The End of Us novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Page Forty-Two

I went to the white-haired elder myself.

He lived in a narrow house behind the granary hall, and he opened his door before I had finished knocking.

He looked at the printout in my hand, and the color left his face.

"You'd better come in," he said.

Keith came with me, and so did Ginny, with her cast propped on her hip.

The elder did not offer us tea.

He sat in a hard chair by the cold fireplace and folded his hands.

"There is a page missing from the register," I said.

"Yes."

"You know where it is."

"I know where one is," he said. "I wrote it."

Nobody moved.

"I was a clerk of the Council then," he said. "Fifty-one years old. They called me to the north bank the evening your father died, because the Council has to see a dead Alpha before the pack can bury him."

"You saw his body."

"I did." His eyes closed. "There was no claw mark on him, Isla. No bite. One wound, in the back, from a blade."

My mouth went dry.

"I wrote it down. Every detail. I took it to the Council the next morning, and Maud Dunstan was standing in the hall when I arrived."

"What did she say?"

"She said her husband was ill, and the Sheridan pack was in disorder, and a murder inquiry would break three packs in a week. She said it was a rogue, and the Council would be kinder to the child if it said so."

"And you believed her."

"I wanted to," he said. "I was a coward, and she was the strongest woman I had ever met. She took the page out of my hand."

"You said you wrote it."

"I wrote a second copy that night, before I slept. Out of habit. I sealed it in the Council's old reliquary box and I put it in the cellar of this hall, where nobody opens anything."

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