Chapter 14: The Night of the Order

Maeve put the eleven of them in the pack house barn at Ashmoor, on cots in a long row, with a lamp at every head.

By dawn I had not slept and neither had she.

The old Alpha's riders had come back at midnight with nothing.

Crane was gone, and the Alliance seal with him, and the roads north were already watched.

I wrapped my wrists and tried not to count what a man could do with that seal.

She went from cot to cot with a stethoscope and a basin, muttering to each wolf in the low voice she had once used on me.

I stood at the foot of the row with my wrists wrapped in gauze.

"They'll wake slowly," Maeve said. "Some will not wake at all today. The drug has to leave the blood first."

"How long?"

"Days. A week for the oldest dose."

I nodded and could not make myself leave.

Briar stirred behind my ribs.

*Let me go to them.*

I walked down the row until I came to the cot of the young man with the dark curls.

He lay with his eyes closed and his chapped lips parted.

I did not touch him.

I only stood there, and Briar leaned forward through me and breathed out once, low and warm.

The young man's eyes opened.

They were brown and dazed, and they found my face.

Then he did something I had never seen anyone do.

He rolled off the cot onto his knees, and he put his forehead to the floor.

At the next cot, the heir of the eastern pack was pushing himself upright with shaking arms.

He bent his head too.

The old Alpha's granddaughter was last.

She could not stand, so she lay on her side with her chin tucked to her chest and her short hair falling across her face.

All down the row, eleven wolves who had been asleep for years bowed to the gold behind my eyes.

I stood in the middle of them and could not breathe.

"Get up," I said. "Please. Please get up. I didn't do anything. I'm not."

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