Chapter 26: Dry Autumn

I smelled the kerosene before I was awake.

It was two in the morning, five nights after the Elder's ruling, and the wolf in my chest was already on its feet.

"Torin."

He was out of the bed before I finished his name.

We went down my mother's stairs in the dark and out the kitchen door.

The smell led us down the pasture to the Lowell hall.

Six wolves in human shape were along the back wall, in black jackets.

They were pouring from red cans onto the old cedar boards, and one of them was crouched with a lighter.

Inside, forty people were asleep on the floor.

I did not decide to shift. It simply happened.

The ground came up to meet my hands, and the cold went out of the night.

Beside me the black wolf, huge and silver-eyed, took its first step.

His voice came into my head, plain and calm. Left, he said. I take the lighter.

I went right.

The man with the cans turned and saw a honey-gold wolf coming at him.

He dropped the can.

It rolled and spilled across his boots.

I hit him in the chest and he went down on his back with a yell that woke the hall.

Torin's jaws closed on the wrist of the man with the lighter.

The little flame went out in the grass.

The back doors banged open. The Lowell families poured out with buckets and a garden hose and one rolling pin.

The old woman with the stick got a woman of the tower in a headlock.

It was over in under a minute.

Six wolves were on their knees in the wet grass with their hands on their heads.

One of them was the older guard who had brought me breakfast at the cottage gate.

He was shaking.

I shifted back with a Lowell blanket around my shoulders, and I crouched in front of him.

"Who sent you?"

"The healer," he said hoarsely. "She said it was a healing order. She said the house was cursed, and it had to burn before the moon."

"And you believed that."

"No, Luna."

He swallowed.

"I have a daughter in the tower. She said Winifred would put her out."

Torin, back in his skin and in the blanket the old woman had flung at him, said nothing.

I stood, and I looked at the six of them.

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