Her Brothers Scented Me at the Gate, Now All Three Claim Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Breakfast With the Elder

The Elder smells pine oil on every Niemi at the table and demands to know who is scented. Lowen lies that she is seeing Beck, and the Elder sets the Gathering four weeks away, where one wolf claims her and he will cut any other thread himself.

The dining room table sat twelve, and at ten to eight all of them were taken.

Garrick sat at the head. Linnea sat at his right, Torsten at his left, and I sat in the middle with Beck on one side of me and Stellan on the other.

Nobody had put them there. They had just arrived.

The room smelled of bacon and, underneath it, strongly, of pine.

I looked at Torsten's wrists, then Stellan's, then Beck's.

Each of them had a shine on the skin, where someone had rubbed the oil in.

"Dad did it at six," Stellan whispered. "He put it on all of us. Don't look at it."

"I'm not looking at it. I'm smelling it."

"Then don't smell it."

The front door opened, and Garrick stood up.

The Elder came in slowly, leaning on a cane with a silver wolf's head.

He was seventy-one, with white hair combed back from a lined, gentle face, and he carried a jar of amber honey in his free hand.

"From my own hives," he said, and put it on the table in front of me before he sat. "Garrick, you keep a fine table. And this is Linnea's friend. Lowen, is it?"

"Lowen Bostick."

"Bostick." He tried the name once. "Lovely. Sit, sit, children."

Beck had made eggs, bacon and potatoes, and he filled my plate before anyone else's.

The Elder watched him do it.

"How did you two meet?" he asked, though he was looking at Linnea.

"At college," Linnea said. "Our first week. She had the bed next to mine."

"And what do you do, my dear?"

"I'm a vet tech in Marquette."

"Animals. Good." He stirred his tea. "And your family?"

"I don't have one. My mother died when I was six."

"I'm sorry. What was her name?"

"Mara."

"A pretty name."

Garrick's hand closed on the tablecloth. I took it for tension, since the Elder's visits were clearly a lot.

The Elder lifted his head and breathed in, slowly, with his eyes shut.

Everyone at the table stopped moving, except Stellan, whose knee pressed against mine under the table.

"Pine oil," the Elder said. "A great deal of it. On every wolf at this table."

"The mosquitoes, Elder," Garrick said. "This year they're terrible."

"In October."

"Late ones."

The Elder opened his eyes, and they were mild and blue.

"Garrick. I have eaten at your table for thirty years. I know when something is under the oil."

Nobody spoke. Torsten put down his fork. His knuckles had gone white.

"The law is simple," the Elder said gently. "A scented woman is claimed in the open, before the pack, within one moon. I don't ask to punish. I ask to bless. Which of you has a mate in this room?"

I felt three threads pull tight in my chest at once.

I felt fear from each of them, coming through the pull as plainly as my own.

The Elder would go around the table, smell by smell, and find all three.

I put my fork down.

"It's me," I said.

Every head turned.

"I'm the one he smelled. I'm seeing Beck."

Beck's spoon hit his plate.

"We've been quiet about it," I said. "He fed me a sandwich in the dark last night, and I don't take a sandwich from just anyone."

Beck looked at me with his mouth slightly open.

"Yes," he said, after a moment. "I'm very forward with sandwiches."

Torsten and Stellan went still on either side of the table. I did not look at them.

The Elder smiled at me with real warmth.

"Oh, how delightful," he said. "Then the oil is only privacy. I'll forgive it, Garrick. Young people are shy."

"They are," Garrick said. His voice was very quiet.

"Then it is simple. Beck will claim you at the Gathering, four weeks from tonight, on the Moon Stone, before the whole pack." He patted my hand. His fingers were dry and warm. "One thread. One wolf. As the law asks."

"Of course," I said.

"And if there's another thread on you by then, my dear." He rose, and leaned on his cane, and kissed the top of my head. "I'll cut it myself."

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