Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 28 of 32

Chapter 28: Home Ground

The eldest elder turned and looked at the other four.

Nobody spoke for a long moment.

Then the smallest of them, a bent old woman who'd sat at Fraser's verdict and mine, nodded once.

"Eleven of those men were his rulings," she said. "I read them out myself. I was ashamed of every one."

"And the other nine?" the eldest elder asked her.

"The other nine have been fighting our fires for free since July." She sniffed. "Let them come home."

The eldest elder turned back to Fraser.

"Every man on that crew is welcome on pack land," he said. "From today. Now will you take the seat?"

Fraser looked at me.

I didn't say anything.

It wasn't mine to say.

"Yes," he said.

Nobody cheered.

It wasn't that kind of moment.

But the eldest elder put out his hand, and Fraser shook it, and four hundred wolves on that riverbank let out one breath together.

"One more thing," the eldest elder said. "The crew came in this morning by the highway bridge. Under safe conduct."

"So?"

"So that's a visit." He jerked his chin at the river. "Come home by the water. Same way we sent you out."

So they did.

All twenty of them waded back across to the burn side, laughing and splashing and cursing the cold.

Then they lined up on the gravel, in their ironed yellow shirts, and walked back over Kinnaird Ford together.

The whole pack stood on the bank and watched them come.

Halfway across, a woman broke out of the crowd on our side and ran into the water to her knees.

The kid in the yellow shirt stopped dead.

"Mom?"

She grabbed him by both ears and pulled his face down and kissed it all over, and he let her, in front of everybody.

The man who'd married a packless woman came up out of the river into his father's arms.

The gray-bearded wolf stepped onto pack land, looked around at all of us, and spat.

"Took you long enough," he said.

Patsy stood beside me on the bank with her arms folded and her face wet.

"Don't look at me," she said. "It's allergies."

"In October?"

"I'm allergic to idiots. There's four hundred of them here."

The elders met again in the hall the next morning, in front of whoever wanted to come.

Most of the pack wanted to come.

Charmaine sat alone on the front bench in a plain gray sweater.

No locket. No diamond.

The eldest elder didn't make a speech.

"Charmaine Kinnaird. You brought a murderer a jacket and let an innocent man take eight years for it. You stood up yesterday and told the truth. Both things count."

She nodded.

"You're not Luna. You never were by any law of ours." He laid his hands flat on the table. "The house on the bluff goes to the pack. It'll be sold. Every dollar goes back to the volunteer fire fund it was taken from."

At the back of the hall, the volunteer chief laughed out loud.

"You'll keep a room in town," the eldest elder said. "You'll see your son on Sundays, at Patsy Stallard's table, with Patsy in the room."

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