Wrong Girl, Right Alpha novel · Chapter 36 of 48

Chapter 36: The Hall Fills

Nora's POV

The widows rang the bell for me.

I hadn't asked them to, but the old widow had said, "Leave it to us," and by seven that morning every wolf in the valley was walking up Creek Road.

By eight the pack hall was full.

Two hundred and eighty of us stood shoulder to shoulder under the lamps, and the doors had been propped open so the ones outside could hear.

I stood on the dais in my oldest sweater, with the Alpha's ring on my right hand.

It was too big for me, and I had wound a strip of cloth round the inside.

Hazel wasn't there.

Tilly had her, and I had kissed her twice and made myself leave.

Dane had come in late and taken his place at the foot of the steps, white around the mouth.

He gave me a nod, and I knew he had told Ronan.

"I'm going to tell you something," I said, "and I'm going to tell it plain."

The hall went still.

"Our Alpha is sick."

A noise ran through the back rows.

"Last September, at the Challenge, the Blackwater champion bit him in the shoulder. He wore silver on his teeth. The silver stayed in Ronan's blood."

I held up the silver cap Vanessa had found in the mud.

The lamplight caught it.

"It's called the gray sickness. It starts in the hand, and it climbs. Blackwater has buried forty wolves in two years of it, because Boyd Satterfield puts silver on the teeth of every pup in his pit."

"How long?" a man shouted from the middle.

"Until the Hunt Moon. Then it reaches his heart."

Nobody spoke.

I made myself keep going.

"He hid it from me because he thought he was saving me. He hid it from you because he thought you'd lose faith. He was wrong about both."

"Luna," said a voice from the south wall.

It was the wolf from the ring, the twenty-six-year-old with the thick chest.

He stood with a dozen other dormitory wolves behind him, and their arms were crossed.

"You're telling us the Alpha is dying and the sickness comes from a bite," he said. "Does it pass? Through touch? Through blood?"

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