Prologue #2
A tall woman with iron-gray hair and a face like a kind general comes out to meet me.
She introduces herself as Della. She does not shake my hand.
She hugs me. The hug is firm and unhurried and smells like woodsmoke and something herbal, and for a second I forget that I have not been hugged by anyone in eight months.
"You made it," she says, releasing me. "I was starting to worry. The leaning poplar threw a few of our last guests."
"It was almost too leaning to recognize as a poplar."
"That's what we say." She picks up two of my bags with the easy strength of a woman half her apparent age. "Come on. I'll show you to your place."
The cottage is the building from the photograph.
It is small and clean and smells of cedar and recent paint.
There is a bed with a quilt. There is a desk under a window that looks out at the mountain.
There is a kitchen with a kettle already on the stove.
Someone has put a small jar of wildflowers on the windowsill—asters and goldenrod and something purple I don't recognize.
I set my suitcase on the bed.
"Jo wants to meet you when you're ready," Della says. "But there's no rush. Settle in. The clinic's just up the path. Dinner's at six in the main hall if you want to come, or I can bring you a plate. Your choice."
"I'd like to meet Jo first, if she's free."
Della smiles. "I told her you'd say that. She owes me ten dollars."
Dr. Josephine Bellerose—Jo—is a small, sharp woman in her forties with dark braids and reading glasses pushed up on her head.
The clinic is more sophisticated than I expected.
Two exam rooms. A small surgical suite. A pharmacy that is better stocked than the rural urgent care where I did my last contract.
Jo gives me a tour with the brisk efficiency of someone who has given many tours and learned not to ornament them.
She explains the patient roster. She explains the population—three hundred souls, give or take, with a higher-than-average proportion of elderly and a smaller-than-average proportion of children.
She explains the conditions I will encounter, some of which I recognize and some of which I do not.
She uses the phrase the Wasting as if it is a known diagnosis, and when I do not flinch or interrupt to ask, I see her shoulders relax half an inch.
"There's something I need to tell you," she says, "that the contract did not specify. We meant to wait until you were settled, but I think you should know now."
"All right."
She watches me. She is a woman who watches people the way I watch monitors—calmly, completely, without telegraphing the assessment.
"Our population is not entirely human."
I do not say anything.
"The community is composed primarily of wolf shifters.
The medical needs are largely the same as you would encounter elsewhere, but there are species-specific considerations, which I will train you in.
Your patients will, at times, in moments of extreme pain or stress, partially shift.
This is not dangerous to you. It is, however, something you need to be prepared for. "
I take a breath.
I think about Alma Birch's hand in mine eleven hours into the dying.
I think about the six years of hospice work in cabins and trailers and double-wides scattered across these mountains.
I think about my mother, dead at thirty-nine, and the nurse who held her hand at the end—a woman named Marjorie whose face I cannot remember but whose calm I have carried with me like an inheritance.
I think: I have spent my life sitting with the dying. The dying are honest. Species is not the question. Honesty is the question.
I say, "All right."
Jo studies me. Something in her expression shifts—surprise, then something softer.
"You are exactly what we needed," she says.
"Where's the cemetery?"
She blinks. "I'm sorry?"
"The cemetery. On the hill. I saw it from the road. If I'm going to care for the dying, I need to know where they end up. It helps me help them—knowing the place is ready, and good."
For a long moment, Jo doesn't speak. Then she says, very quietly, "Della was right. You're going to fit here."
We walk up the hill.
The cemetery is more beautiful up close than it was from below.
The headstones are not granite or marble.
They are wood—oak, mostly, some cedar—carved by hand, each one different, each one set into the ground with a care that I can feel in my chest. Wildflowers grow between the rows.
A low stone wall edges the boundary. A wrought-iron gate creaks softly in the breeze.
And in the corner of the cemetery, beside a small open-sided shed that I realize is a workshop, a man is building a coffin.
He works with hand tools. A plane. A chisel.
A small mallet. His back is to me, and I see only the shape of him—tall, lean, broad through the shoulders, a flannel shirt rolled to the elbows, silver-streaked dark hair pulled back in a low knot.
His hands move with the unhurried rhythm of someone who has been doing this work for a very long time and does not require speed to be precise.
He stops. He stands very still. Then he turns.
His face is weathered—deep lines around the eyes, a faint scar along the jaw, a mouth that looks like it is more accustomed to silence than to speech.
His eyes are dark. Not black; the deep amber-brown of old wood.
He looks at me the way I imagine he looks at the dead: completely, calmly, without flinching from anything he finds.
"New nurse?" he says.
His voice is low and unhurried and surprisingly warm.
"New undertaker?" I say.
The corner of his mouth lifts. Just the corner. The kind of expression you'd miss if you weren't looking for it.
I extend my hand.
He sets down his chisel and crosses the distance between us, and his hand, when it takes mine, is not what I expect.
I expect cold. I expect the chill that I associate with people who work with the dead, the temperature of basements and morgues and waiting rooms. His hand is warm.
Wolf-warm, I will learn later. Alive-warm.
His palm is callused from the woodwork, and his grip is firm without being aggressive, and he holds my hand a beat longer than he needs to.
"Thaddeus Mercer," he says.
"Rue Whitaker."
"Welcome to Bone Hollow, Rue Whitaker."
The wind moves through the cemetery. The wildflowers nod. The light on the mountain has gone gold and slow, and behind the undertaker the coffin lies half-finished on its sawhorses, smelling of fresh wood and beginnings.
I do not know yet that I will sit by his coffin one day. I do not know yet that he will sit by mine. I do not know that I have just walked into the rest of my life.
I only know that his hand is warm, and that for the first time in six years, I do not want to let go.