Chapter 11: Council

The council met in the lodge's great room that afternoon, and I sat in the front row because Torin said so.

Twenty pack members stood along the walls.

Aldric took the chair at the head of the long table, the Alpha's chair, and nobody told him to move.

Torin stood at the window with his arms crossed.

The twins sat on the floor beside me with coloring books, and Hazel had brought the rabbit.

"There is a law older than any of us," Aldric said.

"The Hollowbrook line passes through wolves. Not through a woman who never shifted, never ran and never carried a wolf in her blood."

"Ingrid Haldane is the mother of my heirs," Torin said.

"Ingrid Haldane is a charity case who was fed at the pack's table for nineteen years."

The room went quiet.

"She's the daughter of two dead wolves, and she has no wolf of her own," Aldric said.

"Her children shouldn't sit in your chair. They shouldn't sit in any chair. They shouldn't be here."

Somebody in the back coughed.

I kept my eyes on Hazel's coloring book.

I had been called this in a hallway when I was nineteen.

I had been called it in a hundred small ways since the day I was seven and my parents died.

It did not hurt less because I was twenty-six.

It hurt differently, because my children were listening.

"Say the word," Aldric said, and his voice rose.

"Say she is wolfless. Say it in front of the pack."

"I will not," Torin said.

"Then I will. She is wolfless, and a..."

"Enough."

It was not loud.

It did not need to be.

The word went through the room, and every person in it flinched.

I felt it in my bones.

The old man's mouth stayed open and nothing came out of it.

Torin had not raised his voice.

He had used the Alpha command, and it had stopped his own father in the middle of a word.

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