Chapter 18: Where We Met

Jago didn't move from the doors.

"You know where the cove is, Clive," he said. "Come and fetch it."

Clive laughed and spread his hands to the hall.

Nobody laughed with him. Three hundred wolves still had their backs turned.

He looked at his daughter in the side room doorway.

"Come on, girl."

Bethany didn't move.

She was looking at Duncan. Waiting for him to say she could stay.

Duncan didn't say anything at all.

Clive shrugged, and walked out between the turned chairs, turning his ring.

The great doors banged behind him.

I took my memory stick out of the projector and put it in my pocket.

Then I looked at the fireplace.

It was a big old granite thing, black with three hundred years of smoke. There was a scorch mark on the hearthstone shaped like a hand.

Twenty years ago I'd been standing right there, in a borrowed dress, holding a plate of sausage rolls.

A tall boy had walked in off the terrace, home from Alpha College, and stopped dead.

He'd breathed in. Long and slow.

"Elders," I said. "While the whole pack is here. I'd like to do something properly."

The eldest elder took her glasses off.

She knew. I saw her know.

"Go on, Mischa."

I walked down to the fireplace and stood on the same flagstone.

Duncan saw where I was standing. His face went to pieces.

"No," he said. "Mischa, not that. Not here."

"Where else?"

"I'll get the money back. I'll send her home tonight. I'll do anything you want."

"You've had seven weeks to do anything I wanted."

He took a step towards me, and the pain caught him under the ribs. He stopped.

I didn't make a speech. I'd thought about it, driving north. Everything I could think of to say sounded like a slogan on a mug.

So I just said it, the old way, the words every pup in this hall learns and hopes never to need.

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