Chapter 16: The Full Moon

We dressed with twenty wolves listening.

Stellan buttoned his flannel all the way to the throat over the scar.

I took the gauze bundle down from the shelf and put it back where it lived.

He watched me do it and didn't say a word.

Then he opened the door and we walked down the porch steps together, in front of all of them.

Every nose in that ring lifted.

They didn't need to be told what had happened in the loft.

They could smell it.

They kept us at the grange hall all day, in separate rooms.

Lucille was allowed in with me because she walked in and nobody could think of a way to get her out.

She brought sandwiches.

I didn't eat mine.

She ate it for me.

At moonrise they walked us out into the field behind the hall.

The whole pack was there.

Four hundred wolves, on folding chairs and truck tailgates and blankets on the grass, with the full moon coming up white over Cold Ridge.

The Council sat at a long table at the front, with the eldest in the middle in her pinecone brooch.

Boyd stood at her right hand with the leather book.

Jarrett and Mirabel sat in the front row.

Mirabel didn't look at me once.

At the back, along the fence, stood the strays.

Maybe forty of them.

The kid with the stitched hand.

The old trucker.

The two sisters from the motels.

The old woman from exam room one, in a wheelchair, with an oxygen tank in her lap.

They hadn't been invited.

Nobody had told them to leave.

Boyd read the charge.

The photo.

The escort's report from the cabin this morning.

The order barring me from the Alpha, and how I'd opened his chest anyway.

He read it all very sadly.

"Geneva Coulter," the eldest said. "Do you want to speak?"

"Yes."

I walked to the table.

I reached into my shirt in front of four hundred wolves and took out the gauze.

I unfolded it on the table under her nose.

"This is the round I took out of his chest the night he was shot," I said. "Look at the base."

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