Fatal Attraction: The Hybrid Princess novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Seventh Night

The pack hall rules her mixed blood unfit; she claims her heir's right to challenge on the new moon and finds the rival Alpha in her father's study.

The man in the black coat let go of my wrists.

The fire went out of my arms.

Wolves were already running at us from three sides.

"I came to lay a bough," he said, loud enough for the whole beach.

"I've laid it."

He dropped the pine branch at my feet.

Then he turned and walked back up the sand with eighty wolves snarling at his back, and not one of them dared touch him.

I stood there shaking.

My hands were bare and unburned, and my palm still had the shape of my father's pin pressed into it.

Two of Nolan's guards took my arms.

"I'll walk," I said.

They didn't let go.

The pack hall was a long timber room above the harbor, with my father's chair at the head of it.

Nolan sat in it.

He had not asked. He had simply sat.

I stood in the middle of the floor with Ambrose beside me.

The elders sat on their benches, and the Beta stood behind Nolan's chair with his arms folded.

My grandfather looked like what he was, a gruff old man in a canvas coat with a steel flask in his pocket.

"Fire in the hands," Nolan said sadly.

"A fire nobody has seen in this pack for a hundred years."

He let the silence work.

"We all know what her mother was. We were told she was a quiet woman from the north. Now I wonder."

"Say it," I said.

"Lilia, I take no pleasure in this."

"Then say it fast."

"The old law of this pack bars dragon blood, leech blood and mixed blood from the Alpha's seat."

A hundred years ago a fire had burned half the harbor.

Nobody remembered who had lit it, only that the elders had written a law afterward.

I had read that law once, at sixteen, hunting for a reason no wolf had come to me.

"That law is about the seat," I said.

"Which I don't hold."

"You've just burned a man's hands in front of eighty people," Nolan said.

"I didn't burn him."

"Then he's a creature of the same kind, and that's worse."

A few of the elders shifted.

Some of them were nodding.

I looked down the row of faces.

One woman had taught me to read at six.

One man had carried me home off the ice when I broke my wrist at nine.

They would not meet my eyes.

I took a breath and I did not shout.

"Hal Hedlund's child may challenge a new Alpha until the first new moon after the funeral."

"That is Lake Shore law, older than yours."

The Beta's mouth twitched.

"It is," said an old elder from the end bench.

"The new moon is fifteen days off."

"Then I'll fight him on it."

Nolan went still, and then a smile crossed his face and was put away.

It was so quick I almost missed it.

"Of course," he said.

"The law is the law. Fifteen days. Until then you'll stay in your father's house, for the pack's safety and your own."

"And you'll guard me."

"Two wolves at the door."

"Not a prisoner," Ambrose said, rough as gravel.

"A protected daughter," said Nolan.

"Who is welcome to leave if she tells us where she will go."

He said it so gently that two elders murmured thanks.

Nobody in that hall had to say the rest.

If I stepped over that line, Nolan could call me a runaway, and the law would say I had forfeited.

I looked at him.

Fourteen months ago I had thought I knew the shape of his face better than my own.

"Fifteen days," I said.

"I'll count them."

My parents' house stood on a rise above the bay, a long gray farmhouse with a wraparound porch my father had built himself.

Two guards followed me up the drive and took their places on either side of the door.

The lawn in front of it was black.

A broad circle of grass had been burned down to the dirt.

There were claw marks in the porch rail.

In the post at the top of the steps was a dark stain that had soaked into the wood.

I stood and looked at it a long time.

Then I went in.

The house smelled of woodsmoke, coffee, and my mother's lavender soap.

Nothing had been cleaned.

A mug of her tea sat on the kitchen table with a skin on top.

I walked through the dark hall with my hand on the wall, because I could not make myself turn on the lights.

I went to the one room I wanted.

My father's study was at the back, with a green lamp on the desk and a window onto the lake.

The door stood open a hand's width.

Someone was in there.

I smelled pine, cold iron and wet wool before I saw him.

The man in the black coat stood behind my father's desk with a ledger open under his hand.

He looked up, and his eyes went gold in the dark.

"You said not here," I said.

"I know."

"You said not in front of him."

"I know what I said."

He closed the book, and I shut the door behind me.

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