Chapter 8: The Back Pages

They carried Cade into the great room and laid him on a bench.

Hattie cut his sleeve away, and the grey went all the way past the elbow now, hard and cold under her fingers.

The elders sat down at the head table.

Half the pack crowded in behind them, and nobody made a sound.

Godfrey opened the Law Book and turned the pages slowly.

"I had hoped never to read this aloud," he said.

His voice shook, and I heard real grief in it.

That was what frightened me.

"The Sentence at the Moon Drop is the oldest law we have," he said.

"It was written to stop an Alpha from condemning in anger."

"Read it," Cade said from the bench.

His voice was a rasp.

Godfrey cleared his throat.

"The Alpha who signs the Sentence binds his wolf to the condemned.

"If the moon lifts the condemned alive, it takes the signer's wolf at the next full moon, and the signer with it."

A gasp went round the room.

Rhys swore.

"Unless the condemned pardons the signer aloud, before the pack, under that moon," Godfrey finished, quietly.

He closed the book.

I stood there with Hattie's hand locked around mine.

I did not understand it at first.

Then I understood, and my stomach went over.

"He signed my death," I said slowly. "And the moon took it back and put it on him."

"No one has been lifted alive in ninety years," Godfrey said. "I never thought I'd see it tested."