Chapter 20: The Stone

"Nobody leaves this Stone," the Elder said.

He said it to the scouts, and to the dozen wolves among the crowd whom he had fed honey and favors for thirty years.

They came forward out of the torchlight, and some of them were already changing.

"Torsten," I said.

"I know."

The three Niemi brothers shifted around me with a wet, tearing sound.

Linnea was still tied on the white cloth. Garrick got to her first and cut the rope with his bare hands.

Then the Stone was all teeth.

The scouts hit the Niemis low and hard, and I heard Beck snarl and Stellan yelp.

Half the pack wheeled on the scouts, and half stood stunned.

Wolves I had never met threw themselves between the Elder's men and my family.

I stood alone in the middle of it with my mother's ring in my fist.

The Elder walked toward me.

He did not hurry.

He leaned on the silver-headed cane in his left hand, with the pale knife in his right, and he stepped around the fighting without looking at it.

"You are the image of her," he said. "Do you know that?"

"Don't talk about her."

"She broke my law in the Longhouse, with my own enforcer, and she had your eyes."

"She looked at me as I cut her first mate and said, 'You'll answer for this to our daughter.'"

I felt the cold go through my chest.

"You killed her anyway."

"I closed a file," the Elder said.

He lunged.

For a man of seventy-one, he was frighteningly fast.

The knife came in at my ribs, and something in me answered before I could think.

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