Chapter 24: The Walk

On the next Solstice the ice came in early and thick, and by midnight it would have held a truck.

Both packs stood on the south shore with torches.

It was the first Walk the two had ever shared.

The Holmberg shoreline was Elin's now, and the elders had asked, in writing, who would carry the coin.

I had written back one line.

I would.

Petra stood at the front of the crowd in her quilted vest, with her glasses on their cord and her chin trembling.

Dag stood beside her, and the new Holmberg Alpha beside him, and a hundred faces I had known all my life stood behind them.

Lars's pack stood to the left in their green parkas, with the beta in front.

At the very edge of the torchlight, where the road met the shingle, stood a man by himself in a black coat.

Garrick had come by invitation, to the exact stone where I'd told him to stand.

He wasn't looking at me.

He was looking at the lake.

I hitched Elin higher on my hip.

She was eight months old and heavy, with dark-blond curls and Eli's chin, and she was gnawing the end of my braid with her new front teeth.

"Ba," she told me, solemnly.

"That's right," I said. "Ba."

Lars came up at my back and set his hand between my shoulder blades.

On the left side of my shoulder, under my coat, a small pale crescent ached pleasantly in the cold.

His shoulder carried the same mark from me.

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