Chapter 3

The hall doors banged open before anyone could speak.

Emory came through at a run, guild coat half-buttoned, hands empty.

"Where's my kit?" I said.

"With the wardens. Twenty minutes behind me." He put himself between us and Sabine and raised his voice so the whole hall got it. "Guild statute nine. Interference with a sealed dose is theft from the Guild itself. Every hand that touched that vial answers for it."

"And you are?"

"Steward of the guild office, eastern district. I'll be taking names. Starting with whoever opened the vial."

A few people by the counter stopped smirking.

Sabine didn't. "The Guild sells herbs, sweetheart. My man is the law in this pack. Sit him down."

Her men put Emory on the floor next to us.

He got close to my ear. "Tell them who you are. Or let me."

"No. Statute, nothing else."

A name called out from the floor is only noise. And if Sabine panicked before the wardens arrived, she'd have twenty minutes alone with my daughter and nothing left to lose.

Sabine turned back to the crowd, and I watched her take the room's temperature. The statute had put a wobble in it. She needed it back.

"In fact," she said, "let's settle the theft right now, in front of everyone."

She snapped her fingers. One of her men brought a flask from her bag and a bowl from the counter.

"A purge," she announced, pouring. "Anyone who's been drinking stolen doses, a purge brings it back up. Clean blood, clean bowl. Simple."

I knew the smell before she finished pouring.

"That's not a purge." My voice came out wrong. "That's wolfsbane. Her wolf is barely holding on — that will cut it loose. You'll kill her."

"Listen to the expert." Sabine smiled at the crowd. "What are you afraid of, then — the truth?"

They pulled Nell out of my arms. I got my head back into someone's face and felt his nose go, and it changed nothing. There were more of them.

Two men held her head. It took ten seconds.

Then her back arched off the stone, and I stopped hearing the hall at all.

When they let her go she was limp. I got her onto my lap and counted her breaths. Nine in a minute. A pup her age should run near thirty.

By moonrise there'd be nothing left to count.

"You fed a six-year-old wolfsbane in front of forty witnesses," I said. "Remember that number."

Somewhere behind me a woman said, half to herself, "It did smell like wolfsbane."

"Shut up," the man beside her said. But he said it quietly.

Emory's shoulder pressed against mine. His voice stayed low. "Garrick was in the north district when I called. He's bringing the wardens himself. Hold on."

Sabine heard the room shifting under her, the murmurs moving the wrong way. She took out her phone and turned her back on the crowd, and this time there was no sweetness in it.

"Come now. Not at six — now. There's a guild steward here reading statutes at people, and half the hall is starting to listen... Then bring your men and end it, Roark. Come clean up your name."

She hung up and stood there with her back to us for a moment. When she turned around, the smile was on again.

Nobody left the hall. Nobody wanted to miss six o'clock arriving early.

Nell's fingers moved in mine. Still cold. Still there.

Then headlights swung across the hall doors. Sabine licked her thumb and fixed Tilly's hair, and smoothed her own coat down.

"Now you'll learn," she said.

I held my daughter and watched the doors.

"Then let him come."