The Sickened Luna's Last Chance novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Ashdown Creek's Choice

The Ashdown Creek pack came up Lund Creek road at noon the next day.

Sixty wolves, on foot, in a long muddy line, with no trucks and no music.

I was splitting kindling behind the cabin when Dunne called me round to the front.

They stood in the yard in the thin snow.

They ranged from two boys in patched boots to an old woman leaning on her husband's arm.

At the front was the elder who had taken the staff from my father.

She was seventy, short and wide, with two fingers gone from her left hand.

She wore my father's carved staff across her palms like a baby.

"Linnea Ashdown," she said.

"Yes, Elder."

"You won't remember me. I carried you on my hip when you were two."

"I remember your biscuits."

A small ripple of laughter went through the yard.

The elder did not smile.

"We've come to ask you something," she said. "And we've come to apologize first, because we should have done that years ago."

I put the axe down.

"We watched you grow up in that house," the elder said.

"We watched your father tell you that you were wolfless, and we let him."

"We let the whole valley call you that."

"We were afraid of the lease, and we were afraid of Osmund, and we were ashamed."

Someone in the crowd was crying quietly.

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