Chapter 6: The Denial

The grange hall sat at the bottom of Cold Ridge Road.

It was a long white building with a tin roof and a hand-painted sign about square dances.

The humans in town rented it for weddings.

Once a month, the pack rented it for itself.

By seven on Saturday night, the gravel lot was full of pickups.

I'd been in that hall a hundred times, always in the back by the coffee urn, as staff.

That night they sat me in the front row.

Stellan sat four chairs down from me.

He'd come in on a cane, in a pressed flannel shirt buttoned to the throat over the dressing.

He looked like a man who'd been shot two days ago and decided not to mention it.

The room smelled of three hundred wolves and burnt coffee.

And under all of it, us.

I watched the smell reach people.

Heads came up along the rows.

Noses lifted.

Somebody's mother pulled her teenage son's chair back an inch.

Lucille sat behind me and kept one hand on the back of my chair the whole time.

At the long table on the stage sat the Council, five old wolves in their good clothes.

In the middle was the eldest.

She was past eighty, tiny and white-haired, in a cardigan with a brooch shaped like a pinecone.

She'd delivered half the people in that room, back before the pack owned a hospital.

Boyd stood at the lectern beside the table with his reading glasses on his nose.

Jarrett sat in the second row with Mirabel beside him.

She'd worn white.

"All right," the eldest said, and the room went quiet. "Boyd. Read it."

Boyd cleared his throat and opened a leather book.

He read it slowly, giving every word its own room.

"No wolf shall take the cast-off mate of his own blood. The wolf who does shall lose any rank he holds. The mate shall be put out of the valley."

He closed the book.

"Thirty-nine years," he said. "That law's kept the peace for thirty-nine years. Our Alpha knows better than anybody why we have it."

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