Page 5

"Sanctioned," I repeated. My brain screeched to a stop and my mouth was only capable of sounding stupid. "Sanctioned as in a strongly worded letter and wagging a finger, or sanctioned as in…"

"As in nobody trades with the Greywoods." Sissily's voice cracked in the middle of it and she hated that, I could tell, because she cleared her throat and started again harder. "Not one coven. Not one witch-owned business. Not the suppliers, not the banks that hold their paper, not the healers. Any magic user who does business with this pack answers to the Council for it."

"They can't do that…"

"They already did." She flapped the cream paper at me. "Two days ago, apparently. Nobody told us because they didn't have to tell us, Hazel. They told everybody else."

There was a particular quality to the silence in that yard. I'd been so busy noticing tree stumps and electric gates that I'd missed it on the drive in, and now that I was standing still it crawled up the back of my neck and sat there.

The Moon Howl was closed.

Amber's café. The one with the good Danishes and the wall of windows and the barista who spelled my name wrong on purpose because she thought it was funny. Amber had opened it many years ago and had not shut it for a single day since, including the day she gave birth to Jack, which I know because Alex tells that story at every gathering and gets slapped for it every time.

"Tell me the rest," I told Sissily.

"Hazel,"

"Tell me the rest of it." I did not shout. That's the thing I'll never be able to explain properly. When it gets bad enough, I go quiet, and quiet coming out of me frightens people who love me. Mostly. Because I do dumb stuff when I get quiet. "You've got a face on you like you’ve swallowed a hot potato. Just tell me the rest."

She looked at her hands.

"Stella's not going back to school."

And there it was.

"They pulled a fifteen-year-old out of school." My voice came from somewhere over my left shoulder, several feet away, belonging to somebody much calmer than me. I was having an out of body experience in front of the pack’s house. "For me."

"Two of her teachers are witches. The principal's a mage." Sissily's thumb worked at the wax seal, chipping it, and she didn't seem to know she was doing it. "It wasn't safe anyway. Amber pulled her before anyone made it a decision. She's been in the kitchen all afternoon baking for a shop she can't open as a result."

I stood in the gravel and did the math.

Eleven days ago I'd walked out of a ritual chamber feeling like the queen of the world with my magic still crackling in my fists. Eleven days later, a woman I loved was baking things nobody would ever buy, a girl I'd taught to walk in heels was grounded from her own life, and a hundred-year-old Alpha was cutting down his own trees so he could see his enemies coming.

Somewhere in Cleveland, my grandmother was having a perfectly nice evening probably eating caviar on a fucking cracker.

"Where is he?" My chin came up.

"Hazel, don't." my best friend sounded tired to her bones as she rubbed a hand over her face.

"Where is Alex?"

Sissily's eyes went past me, over my shoulder, and I turned around.

He was already coming from around the house.

There were maybe forty pack members in that yard by then, and I hadn't heard a single one arrive. That's the part outsiders never understand about a pack. Wolves on four legs and men and women on two, in work boots and aprons and one guy in a bathrobe, leaning on fence rails and truck beds and the corner of the porch, and nobody was talking. Every one of them was looking at me, though.

Alex Greywood came through the middle of them like a ship parting the sea through a harbor.

Six and a half feet of him. Ebony skin gone gray around the eyes from eleven days of not sleeping, faded t-shirt, boots unlaced, and those mismatched eyes, one green and one blue, lit from behind the way they go when he's holding back his tamper by the skin of his teeth. He had the cream-colored paper's twin folded in his back pocket. I could see the corner of it peeking at me with every long stride he took.

"Kiddo." The alpha genuinely smiled at me. Just that. Nothing more, nothing less.

There was no anger aimed at me. No begrudging. No animosity.

Bile rose to burn my troat.

"I'm leaving." I got it out first, because I knew if he spoke another sentence I wouldn't manage it at all. "Tonight. I'll take the beater truck from the equipment barn and I'll go, and you'll send word to the Council in the morning that you’ll hand me over. By Thursday Amber opens her shop and Stella goes back to school and you stop chopping down your own damn forest."