The Daughter They Didn't Want novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Pack Kneels

The knife flashed red in the torchlight.

The Moon-reader did not move.

She stood there with her cane and her cracked old face lifted, as if she had waited five years for exactly this.

Ash got there first.

He hit my father from the side at a dead run, and I heard the air go out of both of them.

They went down together on the trampled grass.

The knife skidded out of Dad's hand, and Dad clawed for it.

"Anders!" Ash shouted. "The blade!"

Anders was already moving.

He dropped on Dad's wrist with both knees and pinned it to the dirt, and he picked up the knife by the blade, bleeding, and threw it far into the dark.

Ash had a forearm across my father's chest.

His taped side had soaked through, and his teeth were set against the pain.

"Stay down, Harold," he said.

"Get your hands off me, you Thorsen dog."

"Dad."

I said it quietly.

I walked across the circle and stood over him, and my wolf stood up inside me.

"Be still," I said.

I didn't raise my voice.

It went through him anyway.

I saw it hit.

My father, who had told me to sit down and be quiet for twenty-three years, went slack under Ash's arm and turned his face to the dirt.

Behind me, two hundred people made a low sound.

"He's drawn steel on the Stone's keeper," the stout old elder in the green parka said.

He had walked into the circle with his hat in his hand.

"In my sixty years, no Garrick has ever done that."

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