Chapter 27: The Circle

I got the tackle box under the seat open with my bound hands.

There was a fillet knife in it, rusty, sharp enough.

I sawed through the zip tie and it popped off my wrists.

There were two oars clipped along the gunwales.

I rowed.

I counted strokes, in thirties, and I didn't stop counting until the hull ground on the rocks of the point.

The moon was a third gone by then, the shadow on it the color of dried blood.

I climbed out into knee-deep water in my mother's dress and waded up onto the stones.

There were people everywhere.

The whole pack stood in a great ring above the shore, two hundred of them, faces lit orange by a circle of torches.

The eleven Alphas stood together on a rise of rock.

At the center of the ring stood one tall gray stone, older than anything at Greywater.

And in the trampled grass at its foot lay Vidar.

He was human.

He was naked and gray from his jaw to his belly, frost thick over his heart.

He wasn't moving.

A big gray wolf paced slow circles around him, not touching him.

It was waiting.

"Linnea!"

Tove was at the edge of the ring, gray-faced, held back by two men and the Duluth Alpha.

"He went down ten minutes ago," she screamed. "They won't let me in!"

Arne was beside her in his ambulance jacket, with his bent glasses on.

He saw me, and his face crumpled.

I started walking.

The crowd broke open in front of me without being asked.

I heard them see me.

A bride in a torn and muddy dress, barefoot, with blood on her chin.

At the edge of the circle the red-bearded Marquette Alpha stepped into my way.

"Nobody enters," he said. "Wolf to wolf. That's the law."

"Read the last line," I said. "The King's bride walks in at her will."

He didn't move.

"Ten of you accepted me," I said loudly, so the rise could hear. "On my knees, with poison in my mouth."

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