Chapter 4: Guest

"Yes," I said.

It carried through the whole hall.

My father's mouth opened and shut.

"Imogen," he said. "If you cross that river, you do not come back."

"You already told me that. In front of everyone."

I walked down the steps with Ezra a pace behind me and Clover already at my elbow.

Nobody stopped us.

My sister did not look up from Jasper's cot.

The Black Fork lodge stood on a rise above the river, a long house of dark timber with every window lit.

Thirty or forty wolves were waiting on the porch when his truck pulled in.

They had heard.

News traveled faster than headlights.

I braced for stares.

A heavyset woman in an apron pushed through the crowd and put a bowl of soup into my hands.

"You're too thin," she said. "Eat."

A teenage boy took my backpack.

An old man with a cane looked me over once and said, "She has the Moon's color. Good."

"The Moon's what?" I said.

"Your hair," he said. "Black hair is the Moon's blessing in this pack. Always has been."

I stood there with hot soup in my hands and could not speak.

Nobody had ever called my hair a blessing.

Clover arrived at midnight on the back of a Black Fork patrol bike, furious and delighted.

"I walked out," she said. "My mother cried. I'm sleeping on your floor."

"I'm a guest," I said. "I don't have a floor."

"You do now."

The cook found Clover a cot in the room next to mine.

I stood in my new doorway looking at a clean bed, a lamp, and a window with the river outside it.

Keep reading free with an account. Start "I don't accept you" — he shouted it in front of everyone from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.