Chapter 17

Noa’s POV

“He’s sending her away,” Asher said. “Tonight. To Idaho.”

I set the knife down on the cutting board very carefully, so I wouldn’t throw it.

He had come into the kitchen at four in the afternoon looking like a man who had walked through a fire. His shirt was creased. His jaw was tight. There was a long red scratch on his forearm, and when I looked at it, he glanced down as if he hadn’t known it was there.

“Leah,” I said.

“Leah.”

“Sit down and tell me all of it. Term six.”

He sat on the bench. He told me all of it.

The study. The green curtains. The silver knife on the blue velvet, and the folded scrap of paper beside it that neither of them had touched. Reuben on the phone with Simon, talking about me as if I were a recipe he was following. Soft as butter. Kezia will put her on the ground. She’ll yield. Freely. And then the knife.

He told me the last part with his eyes on the table.

“He said I’d choose the pack,” he said. “In the end. He said Alphas always do.”

“And then he smelled her.”

“Her shampoo.” He rubbed the scratch on his arm. “She stepped out before I could stop her. She put her hand behind her back and pushed me flat against the wall, hard, and walked out from behind the curtain alone. She told him she’d been looking for her mother’s old letters. She cried. She was very good.”

“He believed her?”

“He believed she was snooping. He didn’t know I was there.” His mouth twisted. “I smell like your kitchen now. Like bread and smoke. He thought it was on her clothes from visiting you.”

“So he doesn’t know you heard.”

“No. But he knows Leah’s been in the drawer. She couldn’t lock it again.” He looked up at me. “He told her she’s been under too much strain. He’s sending her to his sister in Clearwater to rest. Three Clearwater wolves are driving her there tonight in Kezia’s truck.”

“Kezia’s letting him use her truck?”

“Kezia doesn’t know yet. Her men answer to Reuben.”

I picked up the knife again. I put it back down. My hands needed a job and there was nothing safe for them.

“Can you stop it?”

“Not without telling him why.” His jaw locked. “Leah begged me not to. She said if I make a scene, he’ll know I heard every word, and he’ll move the knife and burn the paper and we’ll have nothing. She said she’d rather be in Idaho with her aunt’s goats than ruin it.”

“She said that?”

“She said she’d always wanted goats.” He tried to smile and failed. “She’s braver than I am.”

I came around the table and sat down on the bench beside him. Not touching. Close enough that our shoulders were an inch apart.

“So now we know,” I said quietly. “If I yield, he takes Ora. If I don’t yield, Kezia might kill me. If you step in, you lose your pack.”

“Yes.”

“And the only one who knows what the rest of that page says is him.”

“And Simon.”

I looked at the starter jar on the windowsill. It was bubbling softly, warm and gold in the late light. I thought about Abigail, three hundred years ago, with her white hair and her cold hands.

“I won’t yield,” I said.

Asher turned his head.

“Noa.”

“I won’t. I’ll stand in that ring until she drops or I do. I’m good at not falling over now. Dana says so.”

“Kezia doesn’t fight to knock you over. She fights to finish.”

“Then I’ll have to be very hard to finish.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “It’s my choice, Asher. It’s my body and my wolf and my fight. You said together. This is me telling you, together, what I’m going to do.”

He stared at me. His eyes went gold, then brown, then gold again.

Then he did the last thing I expected. He laughed. A short, broken breath that shook his whole chest.

“What?” I demanded.

“Nothing.” He shook his head. “Only that I spent three years telling myself I’d never let anyone I loved walk into danger for me. And here you are. Walking.”

The word sat between us on the bench.

Loved.

He heard it the same second I did. His face went still. He didn’t take it back.

I didn’t make him.

~

Gideon found us there at sunset, still sitting side by side on the bench, not talking.

He looked at me. He looked at my hair. He lifted one white eyebrow.

“Your wolf,” he said. “When did you last let her out?”

“In the great hall.”

“Four days ago.” He clicked his tongue. “No wonder she’s sleepy. You can’t burn off silver sitting in a kitchen, child. She needs to run. Under the sky. With the moon on her back.”

“I don’t know how to call her out on purpose. In the hall it was an accident. In the river she wouldn’t come at all.”

