Chapter 10: The Den

"FIRE!"

I screamed it with everything I had, from the bottom of my lungs and the bottom of my wolf.

Two hundred heads turned.

For one long second, nobody moved.

They just stared at me, the rejected mate, covered in dirt and soot in a torn tank top, crashing her sister's bonding.

Then the cedar behind the altar roared.

Burning needles came down onto the white ribbons.

Somebody screamed.

Then everybody did.

The chairs went over in waves. People shoved toward the main path, the narrow one between the cedars where they'd come in.

Right under the second tree.

"Not that way!" I climbed onto a chair. "South! Go south, through the meadow! Away from the trees!"

Nobody listened.

Damien was shouting something at the altar, but nobody listened to him either.

Iris clung to his arm in my dress, sobbing.

Then a voice cracked across the grove.

"You heard the girl. SOUTH."

The eldest elder stood on her carved chair with her cane raised over her head.

She was eighty-something and about five feet tall, and every wolf in that grove turned and ran south.

I jumped down and grabbed her around the waist.

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me, get me down. I'm too old to be standing on furniture."

I lifted her off the chair and handed her to the nearest pair of arms.

They were my father's.

He stared at me over her head.

I didn't have time for his face.

I was already running the other way.

Because the den was behind the trees.

The hollow under the rocks, where the nursing mothers stayed with the new pups.

Nobody brought nursing mothers to a bonding.

They'd be in there right now, asleep.

The second cedar caught as I passed under it.

Heat hit the back of my neck.

I came around the rocks into the hollow, and the smoke was already pouring down into it, thick and yellow, rolling along the ground.

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