Chapter Two — What the Silver Showed

The Mark at my neck was still burning when I got my door open.

It should have gone cold. Every wolf in the Blood Moon Pack knows how it goes — a severed Mate Bond leaves the Mark grey and numb before morning, the way an old scar finally stops arguing with you.

Mine felt like someone had held a coal to the junction of my neck and shoulder, then walked off and forgotten it there.

I ran the tap until the water hurt and pressed a wet cloth to my throat. The burn drank the cold and gave nothing back.

It isn't dead. Nyx moved somewhere behind my eyes, restless. Stop washing it like a dish.

"It's shock," I said to the empty kitchen. "Shock, and cold, and a long walk home. That's all it is."

She didn't dignify that.

My cabin sits at the thin end of Pack territory, two rooms and a stove that lights on the third try. The smoke alarm in the hallway had been chirping for a dead battery since Tuesday and I still hadn't dragged a chair over to reach it.

Chirp. Nine seconds. Chirp.

Then someone knocked, twice, soft.

"It's me," Wren said through the door. "Don't leave me out here smelling like everybody else's bad night."

I let her in. Omega Wren Halloway came with her kit bag on one shoulder and yarrow salve on her hands, and the green sharpness of it filled the room before she'd taken three steps.

"You shouldn't be here," I said.

"Probably not." She set the bag on my table. "Sit down."

"Wren—"

"Aria. Sit down."

I sat. The chair legs shrieked on the boards and neither of us pretended not to flinch.

"Collar," she said.

I pulled it aside. Wren leaned in, and I watched her face do the thing faces do when they decide not to say the first sentence they thought of.

"Well?"

"It's red," she said.

"It's irritated. I walked home in the wet."

"It's red, Aria." She sat back. "Rejected Marks go grey by dawn."

"Yours is one of hundreds, then."

"Eleven. I've dressed eleven of them since I took my Omega training, and all eleven went grey."

She held up a finger for each thing. "The wolf sleeps two days. The Scent goes plain, and then they get up and they're just a person again."

"So mine's slow."

"Yours is hot enough that I can feel it from here."

I put my hand over it, which was stupid, and we both knew it was stupid.

"Take it off me," I said.

"That isn't how it works and you know that isn't how it works."

"Then tell me it means nothing."

"I'd rather test it," Wren said, and unzipped the kit.

She laid out a strip of white cloth, a shallow glass dish, and a lancet with a bright wicked tip. My stomach turned over before my head caught up.

"Silver," I said.

"The Elders make us test after a Rejection. Everybody gets one."

"I wasn't told."

"You'd have gotten yours tomorrow, from someone with worse manners than me."

"Test for what?"

"Whether the bond let go." She wiped my thumb. "Blood tells before the body does."

"Meaning what, exactly?"

"A wolf that's been released runs thin. Goes pale in a count of ten and quits."

She squared the dish under my hand. "That's the whole test. Ten counts and it quits."

"And if it doesn't quit?"

"Then I write it down and hand it to the Council," Wren said, "and I would like very much to write down normal, so hold still."

The Silver went in deeper than a prick that small had any right to go. The burn ran up my thumb into my wrist and stayed there, a wire of heat under the skin.

Wren tipped my hand over the dish. One dark bead rolled off and sat there, round as a berry.

"One," she said. "Two. Three."

I looked at the ceiling. There was a water stain up there shaped like Oregon, and I had never once noticed it before that night.

"Six. Seven."

"You're counting slow."

"I'm counting right. Eight. Nine."

She stopped.

"Ten," I said.

Wren didn't say ten. She tilted the dish, and the bead moved and kept its color, dark as wet garnet, and the edges of it did not thin.

"Wren."

"Give me your hand again."

The puncture in my thumb should have closed. It hadn't. As we watched, two beads rose out of that one small hole, side by side, and neither of them was in any hurry.

"That's not—" She started over, quieter. "Blood only runs like that when it's making something."

"Making what?"

"Feeding something. I've seen it in wolves knitting a bad break, once in a woman who'd been poisoned and beat it."

"So it's healing."

"Healing from what?" Her voice had gone very careful. "You didn't bleed tonight."

"He didn't lay a hand on me. I know."

"Then say what you mean."

"Nothing happened to your body tonight, Aria. Something happened to your bond, and your blood is answering it."

Tell her the rest, Nyx said. Tell her it's louder than it was yesterday.

I opened my mouth to say it, and the room went out from under me.

It came in through the Mark — grief, and under the grief a rage with nothing to bite. My knees locked. The mug went off the table and broke its handle clean at the base.

It wasn't mine. I have never in my life been angry like that. I stood in my own kitchen wearing somebody else's fury like a coat two sizes too big.

Then it thinned and went, and I was holding the counter, breathing.

Wren had gone white. "That wasn't you."

"No."

"Aria. Whose was it?"

"You already know whose."

"A marked wolf senses their Mate's strongest feelings." She recited it the way you recite something to make it smaller.

"I know the rule, Wren."

"Then you know it's for bonded wolves. It's the first thing they teach us."

"I know what it's for."

"He rejected you in front of three hundred people."

"He said the words," I said. "I never said mine."

Wren sat down slowly on the arm of my one chair.

"Don't repeat that," she said.

"You're the one who came here at midnight with a Silver lancet."

"And I'm the one telling you to keep your mouth shut." She looked at the dish, then at my thumb, then at my throat. "Half the Circle went home tonight saying the word unclean."

"Let them talk."

"They won't stop at talk. If it gets around that the Rejection never took — that you're carrying his bond in your blood while he tells the Pack he's free of you — they won't call you unlucky. They'll call you a problem."

"And what do you call me?"

She wrapped my thumb without answering, which was its own answer, and folded the dish into a cloth instead of emptying it out.

"I'll write that the test was inconclusive," she said at the door. "That buys you a few days. Keep your collar up."

"Wren."

"Keep your collar up."

The door shut. The alarm chirped, and chirped again nine seconds later, and I let it.

I stood there a while, and then I did the least dignified thing available to me. I ate cold noodles out of the carton with a bent fork, standing at the counter, still wearing the shirt I'd knelt in.

There was a price sticker on the sleeve I hadn't noticed all night. I picked at the corner of it while I ate, and it came off in three pieces, and I laid all three on the counter in a neat row as though that mattered.

I was starving. Not sad-hungry — hollow all the way down, the way I'd been the winter I turned eighteen and my body was building a wolf out of me from the inside.

Aria, Nyx said.

"Don't."

Something is using us up.

I put the fork down. The Mark went on burning under my collar, patient as a coal, and I laid my hand flat against my stomach and could not think of one good reason why.

If the bond still holds, what is growing inside me?