He listened the way practical people listened.
Not with the open reception of someone who wanted to be convinced — Fenris wasn't that, would never be that, sixty years of operational certainty didn't produce open reception. He listened the way engineers listened to a structural report on a building they'd designed: looking for the flaw in the argument, the place where the reasoning failed, the point at which he could insert the counter that reestablished the original conclusion.
He didn't find it.
I talked for twenty minutes.
About the Ardenmere. The original bloodline, the first wolves, the power that predated everything the werewolf world had organized itself around. About what the pack system actually was — not a natural hierarchy but a structure built on top of something older, som