“Then let someone else call her.” Gideon looked at his grandson. “There’s a meadow above the north ridge where the Stones have run for two hundred years. The moon’s more than half full tonight. Take her there. Let your wolf ask hers.”

Asher went very still.

“Grandfather.”

“Don’t Grandfather me. I’m old and tired and I’d like to see one thing go right before I die.” Gideon thumped his cane on the stone floor. “Go. Both of you. Before I hit you with this.”

~

The meadow was a wide silver bowl at the top of the ridge, ringed by black pines. The grass came up past my knees. The moon was huge and bright, a little lopsided, more than half of it shining. I could see every blade of grass. I could see my own breath.

Asher stood a few steps away in the cold, in a T-shirt and sweatpants and bare feet, which he swore was normal.

“Turn around,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m about to take my clothes off. And term three.”

I turned around so fast I nearly fell into the grass.

I heard cloth hit the ground. I heard him breathe out. And then I heard the sound I had only heard once before, in the great hall, from inside my own body. A deep, wrenching crack, like a tree bending in a storm. A gust of warm wind hit my back, smelling of pine and rain.

A huge shape stepped up behind me in the grass.

I turned around.

The wolf was black. Not dark brown, not gray. Black as a bottle of ink, so black the moonlight slid off him in silver lines. He was bigger than any wolf I had ever seen except the one I had been. His eyes were gold. And down his left side, under the black fur, there was a long pale stripe where nothing grew, a scar like a river on a map.

Ari.

He looked at me. He lowered his great head until his nose was level with my face. His breath was warm on my cheek.

And inside me, so far down I almost didn’t hear it, Ora lifted her head.

Oh, she said.

Then he howled.

It wasn’t loud. It was low and long and deep, and it went into the ground and up through my bare feet and straight into the middle of my chest, where the thread had snapped at the lake. It wasn’t a sound I heard with my ears. It was a sound I heard with my bones.

Ora answered.

She came up through me like a sunrise. All the tiredness, all the heavy ache of silver, all the cold, it burned up in one long blaze from my heart to my fingertips. I didn’t think of flour. I didn’t have time to think. I just opened, and she poured out.

The meadow tipped. The grass rushed up. Then I was standing on four great golden feet, and the night was full of a thousand smells, and the black wolf in front of me was dancing back a step with his tail high and his eyes bright.

Run, said Ora, laughing. Run, run, run!

We ran.

I had never run in my life. Not really. Not without someone watching, not without my body being a thing to apologize for. Now I ran and the ground flew under me, and every step was huge and sure, and my weight was not a burden but a drum. The black wolf ran beside me, shoulder to shoulder, and when I veered he veered, and when I leaped a fallen log he leaped it too.

The silver burned off me as I ran. I could feel it go. Like frost melting off a window in the sun.

At the top of the meadow, under the tallest pine, I stopped, panting, with my tongue hanging out like a fool.

The black wolf stopped beside me.

He touched his nose to mine.

Light flashed between us.

It was gold and thin and faint, so faint I would have missed it if I hadn’t been looking. But it was there. A thread. Not whole. Not like the lake. A single strand of gold, as fine as a hair, stretching from his chest to mine, trembling in the moonlight.

The bond. Or the ghost of it. Or the start of it all over again.

Ari made a soft sound in his throat, almost a whimper.

Ora said, very quietly, There you are.

I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to breathe. If I breathed, it might go away.

Then the black wolf’s head snapped up.

His ears went flat. A growl rolled up from deep in his chest, so low it shook the ground under my paws. He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking past me, up the ridge, into the dark under the pines.

Down, said a voice in my head. His voice. Asher’s. Clear as if he’d spoken in my ear. NOA, DOWN!

I dropped.

A crack rang across the meadow, sharp and flat, like a branch snapping in two.

The bark of the pine above my head exploded. Splinters rained over my back. A burning smell filled my nose, hot and bitter and metal.

I knew that smell.

I had smelled it every night with my hands on Asher’s ribs.

Silver.

Someone was up on the ridge in the dark with a rifle. And they had just fired a silver bullet at my head.