Chapter 9: The Bonfire

The Lakeshore Pack held its bonfire on a stretch of gravel beach at the mouth of the Calumet River.

The sky smelled like snow.

I had come for one reason, which was to introduce two people.

"This is Lena," I told the Alpha. "She sewed you up. Be nice."

Brant looked at Lena with the face of a man who had been told to hold a baby.

"Ma'am," he said. "I owe you."

"You owe my hospital a new floor," said Lena. "Also you bled on my shoes."

He laughed.

It was a short, startled bark.

I watched it happen, and I knew what chapter fourteen of the book would have called it.

The beginning of the great love story of our time.

I felt the mark on my wrist go warm, and I held my own elbow until it stopped.

"Duck," said Birdie, appearing at my shoulder with a paper plate of brisket. "You look like you swallowed a lemon."

"I'm fine."

"You're green."

"It's the firelight."

"It's definitely not."

The pack fed us for two hours.

An old woman pressed a plate of cornbread into my hands and told me I was too thin.

A small boy in a Bears jersey asked whether I was the Alpha's "lady friend," and was dragged off by his collar.

A teenager with a guitar played something about a girl and a river, badly, and everyone sang along.

By the end of the second hour, I realized something terrible.

I liked these people.

They were loud and nosy, and they argued over whose potato salad was better.

Not one of them had looked at my wrist as if it was the price of a house.

Lena had been dragged off by the cornbread woman to see the kittens in a barn.

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