with my spine feeling like someone had worked it over with a hammer. Moon-after mornings were always like this. The bone pain settled in overnight while I slept and by morning it had made itself at home in my shoulders, my lower back, the base of my neck. I had learned to do a quick check before I got up: fingers first, then wrists, then the slow turn of my head side to side. If I could do all three without catching my breath, I was functional.
I was functional. Barely, but it counted.
The mordveil sprig was still on the counter.
I had not moved it last night. Part of me had been waiting to see if it would disappear the way it appeared, quietly, while I wasn’t looking. It hadn’t. It sat there in the early light looking like exactly what it was, a cut herb with a clean stem, something someone had trimmed with care before placing outside my door.
I filled the kettle and stood looking at it while the water heated.
Three people in this pack knew what mordveil was for. Petra, who had been documenting everything the pack refused to see for thirty years. Me, because Petra taught me. And old Dr. Carrow, the pack medic, who was seventy-one and hadn’t walked anywhere after dark since his hip surgery two winters ago.
No note. No name. Just the herb.
Which left one person.
I had been turning that over since yesterday morning and I kept arriving at the same place. Damon Reeves had stood at the edge of the clearing watching the trees I walked out of. Damon Reeves had cut a sprig of mordveil and left it at my door before six in the morning. Damon Reeves, who had filed thirty-one reports in nine years and remanded every single one of those wolves without what anyone would call hesitation.
And had not filed mine.
I could not work out what that meant and it was making me more uneasy than a report would have. A report I knew how to handle. I had a plan for a report. I had been carrying that plan in the back of my head for three years, the way you carry an emergency exit in a building you hope never burns.
Mercy from the man who built the system was not something I had a plan for.
The kettle boiled. I made tea and drank it at the counter and let my mind go back further, to the part I usually kept locked during the day.
My father filed four grievances with the Elder Council in the last two years of his life. Each one documented something wrong. Each one was received with the careful, practiced silence of an institution that had decided the best response to inconvenient truth was to wait for the person telling it to get tired.
He never got tired. He died first.
I was nineteen. My shift had been failing for six months by then and I had not told him, because I had watched what the pack did with Pale wolves and I had looked at my father with his four grievances and his stubborn, costly faith and thought: I cannot be one more thing he has to fight for.
So I hid it. And then he died and I was alone and nineteen and already three months into a lie with no one left to stop for.
I got dressed and went to work.
The pharmaceutical company was forty minutes by train into the city, and the commute was the only part of my day where I felt something close to normal. Pack territory gave way to suburbs and then the city came up around the train and out here I was just a person. No shift record following me. No wellness review on the calendar. No compound math running in the background of every interaction.
I had taken the job two years into hiding, when I understood that one woman working from a house at the edge of pack territory was not a supply chain I could depend on for the rest of my life. I needed to understand what Petra was making well enough to protect it, refine it, source it independently if I had to.
Six months in, I understood it better than either of us had before.
I liked the work because it was real. Extraction studies, compound interactions, what happened when you pulled something out of its natural context and introduced it somewhere new. My supervisor had told me last month that my documentation was the cleanest she’d seen in years. I thanked her and didn’t mention the thirty-six months of unofficial kitchen research that had sharpened my eye for it.
I stayed late because the post-moon days went easier when I stayed busy.
I got home at seven. Ate something standing at the counter. Then I unlocked the small box under my bathroom sink and counted the vials the way I counted them every month, quickly and then again slowly to make sure I had the number right.
Eleven.
I needed fourteen for next month’s cycle. Minimum. More if the moon ran long or the recovery went badly.
Three short.
I needed to get to Petra before the end of the week.
I was making a note on my phone when the paper came under the door. Just the soft scrape of it across the floor, easy to miss. I picked it up.
Pack letterhead. Formal language, standard format. Mandatory Beta check-in meetings for all mid-rank members starting next week. Quarterly procedure.
I had survived seven of these in three years. Different Betas, different junior officers, different rooms. All of them with the same questions: how are you sleeping, how are you feeling, any concerns about your shift health, are you integrating well with the community. Questions I could answer in my sleep because I had answered them so many times that the answers came out smooth and easy and left no edge to catch on anything.
Those meetings had always been run by people who were not especially paying attention.
This one had Damon Reeves’s signature at the bottom.
I looked at the sprig on the counter. I looked at the notice in my hand.
Seven quarterly check-ins in three years and not one of them had come the week after a full moon. Not one had landed two days after I found a cut herb outside my door that only three people in this pack knew the meaning of.
My father believed in coincidence. He believed in a lot of things that turned out not to be true.
I put the notice down on the counter next to the mordveil.
Two days. That was how long I had before the check-in schedule was posted and my name appeared on a meeting list with his.
I needed to get to Petra tomorrow.
- Writer
