Love beyond the moonlights

Elena Rose had learned to tell the hour by the sound of her aunt's footsteps.

Heavy and slow meant evening, when Margaret came home from the roadhouse smelling of fried onions and cheap whiskey. Quick and sharp meant morning, when there were chores to be found and faults to be counted. And no footsteps at all, only a long, listening silence on the other side of the bedroom door, meant that something had gone wrong and Elena would be blamed for it.

Tonight the silence stretched until the candle in her hand had burned down a finger's width.

"Elena." The door opened without a knock. "You have been standing at that window for an hour."

"I was only looking at the moon."

"Don't." The word came out too fast. Margaret crossed the room and yanked the curtain closed, and for a heartbeat her face was lit from below, and Elena saw something she had never once seen there. Fear.

"It's only the moon, Aunt Margaret."

"It is not only anything." Margaret's fingers tightened on the curtain. "Tomorrow night you stay in this house. You don't go to the roadhouse, you don't go to the market, and you don't go anywhere near the trees. Do you understand me?"

Elena understood nothing. But she was twenty-two years old and had spent every one of those years learning that questions were a luxury, so she nodded and said, "Yes, ma'am."

When the door had shut, she pressed her palm to the window glass through the curtain and felt the cold of the night. Somewhere beyond the sleeping town of Pinehollow, the forest began, black and endless, and in the sky above it the moon was swelling toward a color she had never seen it wear.

Red. Faintly, wrongly red, like a coin held up to a fire.

The house had never been a home. It was a narrow wooden box at the end of Marrow Lane, with a leaking roof, a locked door at the bottom of the cellar stairs that Elena was forbidden to touch, and a single photograph of nobody on the mantel, a frame holding only a pressed silver leaf.

She had come to it at the age of five, carried through the snow in someone's arms. That was all she remembered. A voice singing low and broken. A scent like rain on warm stone. Then Margaret's door, and Margaret's face, and the words that had become the first law of her life: You are lucky I took you. Nobody else would have.

She had believed it for seventeen years.

She believed it still, mostly. But lately, in the hour before sleep, she had begun to feel something else, a restlessness under her skin as if her own body were a coat that no longer fit. Her hearing had sharpened until the neighbors' quarrels came through three walls. Smells arrived like blows: the iron in a butcher's cart, the sweetness of a stranger's perfume, the rot beneath the river ice. And at night, just as she slipped under, there was the dream.

A great silver wolf, standing on a ridge of snow. It never moved and it never spoke. It only looked at her with eyes the color of the moon, as though it had been waiting a very long time.

Elena had told no one. There was no one to tell.

At the roadhouse the next evening, Margaret's warning was already forgotten, because Margaret herself had forgotten Elena. A wedding party had taken over the long table, and the owner, a bald and sweating man called Dunmore, kept bellowing for more ale.

"Rose! Table nine!"

Elena carried six tankards at once, a trick that had taken a year of burned wrists to learn, and she was halfway across the room when the lamps flickered.

Every one of them. All at once.

Conversation faltered. A glass slipped from somebody's hand. And in the sudden hush, Elena heard it clearly through the wall and the wind and the whole length of the dark: a long, rising howl, far away in the forest, answered by another, and another, until the whole night seemed to be singing.

The tankards trembled in her hands. Nobody else in the room looked up.

Nobody else can hear it.

The thought arrived whole and cold. Elena set the ale on table nine with great care, because she did not trust her fingers to hold it any longer, and walked straight through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard.

The air bit at her face. Above the roofs of Pine hollow the moon hung low and enormous, and it was red, truly red, the color of a wound just opened.

Her wrist began to itch.

She pushed back her sleeve. There was nothing there but pale skin and the thin blue veins she had looked at ten thousand times. And yet the itch deepened, warm, then hot, as though something beneath the skin were turning toward the moon the way a flower turns toward light.

Behind her the kitchen door banged open. "Rose! Get back in here, or by every god you're finished!"

Elena did not turn. Out in the forest, the howling had stopped. In its place was a silence so deep and so attentive that it felt like a held breath.

Something was coming.

And for the first time in seventeen years, Elena Rose was not afraid of her aunt's silence. She was afraid of what lay beyond it.