Chapter three

CHAPTER THREE

HAZEL'S POV

Margaret swept past me into the hall. Her housekeeper followed with two thermoses in a basket.

She sniffed once and wrinkled her nose. "He didn't come home last night. I can smell it. This house smells like you and nothing else." She nudged Julian's loafers with her toe. "And you can't even keep a front hall tidy."

I knelt and lined up the shoes. Then I set out her slippers and stood up smiling.

Margaret had never let me call her Mom. In front of the pack she called me the Luna in a voice that made it sound like a joke. In private, she didn't call me anything.

"Where did he go?"

"East," I signed. "Last night."

Her mouth tightened. East meant Lowe territory, and we both knew it. Then she turned that look on me, as though it were my fault.

The housekeeper unscrewed a thermos and poured something dark into a mug.

The smell hit the back of my throat. It was bitter and earthy, with a dusty sweetness underneath that I knew from somewhere. I couldn't place it.

Julian and I had been married five years without a pup. Three years ago Margaret had started bringing me draughts from the old wise women in the hill packs. They were supposed to wake a sleeping wolf, so I could carry a Blackwood heir. One batch had put me in the pack infirmary for three days. Julian had gone to his mother's house afterward, and I'd heard the shouting from the car.

She'd stopped after that. Now she'd started again.

"Drink it," she said. "Hot."

I lifted the mug, and the smell came at me again. I knew that sweetness. My mother had kept a jar of dried flowers on a high shelf in our kitchen, and she'd told me never to touch it. Moonseed. In a tiny dose it made a dormant wolf restless. In a big one, it made wolves sick.

"Well? What are you waiting for?"

"What's in it?" I signed.

Margaret's eyes narrowed. "Herbs. Good ones. Are you accusing me of something?"

"No."

"You can't speak, you can't shift, and you can't give my son a pup. You know what the pack says, Hazel. They say the Wren bloodline is finished, and you're the proof." She leaned in. "If you don't give this family an heir by the next Hunter's Moon, I'll go before the Council myself and ask them to release him from you."

I drank it all.

When the door closed behind her, I ran for the bathroom and threw up until there was nothing left.

I leaned on the sink afterward and almost laughed. Margaret wanted a grandson so badly. She didn't know that Julian checked every month to make sure I'd taken the pill that kept his house free of half-human pups.

I was gathering my bag for work when the front door opened.

Julian came in with his hair still damp and wearing a clean shirt that wasn't one of ours. He smelled of pine and running and, underneath that, of jasmine perfume.

He stopped in the hall and breathed in. Then his whole face changed.

"She brought you moonseed."

I blinked. He could smell it on my breath.

"She means well," I signed.

"She means nothing well." He took one step toward the kitchen, as if he was going to go after his mother right now. Then he stopped. "Did you eat?"

"Yes."

He tilted his head. He was listening to my heartbeat, I realized, and finding nothing to catch.

"Eat with me," he said.

I laid out the breakfast Margaret had brought for him and poured myself a glass of milk. He touched the side of my glass. It was ice cold from the fridge.

"I'm late," I signed, before he could say anything.

I worked at a bakery on Newbury Street in human Boston. It was owned by Jenna Hale, the youngest daughter of the Hale Alpha, who'd walked away from her pack's money to make her own. It was the only place in my life where nobody knew or cared that I was wolfless. It paid twenty-eight hundred a month, and I loved every minute there.

While he ate, his eyes went unfocused for a few seconds at a time. Somebody was talking to him through the link. Once his mouth twitched at something. Once his jaw went tight. I sat across from him and sipped my milk and listened to the clock, the way I always did when he was having a conversation I'd never be part of.

When I was little, I used to press my ear against Grandpa Arthur's chest when the pack was linking, as if I could hear it through his ribs. He'd laugh and tell me that one day, when I got my wolf, the whole pack would be inside my head and I'd wish they'd shut up.

I never got my wolf. Arthur died waiting for it.

Julian finished his food. When I'd washed the plates and dried my hands, he caught my wrist.

"I'll drive you."

In two years, he'd never once driven me to work.

Out in the garage, he opened the passenger door for me himself. Two of his enforcers were coming up the drive for their morning report, and they stopped and stared. One of them actually took a step back, as if he'd seen something unnatural.

I sat in the passenger seat with my hands wrapped around the seatbelt and my heart doing something ridiculous the whole way into town.

We'd just turned onto Newbury when someone ran straight into the road in front of us.

Julian braked so hard the tires screamed. I flew forward and the belt snapped me back.

A fist hammered on my window.

It was Sienna. Her eyes were glowing amber, and her lip was pulled back from a canine that had gone long and sharp.

I rolled the window down.

"Get out of my seat, stray," she snarled. "Now."