The Hall

Chapter 3

"You're late," the guard said, and yanked my door open before the car had fully stopped.

I got out. My bag stayed in the trunk — nobody offered it, and I didn't ask. We were in a loading bay behind the pack hall, concrete everywhere, a ramp going down into the ground with a single bulb over it.

"Down there," the guard said. "Move."

The ramp smelled like bleach. Under the bleach it smelled like something else, and I didn't want to name it, so I didn't.

At the bottom there was a room with a low ceiling and maybe thirty women in it. Some in dresses. Some in jeans. A girl in pajama pants with bunny slippers, mascara dried in tracks down her face. Nobody was talking. That was the thing that got me — thirty women, and it was quieter than a library.

The guard shoved me toward the wall. "Stand there. Don't sit down, you'll get comfortable."

I stood there.

Above us, the floor thumped. A crowd. Feet and voices and that low rumble a room makes when it's full.

"What's happening up there?" I asked the woman next to me.

She was older, maybe forty, gray coming in at her temples. She didn't look at me.

"They do the introductions first," she said. "Then they do the pit."

"The introductions."

"They read your name and your pack and whether you can shift." She finally glanced over. "Can you shift?"

"No."

Something moved through her face. Not pity. Worse than pity.

"Then you're first in," she said.

"They go in order?"

"They go cheapest first." She looked back at the wall. "No offense."

None taken. It was the most honest thing anyone had said to me in twenty-four hours.

The thumping got louder. A voice up top, amplified, went through the names. Couldn't make out the words, just the rhythm of them, and every so often the crowd would make a sound — sometimes a laugh, sometimes nothing at all, and the nothing was worse.

Then a door opened at the far end of the room and a man in a black coat came through with a clipboard.

"Vance," he said.

I raised my hand like I was in school. I don't know why.

He looked at me, then at the clipboard, then at me again, and something crossed his face that I couldn't read.

"Vance, Ella. Unclaimed. Non-shifting." He said it flat, reading it off. "You're up."

"Now?"

"Now."

The gray-haired woman caught my wrist. Just for a second. Her hand was cold.

"Don't run," she said.

"What?"

"In the pit. Don't run." She let go. "He only kills the ones that run."

The man in the coat walked me up the ramp and I kept my eyes on the back of his neck because I could feel the room full of women watching me go and I knew exactly what they were thinking, because I was thinking it too.

Better her than me.

The ramp came out into a corridor, and the corridor came out into a staging area with a heavy iron door, and beyond the door I could hear the crowd going quiet.

"Through there," the man said. "Walk to the center. Don't touch the walls."

"Why not?"

"Because you'll slip."

He pulled a lever. The door groaned up.

Light hit me in the face — so much of it, white and hot, after all that concrete dark. I stepped out.

The hall was packed. Three tiers of seats going up, every one of them full, faces painted with the pack colors, kids on their fathers' shoulders with candy in their hands. It looked like a fair. It sounded like a fair.

And then the noise died.

Down the middle of the floor was a pit, maybe thirty feet across, ringed with iron railings. The floor of it was clean. Too clean. It gleamed.

At the far end of the pit, in the shadow under the railing, something was breathing.

I made myself look at it. I made myself not look away.

It was big. Bigger than any shifted wolf should be — a full head taller than the biggest fighter in the pack, shoulders like a truck, black fur so dark it ate the light instead of catching it. It was lying down. Its head was up.

Its eyes were gold.

"The Culling begins," the announcer said somewhere up high, and his voice cracked a little on begins, and I heard a woman in the third tier say oh God, and then the crowd got loud again, because the crowd was there to see something.

I walked to the center of the pit. My heels made a sound on the clean floor. Click. Click. Click.

"Vance, Ella," the announcer read. "Silver Creek Pack. Non-shifting."

The crowd laughed. It was a wet, rolling sound. Somebody up top yelled something I couldn't make out and everybody laughed harder.

I stopped in the middle.

I'd spent my whole life being told what I was. Too weak. Too slow. Can't shift, can't fight, can't stand up straight, Ella, you're gonna be somebody's problem your whole life.

Well. Now I was the show.

The thing in the shadow got up.

It got up slow, and it got up wrong. Nothing that size should move like that — like it was wearing the body and not the other way around. It came out of the shadow and into the light, and the light didn't help, and the hall got very, very quiet.

Then it charged.

I want to be honest about what I did, because I've had a lot of time to think about it since. I didn't pray. I didn't think about Karl, not once. I didn't see my life flash anywhere.

I just stood there.

The floor shook. The railing rang. Somebody in the crowd screamed, that high thrilled scream people do when they think they're about to see a good one.

It was on me. Ten feet. Five.

I closed my eyes.

And then — nothing.

No impact. No teeth. Not even a breath.

Something hot and heavy huffed against my collarbone, and then dropped, and then I felt the floor shake as something enormous went down onto its front legs, and the hall made a sound I have never heard before or since.

Not a cheer. Not a scream.

Silence. Real silence. The kind where you can hear thirty rows of people forget how to breathe.

I opened my eyes.

The Beast was on the floor in front of me. Head down. Its whole body flat against that clean, gleaming floor.

It was bowing.

Chapter 3 Ends