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. She looked at me. 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."

"Go back to the stew," Rigg said.

She did not.

I am not brave. I am a man who can smell scorched onion and know when a kitchen is lying. I lifted the flour sack tally so the numbers faced him.

"Twenty-eight on your clipboard. Twenty-nine in the yard. One of them was my sister in your mudroom. The inspector can hear a hitch as well as I can. Or I can call the inspector now, from the porch radio, and we can all count together."

Rigg's hand went toward the knife block. His mate stepped to it first and took the block to her chest like a casserole.

"You will not cut a baker in my kitchen," she said. "I live here. I eat here. I will not eat a levy fraud."

Lila's voice was raw. "The six are at Harrow Camp. I heard the dispatcher on his phone. Tuesdays."

The porch radio was still on. I clicked it to the continental channel. The inspector's aide answered on the second try, bored, eating something crunchy.

I said the words: short six, extra howl, living witness, mill fire false. I said my sister's name. I said Harrow Camp. I did not dramatize. Inspectors hate theater.

Rigg sat down in a kitchen chair as if someone had taken his knees. The camera on the porch would have that, too.

They came at dawn, as levy people do. They smelled the mudroom. They photographed the pipe. They took Lila's statement at the table with coffee I made because my hands needed a job. They took Rigg in a truck that did not belong to our pack.

The new count at the next moon was twenty-two. Honest. Painful. We lost the padded pride and we got six names back on a list headed *located*. Two of them came home. Four needed more time than a story has.

Lila sleeps in our father's old room above the bakery now. She still howls on moons. One hitch, one drop, from the yard with everyone else.

I still use the flour sack. The kitchen clipboard is in a drawer. Nobody asks me to make the numbers pretty.

When the extra howl comes now, it is a dog, or a drunk, or the silo for real. I go check anyway. Checking is the job. The hitch is hers again, and she uses it in the open, which is the only cadence I will mark as living.