For two whole days, the pack house was silent.
Elisa had never experienced anything like it, hadn't even thought it was possible. A hundred people living under one roof, and you could hear a pin drop. Even the hyper pups played around quietly, she kept expecting someone to shout, for music to play somewhere, for a door to slam or feet to thunder down the hall. The laughter, the chatter, the energy that pulsed through the walls had faded into something solemn and reverent.
It wasn't guilt anymore. Not exactly. It was something quieter and deeper. Reverence. Fear. A kind of collective reckoning.
It wasn't until the evening of the second day, the night before the full moon, that things started picking up little by little. People coming back from work or school and hung around in the common rooms even though the conversations were still muted and no one played with any electronics.
