4

I ran until the pack lights disappeared behind me.

I ran past the training field and the last of the cottages, through a thorn thicket that opened my arms in long red ribbons and across a marsh that swallowed my shoes. I ran with my gray dress plastered to my legs and my lungs burning like I had swallowed coals, and all the while the pain kept pace beside me, a raw, bleeding hole where the golden thread had been.

Memory is a cruel thing to run with. It does not care that you are busy. Halfway across the marsh I remembered the first time Jaxon ever spoke to me, when we were fourteen, and he found me crying behind the food stores after the pups had thrown rotten fruit. He had sat down beside me in the dirt and said nothing at all. After ten minutes he handed me half a sandwich. It's not very good, he said. But it's something. I had believed, for five full years, that a boy like that could not turn into the person on that platform.

I tripped on a root and went down hard on my hands. For a moment I stayed there, panting in the mud, and I thought: I could stay here.

"Don't," said Wren.

Her voice came through me like a rope thrown to a drowning person. She was ragged and wet-eyed and furious, and she was still there.

"Get up, Sage."

"I can't."

"You can. I'm right here. I'm not leaving you." A shaky breath. "He took the bond. He didn't take me."

I laughed, a cracked, ugly sound, and got to my feet.

The border was a river, black and wide and swollen from the rain. On the far bank a wall of pines stood in a line like soldiers. Every child in Silverwood knew the rule. Past that water lay Eclipse territory, and the Eclipse Pack did not forgive trespassers. Their Alpha was said to be a Lycan, a creature half again as large as an ordinary wolf, and the stories told how he had once torn a man's throat out for stepping across a line on a map.

I looked back once. Far behind me, through the trees, I could see a faint smear of lantern light where the ceremony still burned. Someone was cheering. It sounded like a wave breaking a very long way off.

I waded in.

The cold hit my chest and stole every thought out of my head. The current dragged at my legs, trying to pull me sideways and down, and I clawed my way across with my teeth locked and water slapping my face. Twice my foot lost the bottom. Once a branch whipped past and caught me across the mouth. When I finally dragged myself up onto the far bank, I coughed river onto the mud and lay there shaking, staring up at a sky that did not care.

No wolf came. No alarms went off. Just the rain, pattering on my cheeks.

I pressed a hand to my chest and found the pendant there, still warm, humming faintly against my skin like a small trapped bee. I had worn it every day since the funeral and it had never done anything but hang there, a cheap piece of silver on a thin chain. Now it pulsed in time with my heartbeat. I thought of Elder Marcus's face, the way the blood had left it. I thought of Mara's fingers on my wrist. Don't take off that necklace.

"What is it?" I whispered.

"I don't know," Wren said. She sounded tired, and a little afraid. "But it knows something we don't."

I tucked it under the collar of my dress, where it burned a coin-sized circle against my skin, and made myself keep walking.

After a while I stood. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else. I limped through the pines, following nothing in particular, and the trees thinned and the air changed. It smelled of wet asphalt now, and exhaust, and a faint electric hum I could not name. Through the last of the trunks I saw it, a dark road shining with rain, and beyond it a glittering spill of lights that I had only ever seen in magazines I stole from the barber's bin. Glass towers. Cars with their headlamps blazing. A whole other world, humming and bright, where nobody knew my name or my pack or what I had been called on the training field.

I stopped at the edge of the road. The pain had settled into something dull and steady, like a second pulse. My hands were bleeding. My dress was in ribbons at the hem. I stood there swaying with my arms wrapped around myself and thought, with great clarity, that I had absolutely nowhere to go.

Wren had gone quiet. It was a strange, hollow quiet, like the lights going off in a house.

A pair of headlights swung around the bend and slid toward me, slow and low and black. A long car, polished like a beetle's shell, with tinted windows and a silver crest on the grille. It rolled to a halt a few feet away. I tried to step back, and my knees buckled instead.

I hit the wet asphalt hard.

Somewhere above me a car door opened. Footsteps followed, expensive shoes, deliberate and unhurried. The smell reached me before the voice did. It was cedar and woodsmoke and cold rain, and underneath it something dark and rich, like the air before a storm breaks.

And Wren, who had not said one word in ten minutes, said very softly, "Oh."

"Get up," a man said above me. His voice was low and rough, and it vibrated in my bones like a struck bell. "You're on my land."