Lahat ng Kabanata ng PREGNANT AFTER THE ALPHA’s REJECTION: Kabanata 51 - Kabanata 60

I looked at the keeper woman.“How fast can you move fifty people,” I said.She looked at the approach road. At the gathering. At the specific organised quality of people who had been operating as a unit for three generations and did not need instructions to execute a direction change.“Where,” she said.“The original site,” I said. “Sixty miles southwest. Pre-settlement territory. You will feel it when you are close. The ground changes quality.”She looked at the infant in my arms. At the anchor connection between us.“The child goes with you,” she said. Not a question.“The child goes with me,” I said.She turned to the gathering. She did not raise her voice. Whatever signal she used to communicate with fifty people simultaneously was below the range of ordinary speech and above the range of ordinary silence. The specific frequency of a leader whose people had been trained to listen at that register for three generations.The gathering moved. Not chaotically. The organised movement

I watched the shape at the front of the coming.It moved differently from everything else moving toward the original site. The wolves behind it moved the way wolves move when they are responding to something their instinct identified before their mind did. Organic. Pulled. The specific movement of things orienting toward a source they can feel but cannot yet see.The shape at the front was different.It was not being pulled. It was not orienting. It was not responding to the signal or the completion or the clean foundation or any of the frequencies the night had produced.It was returning.There is a specific quality to the movement of something returning to a place it has been before. A certainty in the direction that does not require navigation. The way your feet find a familiar room in the dark without your mind having to think about where the walls are.Whatever was at the front of the coming had been here before.A long time before.I held the infant tighter.The keeper woman was

I looked at the phone.At Damien’s voice on the other end of it.At the three words sitting in the air between me and the first voice and the site and the beginning and everything assembled at the heart of the oldest ground in existence.A fourth bloodline.I pressed the phone back to my ear.“How long,” I said. “How long has he been carrying it?”“He would not say over the phone,” Damien said. “He said it needed to be said at the site. That it would not make sense anywhere else.” A pause. “Elena, he walked through the front gate of a packhouse that has been through the most significant day in the history of the pack world and he presented himself to the lead mediator and asked for you by your full name. Elena Lunara Voss.” Another pause. “Not Elena Voss. Not the Lunara wolf. Your full name. All three parts.”I thought about that.About the full name. About who knew it. About who used it.The keeper woman had used it at the gate.The first voice had used it at the site.The old woman

Chapter Fifty Seven: Forty-Eight HoursKael was hungry.That was where we started.Not with the charge. Not with the forty-eight hours. Not with three territories northwest and an inter-territorial council headquarters built on the valley site and whoever had buried a criminal filing inside forty minutes of false documentation.With a four-year-old boy who had been awake since before dawn and had held the function of guardian of the beginning at the heart of the oldest site in the pack world and had not eaten since Marta put a plate in front of him in the Blackthorn packhouse kitchen what felt like several lifetimes ago.Marta.I looked at the keeper woman.“The gathering,” I said. “The keepers. Do any of them have food?”She looked at me with the expression of someone who has spent three generations preparing for the most significant night in the history of the pack world and had apparently thought to bring provisions.“Yes,” she said.“Feed my children first,” I said.She moved towa

We drove north first.Not because north was the direction of the headquarters. Because Mace had said the northern route and two and a half hours and the northern route added distance in one direction to subtract it in another. Old pack roads. Pre-settlement tracks that the vehicle could cover faster than the main territorial roads because the main territorial roads passed through pack boundaries and pack boundaries at pre-dawn on the first morning of the beginning were not places I wanted to stop.Damien drove.I sat in the back with the infant and the anchor and the establishing third bloodline now four hours and twenty minutes into the first successful establishment in three generations of trying.Mace was in the passenger seat with his hands in his lap, the compass light steady on them. He had not spoken since we left the site. He was doing something with the compass function that I could not see, but I could only read in the quality of his stillness. The specific stillness of some