Chapter 23: Midnight Blue and Silver

Brinley's POV

He said yes before I finished the question.

I had one night to get ready, and my mother had spent a year on it.

That evening I drove my old truck down the gravel drive with the headlights on.

Ansel rode beside me, in a black suit and no tie, and the Hollow followed us in four borrowed vans.

At the edge of our land, where the pines stop and the highway starts, I slowed down and looked at the house.

Twenty-two windows, every one of them lit.

This time I knew who was behind each one.

At the gate I got out and put my palm on the ward stone.

It had been dark under my hand for a year.

For one long moment, nothing happened, and my heart stopped.

Then the stone warmed, and a pale line of light ran across it from edge to edge, and the gate swung open by itself.

"He re-keyed it," I said.

"Your brothers did," Ansel said. "Your father held the lantern."

I laughed and wiped my eyes, and drove through.

The circle was the same clearing, with the same altar stone, under the same full moon.

Everything else was different.

White moonflowers ringed the grass, thicker than the ones I remembered, and my grandmother's silver chalice sat on the stone, polished bright.

My mother had hung midnight blue banners from the old oaks, and not a single thing in the clearing was pink.

Four hundred Silver Creek wolves stood in a ring, and behind them, the Hollow, in grey jackets.

The big man had brought his handbook.

My father stood at the center, holding a piece of paper.

He read it.

He read it to every wolf in that clearing, the sale of me for a river, the signature, the date.

He read it again, slowly, the way he'd promised.

He read the word cake, and he stopped, and nobody laughed.

When he finished, he folded the paper and handed it to the elder, and the pack was silent.

"I was wrong," my father said. "I'll be wrong less. I'll spend the rest of my life earning the chance."

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