The Sacred Luna

Chapter 2

(Sanya’s POV)

The agreed spot is a crossroads, which I now think is a very stupid place to stand in the dark, alone, for this long.

I've been here an hour. Maybe more. The moon has moved — I've been watching it the way you watch a clock when you're waiting for something that should have happened already — and it tells me it's later than I want it to be.

That's fine. He's late. There are a thousand reasons a person can be late.

I list them in my head. The road. His mother. A goodbye that went longer than expected because she held his wrist and wouldn't let go. I watched her do that this afternoon. She held his wrist and said something I couldn't hear and he went still, jaw tight, and then he covered her hand with his and held it.

He's late because of that. Because saying goodbye to a woman who is dying takes longer than you plan.

That's the reason.

I check the road again. Nothing moves. The trees are doing that thing trees do at night — standing there, being unhelpful — and the crossroads is empty and the moon has moved another finger-width and I have now thought of eleven different reasons a person can be late that are not the worst thing.

I say his name into the dark. Not loudly. Just Aaron, like a question. Like the dark might pass it on.

It doesn't. --- The sky begins to go from black to the specific grey that happens before colour comes back to the world, and I think: this is the part where I start to worry.

Not that I haven't been worried. I've been worried since the first hour. But there's the worry that is really just impatience dressed up, and then there's the worry that settles in your chest and pushes, slow and steady, until there's no room left for anything else.

This is the second kind.

Where are you?

I don't say it out loud. I just think it, very hard, in the direction of the road. He doesn't appear. Two hours. The sky is almost grey. The plan was before dawn. This is before dawn, technically, but it's the kind of before dawn that is very close to being something else, and I'm standing at a crossroads in the cold with my bag at my feet and my heart doing something uncomfortable in my chest, and I don't know what to do with that except wait.

So I wait.

...

The sound of footsteps comes from behind me, and for one full, complete, embarrassing second, my whole body lifts.

Then I smell them. Pack. Family. My brothers.

Derek's boots have a particular heaviness. He puts his whole weight into every step, like he's proving something to the ground. I know the sound of them the way I know the sound of a door slamming — which is to say, intimately, and without any fondness.

I turn around.

They're both there. Derek looks the way he looks when he has already decided something and is just waiting for you to finish talking so he can confirm he's decided it. Garrett looks at me the way he looks at problems he's already solved.

"Let's go home," Derek says. Not a question.

"No."

"Sanya."

"He's on his way. He's just running late, there was probably—"

"Let's go home."

I take a step backward, which is stupid because there's nowhere to go and we all know it, but I take it anyway because something in me needs to make them work for this. "I'm not going anywhere. He'll be here."

Garrett doesn't raise his voice. He never raises his voice. He's discovered that being very quiet while he says something is more effective than shouting it, and he has been using this technique since we were children and it has never once stopped working on me, which means he will never stop doing it.

"Let's go home, Sanya," he says.

And then Derek takes my arm.

I'm not proud of what happens next. I pull. I twist. I try to get my arm back from a man who has forty pounds on me and has spent the last several years training with the pack warriors, which means the struggling is mostly just embarrassing for everyone involved, but I do it anyway because I don't know what else to do with my hands.

"Stop," Derek says. Not unkindly. Which is somehow worse.

"Let go—" "Stop." "He's coming, just wait, just one more—"

That's when I see it.

Over Garrett's shoulder. Through the tree line, past the road, past the dark spaces between the branches — a column of smoke. Thin at first. Then thicker. Orange at its base where the fire is still eating something.

From the direction of Aaron's pack.

Everything inside me stops.

The struggling stops. The words stop. Derek still has my arm but I'm not pulling anymore because something has gone wrong underneath me, some basic function of the body that I am usually able to rely on, and I'm standing but I'm not entirely sure how.

"Aaron. Aaron—"

Derek's hand covers my mouth. His palm is rough and it presses hard and I'm already screaming but it comes out muffled, wrong, swallowed. I grab at his wrist with both hands and it doesn't matter because he's pulling me backward, away from the road, away from the smoke, and the smoke is still rising over Garrett's shoulder and I can still see it and it's rising and it's— Aaron.

I don't know what sounds I'm making. My throat is doing something without my permission and Derek's hand is pressing and the orange glow at the base of the smoke is the specific colour of something that cannot be put back once it's started, and I know this, I know this, and still I cannot stop looking.

...

The walk home takes twenty minutes.

They flank me the way guards flank someone they don't trust to keep walking in the right direction, which is fair, because I'm not sure I do. My legs work. They just don't feel like mine. There's a particular quality to the ground when something has gone wrong — it feels less certain than it usually does. Like the dirt itself is unsure.

Garrett's voice finds me on my left. "He never planned to come."

I look at him.

His face is cold, certain. Like he's reading from something he prepared beforehand.

"Men like him use women like you to pass time. He knew you'd wait. He knew you'd believe him. That's all this was."

"That's not—"

"You waited two hours alone at a crossroads in the dark." His voice is very reasonable. Very quiet. "Is that the attitude of a man who's serious about you?"

I don't answer, because I don't have any answer to that. Still my mind runs through everything I know about Aaron and I'm trying to make it fit with what Garrett is saying.

It doesn't fit.

Nothing about what he said fits.

Still, I don't say anything. Because the smoke is sitting on my chest like a stone and I can't think of anything past it.

"Go in," Derek says, his voice final.

...

They lock my room. I hear the bolt slide and I sit on my bed and I look at the window and I think. I could open it. I could go back.

I think about the smoke. I think there are a hundred explanations for smoke. A kitchen fire. A controlled burn. Something ordinary that happens at night in packs all the time, something that means nothing, something that is not what it looked like.

I think about the smoke.

I sit with my hands in my lap and I think about the fence post Aaron was fixing this afternoon, the way his hands were patient on everything, the way each hammer strike was precise and unhurried. I think about his mother's cough. I think about the way he said every beginning should have something sweet in it — not like a performance, not like a man trying to charm anyone, but like a fact he'd already decided was true, the same way he'd say the road takes twenty minutes or a fence needs a new nail.

Men who don't plan to come don't pack coconuts for the morning after.

That's what I hold. I hold it the way you hold onto something that might be real and might not be and you can't afford to let go either way, because if you let go then you're left with what Garrett said, and I'm not ready to be left with that. I'm not ready for that to be the story.

But the smoke was real.

I saw it. And I know what I saw.

I close my eyes.

Creator, I pray.

If you're listening, please. Whatever happened tonight. Whatever that smoke was. Please keep him safe. Please.

I stay very still in the dark, bolt on the door and the window locked and the smoke behind my eyes, and I wait for something to answer.

Nothing does.