The Luna They Buried

The blood was still wet when I got there, which meant the enforcers had left in a hurry and somebody owed me an apology for the short notice.

I set my bucket down on the concrete of the freight platform, flipped the lid off the bleach, and rolled my sleeves past the elbow. The mop handle was cold against my palm. Freight trains groaned somewhere east of the station, hauling scrap through the dark, and the wind off the river carried diesel and rust and, underneath it, the copper smell of a wolf who had died badly.

I dipped the mop and started at the far edge, working in squares. That was the trick. Never look at the whole mess at once. A square at a time, corner to corner, and the night gets smaller.

The Ironjaw enforcers had done their usual work before they called me, which is to say they had dragged the body out and left everything else where it fell. A shoe without a laces. A cufflink snapped in half. A dark smear that led toward the platform's edge and stopped, as if the man who left it had remembered he was supposed to be dead and corrected himself.

I scrubbed over the smear and it came up brown on the bleach water. I tipped the mop into the bucket and wrung it out with both hands, and that was when the gate at the west end of the platform opened.

Rafe Calloway came up the ramp with his coat collar turned against the wind and a notebook already in his hand. He was tall enough that the platform lamps put shadows in odd places on him, under the jaw, behind the ears, and his hair was the color of the old brick on the station wall, a dark red-brown that caught the light when he moved. Grey eyes, the kind that make a woman want to check her face in a mirror.

I did not check my face. I kept scrubbing.

"You're late," I said.

"You're already working." He crouched at the edge of my clean square and looked at the blood I had missed. "I told the enforcers not to touch anything until I got here."

"They don't listen to Gammas with notebooks. They listen to Councilmen with money. You should try money."

Rafe wrote something down. "What did you move?"

"Nothing. I clean floors, Gamma, I don't collect evidence for you. If you wanted the scene preserved, you should have come faster."

"I came as fast as the border patrol let me. A deal went bad on the east line two hours ago. Three wolves dead, one of them Ironjaw."

I wrung the mop out again. "Which one?"

"Bennie. Young. No mate yet."

He said it plain, and I felt the small cold hand of that news close around my chest. Bennie had come to the pack hall last winter for his first assignment, and Marcus had taken him out to the diner on Third to celebrate. Two eggs and a slice of pie. That was what I remembered. Bennie had eaten my brother's pie.

"You knew him," Rafe said.

"Everybody knew him. He had a voice like a busted horn and he asked me to save the coffee grounds for his mother's garden." I dunked the mop and the water turned another shade of brown. "So. East line deal. Who was he dealing with?"

"Rogues. Or men dressed like rogues. The surviving witnesses say the buyer never spoke."

"They never do." I started on a new square, closer to where the blood had pooled. "Whoever it was is probably already across the border. You want my advice, Gamma, you'll give the Council the paperwork they want and let the east line go."

Rafe stood up. He was close enough now that I could smell him past the bleach. Wool and cedar and clean sweat, and something underneath that made the skin on my arms prickle in a way I did not want to think about. His eyes went to my mop, then to my face, and stayed there a beat too long.

"You're good at this," he said.

"I'm good at making things disappear. There's a difference."

"Is there."

There was, and I did not like the way he was looking at me like he already knew what it was. I turned my back and scrubbed at a spot that did not need scrubbing.

Behind me, boots on the metal ramp. Two enforcers, then two more, and then the small crowd that always gathers when there's blood to look at. Marcus was among them, black hair stuck up on one side from his cap, and he gave me a nod that meant we'll talk later. I nodded back.

The platform lights flickered. The wind came off the river hard enough to pull at the hem of my coat, and I heard the gate at the west end open again, and then the crowd went quiet in a way that told me who it was before I turned around.

Vinny Adder walked to the edge of my clean square and looked at the blood on the toe of his polished shoe. He was silver-haired and silver-tongued, and he wore his overcoat like he had been born in it, and when he smiled he did it with his whole face, which is how you know a man has practiced.

"Delphine," he said. "They tell me you found something in the ash."

I kept my mop still. "I found a floor that needed cleaning. I don't know what the enforcers found."

"No, of course not. You only make it disappear." He smiled at his own joke and the enforcers behind him smiled too, a heartbeat late. "I want this one gone by sunrise. No trace, no blood, no evidence for the human police to find. The Luna's death has already made the Council nervous, and I don't want them nervous on my account."

"The Luna's death?" I said. "Bennie died on the east line."

The platform went so quiet I could hear the river.

Vinny's smile did not change. It did not need to. He looked at me for a long, gentle moment, and then he looked at the blood on the platform, and then he looked back at me.

"I admire a cleaner who keeps her squares straight," he said. "Finish this one. We'll talk about the Luna in the morning."

He walked back toward the gate. The crowd parted for him. Rafe did not move, and his jaw was tight, and I saw his hand close slowly into a fist at his side.

I dropped the mop in the bucket and the water jumped. That was when Rafe's fingers closed around my wrist, just above the wet edge of my sleeve, and the world went sideways.

There was heat first, running up my arm from his hand and pooling in my chest like a swallowed coal. Then the sky tilted and my hearing dropped to a single rushing note, and I felt the mop handle bite into my palm even though I had dropped it, and I saw a kitchen I had not seen in years, the green tile behind the stove and a woman's hands cutting an apple in long curls, and a voice that was my mother's said something I could not quite hear.

Then it was gone and I was on the platform with my wrist in Rafe's hand and my heart slamming like a train.

He let go as if I'd burned him. He looked at his own hand, then at me, and there was something raw and frightened in his grey eyes before he pulled it back behind his face.

"You felt that," he said.

"The bleach went to my head." I bent and picked up the mop. My hands were shaking. "Get off my square, Gamma."

He did not move. "I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly. Before tonight, did you ever have a reason to think about the Luna?"

I wrung out the mop and the water ran brown. "I clean her floors, Rafe. That's all I do."

"That isn't what I asked."

Above us, the platform lights hummed. Behind Rafe, the crowd had thinned, and Marcus was still at the edge of the ramp, watching me with his cap twisted in his hands. Beyond the platform roof, the sky was turning the color of old dishwater, and the first train of the morning called from the rail yard, and I had a square of blood left, and the woman in my head was still cutting that apple, and my wolf had not moved in months, and now she was awake.

The crowd left the platform around four in the morning, and the enforcers left after that, and by the time the sky turned grey over the river there was nobody on the freight platform but me and the bucket and whatever was left of the Luna.

I worked the last square with my back to the east gate so I would not have to look at the stain while I scrubbed it. The blood had dried to a dark shell over the concrete, and it took three passes and a hard scrub with the heel of my hand to get it up. The bleach stung the cracks in my knuckles. I kept going.

The bucket water had gone from brown to a thin red, and I knelt and tipped it toward the drain and that was when the reflection changed.

My own face looked back at me from the water, ash blonde hair plastered to my temple with sweat, green eyes wide and tired, and then the water moved and the face was not mine. It was a wolf. A great silver grey thing with its ears flat and its mouth open, and it looked up at me out of the b