I Hid My Sister's Killer, So the Alpha Poured Truth Down My Throat novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Name

Brigid names the dead old Alpha as her sister's killer and says why she kept silent; Kellan's knees give way, the Beta calls her a liar, and the witch finds wolfsbane in the cup.

"Your father," I said.

I could not stop the rest.

"Aldric Drummond killed her. He raped her at the creek and held her under the water until she stopped."

The hall did not make a sound.

Then everyone made one at once.

A man near the door shouted that I was lying.

A woman screamed Nessa's name, then Aldric's, then mine.

Kellan did not move.

He stood on the dais with the empty cup in his hand and the color gone out of his face.

"Liar," he said.

It came out of him thin and quiet.

Hester Marl pushed through the guards and stood beside me with her arms folded.

"She isn't," she said. "It can't make her lie. I've brewed it for forty years and it has never once made a liar of anybody."

"My father was the Alpha of this pack for thirty years."

"Then ask her the rest," Hester said. "Since you started."

Kellan's hand shook, and the cup rolled off the dais.

"Why?" he said.

I had asked him not to ask in front of them.

The serum did not care.

"Because I found Nessa at dawn," I said, "and he was standing in the creek up to his elbows, washing."

My voice came out flat and clear and not my own.

"He didn't run. He looked at me and he said the old law ends a killer's whole line."

I heard someone in the front row breathe in.

"He said if I named him, the elders would put down his son with him. You were thirteen."

I looked at Kellan.

"He said they would take you down to this same creek."

Kellan's knees gave out.

He did not fall.

He went down on them slowly, on the dais steps, with both hands flat on the wood.

Nobody in that hall had ever seen a Drummond kneel.

I wanted to tell him it was over, that I had been wrong to ever think he could carry it.

The serum let me say one more thing.

"I burned her dress that night. I lied to the elders. I let them cast me out."

"Brigid."

"I would do it again," I said. "I asked you to ask me alone."

He looked up at me, and I saw the boy I used to carry on my back through the orchard.

It lasted one heartbeat.

"Enough."

The Beta's voice cut over the room, warm and sorrowful.

Osric Roxburgh stepped between Kellan and the guards, and he put one hand on Kellan's shoulder.

"Alpha, this is witch work," he said. "You see how it is. The woman has starved for fifteen years. She hates this pack and she hated your father most. The draught is bent, and it's saying whatever she wants."

"It doesn't work that way," Hester said.

"You brewed it," Osric said, gently. "Of course you'd say so."

Several of the elders murmured agreement.

One of them, an old man with a cane, did not.

"Aldric buried the girl himself," the old man said slowly, to nobody. "He carried her up from the creek. I remember thinking it was a kindness."

Nobody answered him.

My mother had both hands over her mouth.

My father had finally looked at me, and I could not read his face at all.

"Take her down," Osric said. "Silver cell, until the Alpha decides."

The guards took my arms.

I tried to step forward, and the floor tilted.

A cough tore up out of my chest.

I put my hand to my mouth, and it came away red, all the way to the wrist.

"Look at her," someone whispered.

The pain was not the old hunger.

It was new, and it burned from my belly up into my throat.

I went down on the stone.

I heard Hester say my name.

She was the only person in fifteen years to say it that way, quickly and with fear.

She pushed the guards away, got her hands under my head, and snatched up the cup from where it lay.

She held it to her nose.

Her whole face went still.

She wet one finger in the last dregs and touched it to her tongue, and spat.

"Monkshood," she said.

Kellan had risen.

"What?"

"Wolfsbane." Her glasses had slid down her nose, and she did not fix them. "It wasn't in my draught. I'd have smelled it. Somebody cut the cup after I filled it."

The hall went still for the second time that night.

I could not see Osric from where I lay.

I saw Kellan's face turn, very slowly, toward the Beta's side of the room.

"How long?" he said.

"On a body this starved?" Hester's voice shook. "Three nights, if she's lucky."

"Is there a cure?"

She looked down at me, then at him, and she did not like what she had to say.

"One," she said. "An Alpha's bite, three nights running, to burn it out of her blood."

She lifted her chin.

"Yours, Alpha. There isn't another."

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