Chapter 14: Stand Down

I put my head back and howled, and the Hall went silent.

Then I trotted straight through the crowd to where Lorna lay across her husband's arm.

I put my muzzle next to her ear.

She smelled of lilac soap and, very faintly, of the bitter green tin.

Her eyelids fluttered, and her pulse did not change.

I curled my lip and showed her my teeth, and her eyes came open all by themselves.

"Oh," Lorna said. "Where am I?"

Hattie was beside me with the blanket before I had finished shifting back.

"You're in the Hall, Lorna," I said from behind it, loud enough for the benches.

"Your heart's fine. I can hear it from here."

The healer had already knelt and taken Lorna's wrist.

She looked up at the council chair, and she said nothing, and that was answer enough.

The old chair rapped the table twice.

"The shift is witnessed," she said. "Cassandra Greer is a wolf, and the pack will remember what it saw today."

"The rest we will hear in closed session. The Alpha, the Beta and the girl, tonight."

That evening the meeting room behind the Hall smelled of coffee and wet coats.

Five council members sat on one side of the table.

Conall and I sat on the other, and the Beta stood.

"A wolf is not a mate," the Beta said. "That is all I say."

"A mate is named by a bite and a public naming, before the pack. Our Alpha has done neither."

"In seven weeks he turns thirty."

"If he names her then, with his chair at stake, who here would believe it was love?"

"The girl herself would not," he added, kindly, and looked at me.

That one landed, and he knew it.

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