The Thirteenth Moon novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Old Wolf

Torin was on his feet before the blade cleared the cane.

He put himself between me and the steps, and he didn't have a weapon, and he didn't need one.

"Stand away, boy," Orrin said. He was climbing toward us without hurry. "This is old business."

"You're on the grounds with a drawn blade," the envoy said, standing at her table. "Sheathe it. Now."

"I have cut that arm once already."

He said it to me, quite calmly.

"The vine went around the crescent, and the crescent stayed. This time I'll take the crescent. A seat with no Moon's daughter to give it must go to blood, and the Council knows whose blood has held it for two hundred years."

"That's not what the book says," Edda shouted.

"The book is what you say it is, Edda. It always has been."

Around the dais, the pack had closed in.

Nobody was frightened.

I could see it in their faces, three hundred of them, and what I saw was something harder.

I lifted my left arm.

"Torin," I said. "Play it."

He didn't ask what.

He reached into his back pocket and held out his phone, and thumbed the screen with a steady hand.

Orrin's voice came out of the speaker, low and pleasant and perfectly clear.

"I told you Edda Whittaker would be on the road by the first snow."

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