The Extra Howl

I keep the tally on the back of a flour sack because the official clipboard lives in the Alpha's kitchen and comes back with the numbers he likes.

Three-note hitch, then a drop. Lila did that when she was teasing the dogs. Lila has been listed dead since the mill fire.

The pack stood in the gravel yard. Radios crackled on the porch. Someone's stew boiled over; I could smell scorched onion through the screen door.

I marked twenty-nine howls. Roster said twenty-eight.

Last month I had told myself it was an echo off the grain silo. This month the extra came from the mudroom, not the tree line. Same hitch. Same drop. Too close, too indoor, like a throat working around a rag.

The Alpha's mate opened the kitchen door with a ladle and smiled like I had miscounted the onions.

Behind her, something thumped the washer.

My name is Cole. I count because my father counted, and because the continental levy is based on heads. More howls than wolves means someone is padding. Fewer howls than wolves means someone is hiding deserters. Either way, the Alpha's kitchen clipboard has never loved a man with a pencil.

I waited until the yard emptied and the radios went back to weather. I wiped flour off my fingers and went around the side of the house, past the trash cans that always smell like fish bones on Fridays.

The mudroom window was cracked for steam. I heard the washer knock a second time, not mechanical. A heel.

I am not an enforcer. I bake on weekdays and I count on moons. I still know how to open a latch without announcing myself.

Lila was on the linoleum between the washer and a stack of boot trays. Duct tape on her mouth. A chain on her ankle bolted to the water pipe. She was thinner. She smelled like laundry soap and fear-sweat and *Lila*, which is a smell I would know in a fire.

I pulled the tape. She didn't scream. She whispered, because she is smarter than I am.

"Don't shift. He counts shifts on the porch camera."

The Alpha's house has a camera because the Alpha believes in loyalty and also in footage.

"You died," I said, which was a stupid thing to say to a living mouth.

"I ran from the mill," Lila said. "He found me. He needed a second voice. The levy inspector comes at dawn. We're short six. The six went to the labor camp in the next county. He sells them. I howl twice. Different rooms. He taught me to throw the hitch toward the yard."

The hitch. My extra. Her cadence, used like a rubber stamp.

From the kitchen, the Alpha's mate called, "Cole? You left your sack."

I put my body between Lila and the door. "I'm getting a bag of onions," I called, which was almost true. There were onions in a crate. I also had a bolt cutter in the truck because I had been meaning to fix the pasture gate.

I went out the side, got the cutters, came back. The chain was cheap. The crime was not. The bolt snapped with a sound like a small bone.

Lila stood on pins-and-needles feet. I gave her my jacket. We did not hug. Hugging is a noise.

The Alpha, Rigg, came in from the porch with a smile that had been used on inspectors before. He saw the cut chain. The smile stayed a second too long, then fell off.

"She's a deserter," he said. "I was correcting her. The pack doesn't need a scandal before levy."

"The pack needs six wolves who aren't in a camp," I said. "And a howl that belongs to a person, not a trick."

His mate stood in the kitchen doorway with the ladle. She looked at Lila's ankle, then at the porch camera she had installed after Rigg blamed a missing ration shipment on her. She set the ladle down.

"I thought she was a cousin hiding from a bad match," she said. "You told me that, Rigg. You told me the extra howl was the silo. The camera keeps thirty days. Does it also show the labor dispatcher?"