The Sickened Luna's Last Chance novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Hollow
Linnea collapses at the Autumn Gathering, Hester names a dormant wolf and one year to live, and Torin refuses her in front of the council.
The Autumn Gathering was the one night a year I stood on the stone beside my husband.
I wore the grey dress Torin's secretary had picked for me, and I stood at his left hand like I always did.
Two hundred wolves sat at the long tables in the Redfern hall.
Another sixty had driven over from Ashdown Creek, my father's pack, and they were not allowed past the third row.
I was counting the steps to the door when my legs stopped working.
It didn't feel like fainting.
It felt like someone had pulled a plug in my chest and everything I had was running out.
I put my hand on the table and the table slid away.
Then I was on the floor with the wood against my cheek, and nobody was touching me.
I heard a chair scrape.
I heard Torin say, in his flat council voice, "Give her room."
He did not kneel.
Hester Lund did.
She came through the crowd with her white braid swinging and her bag in her fist, and she put two fingers under my jaw.
"Look at me, Linnea."
I looked at her.
Her face was dry and plain and not at all surprised.
"How long has your chest been doing this?"
"Since spring," I said.
"And you told nobody."
"I told my husband in June."
Hester looked up at Torin.
He was standing over us with his hands behind his back and his jaw set.
"I assumed it was nerves," he said.
Hester put her palm flat on my breastbone and closed her eyes.
The hall had gone quiet enough to hear the heater tick.
When she opened her eyes, she didn't whisper.
"Your wolf is asleep," she said. "She never woke. And she's not sleeping the way a wolfless woman sleeps. She's sleeping like a stone in a river, and the water is wearing you away."
Somebody at the back said, "Wolfless."
It was a small word, but it carried.
I had heard it all my life, in the Creek and at Redfern, in the tone people use for a limp.
"How long?" I said.
Hester didn't soften it.
"A year. Maybe a little less. The dormant ones don't die of one thing. They just empty."
I lay there and looked at the roof beams.
I thought, I'm twenty-seven.
Then I sat up, because lying down in front of all those people felt like agreeing.
"Is there a cure?"
"There's a Waking," Hester said. "An Alpha opens a vein and gives the sleeper a cup of blood, freely, and she wakes or she doesn't. It's not safe. It's not nothing."
I turned my head.
The man I was married to stood two feet away, and he was the only Alpha in the room who had a right to be asked.
I got to my feet without anyone's hand.
"Torin."
He looked at me.
His amber eyes were exactly the color they had been on the day I signed our contract, and just as closed.
"Give me your blood," I said. "Tonight, in front of the council, so nobody can say later that it wasn't offered."
The elders at the head table shifted in their seats.
Saskia Rooke, the moon keeper, set down her glass.
"Linnea," Torin said quietly. "You're ill. This isn't the place."
"Nowhere is the place with you. That's why I'm doing it here."
"A Waking can kill the giver's standing as easily as the sleeper," he said. "The pack needs its Alpha steady through the Count. I won't risk it on a guess."
"It's not a guess. Hester just said it."
"Hester said a year."
"That's what I'm asking you about."
He didn't blink.
"The answer is no," he said. "We'll see the specialist in Missoula after the Solstice."
"The Solstice is ten weeks away."
"Then you can wait ten weeks."
I heard my father clear his throat at the far end of the hall.
Osmund Ashdown sat in the third row with his arms crossed and did not look up.
I turned all the way around so everyone could see my face.
"My husband just told me I can wait," I said.
Nobody answered.
I slid the pale gold band an inch up my finger and let it settle again.
Then I walked down the center aisle with sixty wolves of my own pack staring at the floor.
At the door I looked back once.
Saskia had slipped into the chair beside Torin's and was pouring him a glass of water, with a small, soft smile.
And his hand, the one holding the glass, was shaking.
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