Chapter 3

The second day's Trial grounds felt wrong the moment you stepped in.

The outdoor temperature was punishing. Noon sun had baked the stone floor hot enough to hurt, and a body with no signs of life had been standing in it long enough to start releasing something into the air.

The contestants standing nearby began frowning, then pressed hands over their noses, irritated and uneasy.

"What is that smell? Dead deer?"

The arena judge noticed something off as well. He traced the smell and locked his gaze onto my waiting figure in the corner holding area.

My shell had stiffened further from the advancing rigor. Every movement was unnatural, jerky and mechanical. The skin had shifted from blue-grey to a faint, spreading purple-black, and my head was beginning to tilt sideways on its own, dropping slowly toward my shoulder, then jerking back, dropping again, like a puppet whose strings were fraying.

The judge's expression shifted to alarm. He began walking toward me, ready to ask if I needed to see the pack healer.

At the same moment, outside the arena, my mother stood in the blazing sun waiting by the exit corridor and felt the sluggish pulse coming back through the Submission Mark.

She assumed I was slacking off inside.

The fury hit her before any other thought could.

"Useless. Of all the times to fall apart."

She dug her fingers into the jade plate in her pocket until her nails nearly broke skin, and drove in the most violent command she knew how to give.

Inside the Trial grounds, the judge's hand was almost on my shoulder.

My body convulsed hard.

Both hands locked into combat-seal formations at an angle that no living body should be able to form. The outline of a wolf shape forced itself across the surface of my skin, grinding and mechanical, like a machine that had been pushed past its limits and was tearing itself apart trying to comply.

The judge stumbled backward two steps, went white, and ultimately couldn't bring himself to intervene.

The midday bell rang, signaling the end of Trials.

My shell walked out of the arena in a gait no living creature has, both legs stiff as columns, each step dragging forward as though lifting iron blocks.

Just past the exit corridor, a familiar figure rushed toward me.

It was my advanced training instructor, Coach Kane.

"Jasmine? You look terrible. Internal injury?"

Coach Kane's face was full of concern. He reached out to steady the shell before it toppled.

My mother lunged out from behind him and shoved his arm away hard.

"Don't touch my daughter."

Her eyes had gone red. She pointed directly at his face.

"You were already dismissed. Stay away from her."

"Did I not teach you enough of a lesson back then? You want to wreck her shot at first place, is that it?"

The crowd of pack members and Record Keepers nearby immediately pressed in to watch, forming a wide ring.

Coach Kane was shaking with anger. "Alpha, what are you talking about? Jasmine's condition is critical. She needs to see the pack healer right now."

"She doesn't need a healer. She's fine."

To prove to the crowd that there was nothing between me and Coach Kane, that the bond he had tried to form with me was nothing but the kind of "soft attachment" she believed would drain my fighting edge, my mother did something that made every person watching go cold.

She grabbed my collar with both hands and tore it open in front of everyone.

"Look. If someone had gotten to her, messed with her head, she'd have wolf-instinct markings on her body, something other than the Submission Mark."

"I'm going to let every single one of you see that my parenting has not one flaw in it."

The sound of fabric splitting.

The lightweight summer training vest tore halfway open.

What the crowd saw was not the firm, healthy skin of a pack warrior. It was a massive spread of dark purple-black bruising that covered her entire chest and neck, skin coloring so severe it looked like a wound that had been left to rot from the inside.

And the Submission Mark burned into the skin over her heart, which should have glowed a hot, living silver, was dim. Charcoal-dark. Like a cinder that had long since burned out.

A dead mark means its host has been dead for some time.

A sound moved through the crowd, the sharp involuntary intake of breath that happens when something breaks the mind's ability to process what it's seeing. A few people near the front screamed outright.

My mother's hands froze mid-air. The moment her eyes touched that purple-black skin and that dead mark, her face went completely still.

"Jasmine."

"When did you take this kind of internal damage?"