Chapter 8

Briony's POV

"Whatever you think you saw," I said, "you don't actually have anything. Just a story with no proof behind it."

Petra's smile didn't waver. "Don't need proof to get people talking. Rumors work just fine on their own."

"Then go start one." I turned back to the shelf, hands steadier than I felt, and kept sorting like she wasn't still standing there. "See how far it gets you when the healer who trained half this pack backs her own story to the elders' faces."

For a second neither of us said anything. Then Petra pushed off the shelf she'd been leaning against and walked to the door, unhurried, like she had all the time in the world.

"Have it your way." She paused with her hand on the frame. "For now."

She left. I stood there another minute with my hands buried in dried herbs, waiting for my heart to slow back down to something normal, and it took longer than I wanted it to.

Bettina found me an hour before sundown, done with the day's patients, and told me to sit without giving me much choice in the matter. Kieran was already at the table when I walked in, arms crossed, jaw set the way it got whenever he decided something before the conversation even started.

"Sit," Bettina said again, softer this time, and pulled a chair out across from me.

"Am I in trouble?"

"No." She folded her hands on the table. "You're about to get answers. Long overdue ones."

I sat.

"The Anchor-born line goes back further than anyone in this pack remembers clearly," she started. "Before Ashvale had a name, even. The stories say the first of them could walk into a battlefield mid-slaughter and stop it cold, not by fighting, but by pulling every wolf there back into themselves. Frenzy, bloodlust, none of it could hold once she touched a person."

"She." I caught it. "It's always a woman?"

"Always. Passed mother to daughter, though it skips generations without warning. Sometimes two hundred years between one Anchor-born and the next." Bettina's eyes didn't leave mine. "Your great-grandmother had it. Barely used it, from what I was told. Kept quiet, lived a long life, died in her sleep like anybody else."

"Then why does everyone act like it's a curse?"

Bettina and Kieran traded a look I didn't like at all.

"Because not every Anchor-born gets to live quietly," Bettina said. "The gift answers the need. Somebody's dying, somebody's about to lose control, and it pulls itself out of you whether you're ready or not. That's what happened with Faro. You didn't choose it. It chose the moment for you."

"That's not an answer. That's just what I already know." I leaned forward. "What happens if I use it too much?"

She hesitated, which scared me more than anything she'd said so far.

"We'll get to that," she said. "When you're ready to hear it."

"I'm asking now."

"And I'm telling you not tonight." Her voice hardened just enough to end the conversation. "You survived a burn tonight that would've dropped a grown warrior. Let that be enough for one day."

I wanted to push. I looked at Kieran instead, hoping for backup, and got nothing but the same closed-off face he'd been wearing since he sat down.

"Fine," I said, even though it wasn't. "Then tell me something you're actually willing to say."

"I can do that." Kieran uncrossed his arms and set both hands flat on the table, like he was laying down terms instead of having a conversation. "From now on, you don't use it unless it's life or death. Not to prove a point, not because somebody dared you, not even to help somebody with a scraped knee. Life or death only."

"That's not up to you."

"It is tonight." His voice didn't rise, but it didn't need to. "You don't know your own limits yet. Bettina doesn't fully know them either, not for certain. Until we do, I'm not watching you burn yourself out over a bruise."

"So I'm supposed to just stand there? Watch someone bleed out because it's not bad enough yet?"

"I'm saying use your judgment, and when in doubt, come find me or Bettina first." He held my eyes. "I'm trying to keep you alive long enough to figure out what this actually costs you."

I hated that it made sense. I hated it more that I couldn't come up with a single argument that beat it.

"Fine," I said again, and this time I mostly meant it.

"And the mark." Bettina tapped her own palm where mine had glowed gold two nights running. "If it acts up on its own,heat, light, anything you didn't call for,you come to me straightaway. Doesn't matter what hour."

"It's done that before?"

"Not that I've heard. Not in generations." She said it like she wanted it to stay that way. "Which is exactly why I need to know if it starts."

I promised her I would. I meant that too, standing there in the lamplight with both of them watching me like I was something fragile and dangerous at the same time. I just didn't know yet how fast that promise would get tested.

I couldn't sleep. I lay in that narrow bed staring at a ceiling I still didn't know well enough to memorize, running Bettina's half-answers over and over, trying to find the shape of whatever she wasn't telling me. Eventually exhaustion won out over worry, and I went under somewhere past midnight without meaning to.

I woke up like something had grabbed me by the throat.

My palm was on fire. Not literally, but close enough that I sat bolt upright gasping, cradling my hand against my chest, the mark blazing gold bright enough to throw light against the far wall. There was no wound to heal, nobody screaming for help, no danger anywhere near me that I could feel or smell or hear through the thin window glass.

Nothing. Just me, alone in a dark room, and a power that had decided to answer a call I hadn't made.