Chapter 16: The Late Rite

I got between them and got a split lip on my own mouth for it.

Emmett was crying with his hand over his arm.

Tobin sat on the floor with his fists in his lap and his face blotchy and furious.

Otis filled the doorway in his undershirt, holding a flashlight.

"Nobody bleeds in my house after midnight," he said. "It's a rule I just made up."

Nobody laughed.

I put Emmett on my knee and Tobin under my arm, and I held them both until they stopped shaking.

"Everybody watched me wait," Tobin said into my side.

"I know."

"Everybody."

"I know, baby."

Emmett sniffed hard.

"I'll stand there with you," he said. "If you go again."

Tobin did not answer.

But he stopped pulling away from the arm that held both of them.

The white-braided elder came to the cabin herself at noon.

She stood on Otis's porch in her long grey robe, and she would not come in.

"The council has talked," she said.

"Emmett's naming stands.

"A stone does not unname a child for his mother's crime.

"But a moon taken by a lie is a moon the pack owes.

"Tobin Harlan may take his rite at the stone, on the first moonrise he asks for it."

She looked past me, at the small face in the window.

"We will not wait a year."

Tobin asked for that same night.

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