Claiming The Spare Twin novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Challenge

I pulled my green dress on over my head, with the sheet still tangled around my legs, and I went down the stairs barefoot.

Finlay came behind me, buttoning his shirt.

The courtyard was gray with the first light, and cold.

My mother stood in the center of the ring of stones, in her gray jacket without its pin.

Around her stood twenty men and women in old Beta's colors, with their arms folded and their faces set.

They were the pack's old guard, my father's friends and my mother's, and I knew every one of them by name.

Half of them had eaten bread at our kitchen table when I was small.

"Luna," my mother said, as though the word were a thing she had to spit out.

"Mother."

"I've called the challenge."

The old elder hurried out of the house, with his coat on over his nightshirt.

"Greta, this is irregular."

"It is old law," she said. "You read it to us yourself. Any wolf of rank may challenge a Luna's seat in the ring, in the first week of her naming."

"I'm not named yet," I said.

"Then it is simpler. A girl who has been a wolf for one night does not hold the strongest seat of the pack, because nobody has ever tested her."

"The Moon tested her," said the old elder weakly.

"The Moon turned her into a white thing for five minutes," my mother said. "That is not a fight. I have been fighting for this pack for thirty years."

I looked at the twenty faces around her.

Some of them wouldn't meet my eyes.

Some of them looked straight at me, hard and unsorry, and I understood that they would always remember a Beta who had held this house together, and they would never forgive me for taking her down.

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