His Pups Called Me Mama. He Called Me Nobody. novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Eve of the Moon

"She can't drive," I said. "She's on crutches."

"The twins can," said Aldric, reading over my shoulder. "Badly."

"Mossgrave's already there. He's been there a week. She's walking into his house on one leg."

"It's the Council's house."

"With his wolves in it."

Aldric folded the note and handed it back to me.

"She said don't follow," he said.

"She's never given me an order I followed. Not once in eighteen years."

"Then why are you still standing here?"

We left the children with the cook, the blacksmith and three hundred Langtry wolves who'd sworn to the guardianship the day before.

Clover cried at the truck window.

Arlo didn't.

He stood very straight on the porch steps and held his sister's hand.

"Come back," he said.

"I promise on the moon."

"Real moon or my moon?"

"Both," I said.

He nodded, satisfied.

The Council hall was two days' drive south on mountain roads, in the Wyoming high country.

An old stone lodge at the end of a valley, with long windows and a slate roof.

Behind it, on a bare hill, stood a ring of standing stones open to the sky.

The Moon Court.

We got there at dusk on the eve of the Hunter's Moon.

The yard was full of cars from every pack on the continent.

Alphas everywhere, in their good coats, with their seconds and their guards.

Every one of them turned to look at me when I got out of the truck.

They could smell it.

I'd stopped hiding the morning I left a tin of wolfsbane on a nursery floor.

Now a hundred Alphas lifted their heads in the cold air.

Mags was in the infirmary on the ground floor.

She was sitting up in a white bed, gray as the sheets, with the twins on two chairs beside her.

She saw me in the doorway and swore.

"I said don't follow."

"I didn't follow. I came separately."

"That's following."

"Did you get to them?"

She jerked her chin at the thin rider, who was standing at the window.

"She's had my sworn word since this morning," Mags said. "All of it. The fire. The torch. The gloves. The flowers."

"Will they believe her?" I asked the rider.

The rider looked at me with her dry, careful eyes.

"Tomorrow," she said, "the Court will believe what it sees."

The Alphas ate together in the long gallery that night.

Aldric walked in beside me.

He didn't walk one step behind me this time.

Cordelia was at the far end of the room, in white silk, on her father's arm.

She'd painted over the bruise so well you'd never know.

Alphas were bowing to her.

I watched an old man from a coastal pack kiss her glove.

Then she saw me.

She crossed the whole gallery with her chin up and a smile on her face, so everyone would see the princess be gracious.

"Cousin," she said, loud enough to carry. "How brave of you to come."

"Cordelia."

She leaned in close, cheek to cheek, like a kiss.

"I'll have the screamer's room painted pink," she whispered. "She'll hate it."

I didn't step back.

I leaned in too, and breathed in, slow, the way Mossgrave had on the bridge.

Gardenia.

On her, and on the gray gloves of the man who'd come up behind her.

Alpha Mossgrave smiled at me over her shoulder.

He held out his gloved hand.

I didn't take it.

I'd seen that hand in a doorway when I was eight.

"Tomorrow, then," he said pleasantly.

"Tomorrow," I said.

Our room was at the top of the old lodge, under the slate.

Stone walls, a big old bed with gray wool blankets, and a window that looked straight out at the ring of stones on the hill.

The moon was nearly full.

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