The Alpha I Inherited

or a long while with his hat in his hand, and then he got back in and drove away t

ing under a towel. She did not ask me how it went. She took one look at m

gate was never

was

new th

t in front of me with two slices of bread. "Eat. You hav

The bacon was good and the bread

Your grandmother started it the night your mother ran, and I have kept it with her, and Wade has kept the piece he knows, and Silas has kept the rest for his own reasons

the true t

nter. "But I can tell you where to look. Go up to the pack house this afternoon. Not the new one on the hill, the old one,

s on th

e in that frame on the day they were confirmed. Your grandmother

of and a porch that had been glassed in sometime before I was born. I had walked past it a hundred times and never

eyhole shaped like a crescent moon. Wade was sta

I would co

e stepped aside. "Th

d be down at the ga

nd Silas has gone home with his coat still buttoned, and I came

warm and animal, a smell that made the back of my neck prickle. The hall was narrow with a runner worn through in the middle

d. "She slept in the back room on the ground floor afte

clean and there was a bed with a quilt and a chair and a washstand with a crack

rame,"

side, was darker than the rest, and when I put my face close to it I saw the marks. Notches. S

BLACKRID

," Wade said. "Sh

nother. The names went down the frame in a crooked line and each one was a person who had stood in this door

high. And then, lower down where a shorter person might reach, the wood was cut ag

that?"

e. He was looking at the l

e had left a place for you and that she had marked it so you would know where to put

away. She never wrote to me. N

d the top one was addressed in a shaky hand to Miss Nora Calloway, Charleston, West Virginia, and the seal on the back was the same crescent moon. "She

e. It was heavie

the moment she died, and Silas cannot touch it because the deed to this building was never in the pack's name

le carved moon and the gap above it where

me on at the fork. Then a second light. Then a third, and a fourth, until the whole row of company

oices, outsi