Chapter 15: Dawn Call

Maeve's POV

I woke at three in the morning with my heart going hard, and it was not mine.

It was the thread between us, thin as it was.

Gideon's heartbeat came down it fast and heavy, and under it ran a rage I had never once felt in him.

I sat up in my grandmother's bed.

I knew where he was. I knew he had arrived.

"You're going," Bess said from the doorway.

She was dressed, with her coat on and her truck keys in her fist.

"I didn't ask you to drive me."

"No, you didn't," said Bess. "Get your boots."

We took the county road west with the heater rattling.

Neither of us said much.

Every few miles the thread pulled tighter, and I put my hand flat on my stomach and said quietly to the baby, "Almost there."

We reached the pack house as the sky went grey.

The whole pack stood in the yard for dawn call, a hundred and more in their coats, breath smoking.

I had stood on those steps for five years at his side.

Bess parked behind the barn. I walked along the back of the crowd with my scarf over my hair, and nobody turned around.

Gideon stood on the top step with Toby beside him.

He looked as if he had not slept in two days. His shirt was creased and his jaw was dark.

He held my grandmother's letter in his hand.

"I have something to read," he said, and his voice carried over the yard. "I ask you to hear all of it."

He read it.

He read it slowly, line by line, and he did not skip the part where he was the one with his back turned.

When he reached the last line, nobody in the yard made a sound.

Then he took a second paper out of his coat.

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