Chapter 5: On His Feet

Nobody in the basement moved.

The kid on the stairs looked at me.

The old trucker unfolded his arms.

The brown wolf by the boiler room stood up and the fur rose along his back.

Jarrett's enforcers put their hands in their jacket pockets.

"You can't put seventy people out of a valley in three weeks," I said.

"Watch me."

"Where do they go?"

"Not my problem." Jarrett smiled. "That's the whole point of a pack, Geneva. You're in one or you're not. You never were."

He let that sit.

Then he turned the smile on the strays.

"New moon. Anyone still here after that is a rogue, and the pack deals with rogues."

The kid stood up.

"I was born in this valley."

"Then you'll miss it."

Behind me, the door of exam room two opened.

Everyone looked past me.

I turned around.

Stellan was standing in the doorway.

He was barefoot on the concrete, in a hospital gown that came to his knees and didn't close across his chest.

The white dressing showed through the gap.

He held the IV pole in one fist.

His face was the color of old snow.

"Get back in bed," I said.

He didn't even look at me.

He looked at Jarrett.

"Unfit," he said.

Jarrett's mouth opened.

"Uncle. You shouldn't be up."

"The chief signed it at six, you said."

"He did. It's procedure, while you're..."

"Did the chief examine me?"

Jarrett said nothing.

"He looked at my chart for two minutes and went home to bed," Stellan said. "I was awake. I heard him."

He took a step forward.

The pole rolled with him.

I felt what it cost him in my own ribs, a deep grinding ache, and I put my hand flat on the wall.

He took another step.

The enforcers backed up one each, without meaning to.

Stellan stopped in the middle of the basement, under the bare bulb, with the strays on one side and his nephew on the other.

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