Chapter 28: The Fall of the Alpha

I came back to myself on the lawn with the cold grass under my knees and a shadow-walker's cloak around my shoulders.

"Don't look at me like that," Posy said, her voice cracking. "I borrowed it off a very tall man."

I was shaking, and I could not stop.

Bram knelt and put his forehead against mine.

"Forty-three," I said. "I counted forty-three."

"Forty-three came out," he said. "I counted too."

The whole academy had gathered on the burned lawn.

Wolves, fae and shadow-walkers stood in a ragged half circle around the black hall, and none of them had arranged themselves by bloodline.

The guard who had chained the doors lay face down in the grass with a wolf's knee in his back.

"Brass lamp," said the broad warden with the bandaged ear, and held it up. "Still half full. He had a second one in the cloakroom."

The dean walked to the middle of the lawn.

I had not seen her walk fast before.

"Lucan Thackwray," she said. "A trustee of this academy, in my own hall, with two hundred children."

Lucan stood a little apart, alone, in his buttoned coat.

He had put his hands in his pockets again.

"I have been in the valley since dusk," he said. "At the Eclipse Moon, in front of you all. Whatever a guard of mine has done..."

"The guard has told us who paid for the oil," said the warden.

"He told it under the Concord's stone," said Ilyan, "which I carried down the hill in my hands, as is permitted."

He held up a flat disk of pale silver the size of a plate.

It glowed.

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