Chapter 8: Inside the Moon Hall

The whine climbed the back of my skull until my teeth ached.

Under it, so faint I almost missed it, a woman started to cry.

"Bryn," she said.

It was a voice I had never heard, and it knew my name.

My knees gave a little.

"You killed me," the voice said, soft and wet and broken. "You took everything from me."

I put my hands over my ears, and it made no difference.

"It isn't true," I said out loud, to nobody.

My throat closed on the words anyway.

I had heard those same sentences in the whisper of the pack since I was a child.

Hearing them in a crying woman's voice made them real for a moment.

Then Elias stepped in front of me.

He did not hold his ears, and he did not shake.

He put both palms flat on the oak door, leaned his weight into it, and shoved.

It swung shut with a boom that rolled down the cellar.

The whine cut off.

The silence afterward was so complete that I could hear my own blood.

I realized I was crouched against a pillar with my arms over my head.

Elias turned and looked at my mouth, and then at the rest of me.

"What did it say?" he asked.

"It said I killed her."

"Who?"

"My mother, I think."

His face did not change.

I had noticed that his face almost never did, and that when it did, it was for a reason.

"I can't hear it," he said. "I never have."

"What does it feel like to you?"

"A draft," he said. "Cold air from under the door."

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