We went at midnight.
Not because midnight was dramatic. Because midnight was the hour after which the pack house reached its deepest quiet, the hour when the last lights went out in the senior warriors' wing and Rowan's habitual late-night patrol concluded and even my father, who kept later hours than most, had generally moved from his study to the bedroom he shared with my mother at the far end of the main corridor.
I knew this house's sleeping patterns the way I knew everything else about it. By years of observation. By the specific quality of silence that each hour of the night produced, the way a musician knows the difference between rests, not all silences were the same, and the silence of a house at midnight was different from the silence at eleven or one, deeper, more committed, t
