Chapter 003 — The Letter in Gray Parchment

The postman in Alder Hollow was a man named Earl who had been on the same route for twenty-two years. Evelyn had never once in three years received anything from him that was not a bill, a catalog, or a Christmas card from her aunt in Portland.

So when she found the envelope on the step at seven in the morning, she did not think it was from Earl.

It was gray. It was thick. It felt like leather, not paper. The flap was sealed with black wax, and pressed into the wax was a sigil — a wolf, curled into a circle, biting its own tail. Evelyn stood on the step in her bathrobe with her coffee mug and stared at it for a long time.

She had seen that sigil once before. Three years ago, on a road in northern Idaho, pinned to her windshield with a silver knife. The note had said one line. She had never forgotten it.

She picked the envelope up with her sleeve. She carried it inside like it was a dead bird.

Elias was in the kitchen in the deer-print apron she had bought him at the thrift store because he had called it "the most responsible-looking garment in the store." He was stirring a pot that smelled, unfortunately, like burnt onions.

"Good morning. I am making a stew. It says beef broth and root vegetables."

"What is in the pot, Elias?"

"Beef broth. Root vegetables. A little bit of garlic. Also —" he hesitated "— also flour. I put flour in to make it thick."

"How much flour?"

"A cup. Maybe a cup and a half. The recipe was not very specific."

She looked in the pot. The stew had become a pale, lumpy paste. It bubbled quietly. It did not look like food. It looked like cement that had recently given up on being cement.

"That is a very ambitious stew," she said.

"I think it needs more salt."

"Elias. Did you put sugar in instead of salt?"

He looked guilty. "The jars look the same."

She took the spoon from him, turned off the burner, sat him down at the table, and put the gray envelope in front of him.

"Before we deal with the stew. Look at this."

He turned it over. He did not touch the wax. "Is it a bill?"

"No."

"Is it from your aunt?"

"That is what I would like to know."

She opened it with a knife. The wax cracked. Inside was a single sheet of the same gray leather-paper. The handwriting was sharp and slanted, the same angular script as the pages under her flower shelf. She had spent three years learning to read them.

The note said:

He should come home. Do not hold what you cannot keep.

She read it twice. Then she folded it very small and put it in the pocket of her bathrobe.

"Evelyn? You went white. What did it say?"

"It was junk mail."

"Junk mail in leather?"

"The new kind."

He did not believe her. But he had learned in three months that when Evelyn's face did that polite, closed, I-am-not-talking-about-it thing, it was better to let it go.

"Okay," he said. "Do you want toast instead of stew?"

He made her toast. He did not burn it. One of the small miracles of her life.

She locked up at lunchtime, told Elias she was running an errand, and took the letter out behind the shop. She poured kerosene on it and lit it. The gray leather-paper burned slow. The wax sigil curled. For a second in the flame she thought she saw the wolf move — the tail unwinding, the head lifting — and then it was ash. She scattered the ash in the flower bed.

She came back inside. Elias was scrubbing the cement-stew pot with a wire brush, humming off-key. He turned around. He smelled the air. He frowned.

"Evelyn. You smell like smoke."

"I burned toast again."

"You didn't burn toast. I made the toast."

"I burned something else."

"What did you burn?"

"Junk mail."

He came closer. He leaned down, very slowly, and sniffed the side of her neck.

She froze.

He pulled back. His brow was furrowed. He was looking at her with an expression she had never seen on him — not confused, exactly, but reaching. Like he was trying to remember something by smell alone.

"That scent," he said. "What is that?"

"What scent?"

"On you. It is —" He stopped. "It is familiar. I think I have smelled it before. A long time ago. It makes my chest feel tight."

"Elias —"

"I don't know what it is." He shook his head. The expression cleared. He smiled, a little sheepish. "It smells like home, I think. Is that weird?"

She put her hand on his chest. His heart was beating fast under her palm.

"It is not weird. It is just me. I have always smelled like this."

"Have you?"

"Mm-hm."

He nodded. He went back to his pot. She stood in the doorway and thought about the pages under the flower shelf, and the fact that the amnesiac wolf king could smell the mate bond through his own seal.

That night, after he was asleep, she pulled the sheaf out again. She turned to the page she had not dared read before. It was a drawing. A man standing in the center of a circle. Lines wrapping around his limbs, his throat, his eyes. They looked like chains. They looked like armor.

Beneath the drawing, in the same angular script, were three words.

Voluntary. Forbidden. Price.

She stared at the drawing. She knew the spell could be cast two ways — forced on a prisoner, or chosen by the caster. She had always assumed the first.

She looked at the sleeping man on the couch. He was curled around Buttons.

She closed the sheaf. She put it back.

Later, when his breathing went deep and even, she went outside. The mud behind the shop was soft from the rain. She knelt with a flashlight.

There were three new sets of prints in the mud. They were huge. They went around the shop once, slow and deliberate, and ended at the back step, exactly below the window of the room where Elias slept.

They were fresh. Made since sunset.

She stood up. Somewhere past the tree line, far enough that it might have been the wind, she heard a long, low sound that was not the wind.

She locked the back door twice. She set the silver blade on the windowsill. Then she went inside and sat on the floor next to the couch, took Elias's hand, and held it until her own hand stopped shaking.