Chapter 14: Home Lights

Garrick found me a mile down the mountain road with snow in my braid.

He did not ask one question.

He stopped the truck, got out, and put his own jacket around my shoulders.

Eli was asleep on the back seat with his inhaler in his fist.

"You carried him out," I said.

"He woke on the steps and wanted to go with you. I wasn't going to say no." Garrick shut my door. "Home?"

"Home," I said.

The MacBain house sat at the end of the pack lane, a small gray two-story with a sagging porch.

It was past dawn when we pulled in.

The porch light was out.

I stood on the bottom step and looked up at the dead bulb, and my throat closed.

I had left that light burning every night for eleven years.

Someone had switched it off at the wall.

"Alpha's orders," Garrick said quietly, behind me. "The first night you left. I didn't know until I came to find your things."

"I'm not angry at you."

"You could be."

I reached up, unscrewed the bulb, and screwed it back in.

The light came on.

It was pale and small in the early day, and it was the best thing I had seen all week.

I carried Eli up to his own bed under the sloped ceiling, with his books stacked around it, and he did not wake.

When I came back down the stairs, there was a woman on the porch.

She was one of the pack-kitchen women, sixty or so, with flour on her sleeves and a covered dish in both hands.

"I sat in the third row when he said no one would miss you," she said. "I sat there and I held my tongue."

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