A Pack of Their Own novel · Chapter 27 of 32

Chapter 27: His Father's Name

The old woman looked from my father to me.

"Let her speak," she said. "Briefly. She is named in the petition."

My father sat down slowly.

I had rehearsed this all the way here.

When I opened my mouth, none of it was there.

So I said the first true thing.

"I'm nineteen, and my wolf woke a year early on the steps of this house."

"Everyone here saw the wound close. Everyone here saw my father tell me to walk it off."

"It isn't a fever. I'm half bear, and so is he."

The noise started at the back and rolled forward. Someone laughed. Someone said a word I won't repeat.

"Madam Chair," my father said, over it. "This is what I warned about."

"The child believes it."

"Then I brought this," I said.

I took the plain wooden frame out of my coat and set it on the Council's table.

It showed a lean boy of sixteen beside a huge white-bearded man, with a pine ridge behind them.

The old woman picked it up and held it at arm's length.

"He has my jaw," I said. "Nana Bess kept it on her mantel for thirty years, and she put it in my hands this morning."

"I have never seen that photograph," my father said.

"That's you."

"That's a boy who looks like a Hargrove. We are a large family."

"You swore a pure-blood oath on the Blue Crescent seat," the old woman said, without looking up.

"A boy on a ridge with a bearded man is not proof of anything."

"No, ma'am," I said. "He isn't."

I stepped aside, and Mom came forward.

She had walked behind me up the whole aisle without a word.

She stopped on the open floor, in her good coat, and looked at my father.

Keep reading free with an account. Start A Pack of Their Own from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.