I hope my guys are here to put in a good word.
“Shane Skylar,” Darla hisses, her voice rough. “What have you done?”
“Respectfully—” I begin.
“Don’t you dare!” Thorne shouts, cutting me off. “This is a sign of utmostdisrespect, and you know it. I can’t believe you acted so rashly.”
“It’s bad enough that you eavesdropped and didn’t consult,” Faye says. “But to go out and perform the ritual, based only on that scant evidence? It’s unforgivable, Shane. We could strip you of your position.”
“Owen did no less,” I retort. “And, if I recall correctly, all of you were strongly supporting bringing Hyacinth in, and argued with Sadie and Trina about it.”
“We were,” Darla agrees. “But none of us were about to leap straight into action, wasting valuable time and resources to attack a human woman who may well be useless.”
“Furthermore,” Rafe adds, “Owen had much firmer confirmation than you. The spell had extremely solid results. Your ritual had next to nothing.”
I tilt my head back and take a deep breath, trying to stay calm. “I don’t think going over this in detail is helping the situation,” I say. “I can stand here for a while, and you can chew me out if you want, but it looks like an even bigger waste of time to me.”
I can tell by the looks on their faces that I’ve pissed them off. I’d find that amusing if Darla and Neville didn’t look so sick. Both of them look like they’re having trouble just staying upright, and Neville’s bright smile has been replaced by a grimace of exhaustion and pain.
“You know I’d usually applaud this,” Neville says, his voice rough. “But we have no time left, boy. If you’ve made a mistake, then the price is all our lives.”
Chapter 6 - Hyacinth
Standing in the dark room with all the members of the council glaring at me menacingly is making my blood run with icy terror.
But it’s quickly being replaced by red-hot anger.
It takes a little while for the words being exchanged to make sense to me. But once they do, betrayal slams into my chest with the force of a runaway train.
They knew? My friends knew, and they didn’t tell me?
“Wait!” I almost yell. “Trina, did you know about this?”
Every head in the room swivels to look at me, and I realize I’d dropped out of the conversation for a bit. Now I’ve interrupted a discussion that might not have been about me.
I don’t care. I didn’t ask to be here. They can accommodate me a little.
“Hyacinth,” Trina says apologetically. “It wasn’t worth telling. Saying that the ritual could have been a false positive is understating it—the results weren’t anywhere near conclusive.”
“But you knew it was me,” I protest. “You guys were arguing about it—and this ‘council’ was in support of bringing me here.”
“Butweweren’t,” Sadie says firmly. “The ritual couldn’t have been more vague. Besides, Hyacinth, what did you expect us to do? We couldn’t risk exposing the supernatural world or disrupting your life, especially when we had no evidence it was going to help.”
I want to retort, but a slow wave of numbness trickles through me as I realize the truth of her words.
What were they going to do? Tell me that, possibly, maybe, I was named in a magic spell to marry a werewolf, but I shouldn’t worry about it because it’s probably nothing?
Trying to imagine my reaction to that happening in real life almost makes me laugh out loud. Eventually, I just shake my head, waving a hand at Sadie.
“Okay,” I say. “I take your point.”
The silence in the room seems to deepen, and I realize the whole council is still looking at me.
“Now that thehumanhas finished speaking,” Darla says acidly, “we should move on with the next steps. What will be required to break this union?”
“We can’t do that,” Sadie says. “Not yet, anyway. If Hyacinth is the wrong person, that energy will begin to leak out into the rest of the pack. It will become very clear that her energy is holding us back, not helping, and it will be easier to break the bond then.”
“How will this manifest?” Neville asks hesitantly, as if he already knows the answer. “What signs will we see?”
