THE ROPE IN HIS HAND

The door slammed against the wall so hard that the candles shook, and I turned around with the old Alpha's hand still clutching my wrist.

Elder Veda stood in the doorway with four guards behind her, and Naomi was right there at her side with tears running down her cheeks. She had changed from the white cloak into a pale nightgown and let her hair fall loose, so that she looked like a frightened child who had been dragged out of bed by terrible news. I had to admire how fast she worked.

"Sister," she cried, pressing her hands to her mouth. "What have you done?"

I did not answer her, because Roderick's fingers had suddenly gone tight and strange around my arm. His body arched off the bed, his eyes rolled back, and a harsh, wet sound came out of his throat. The antidote should have steadied his breathing within minutes, but instead I watched his whole body shake as if lightning were running through it.

"Alpha," I whispered, trying to hold his shoulders down. "Stay with me. Alpha, please."

He gave one last shudder, and then his hand slipped from my wrist and fell onto the blanket. The room went completely silent, and I knew before I touched his neck that there was no pulse to find.

Old Alpha Roderick was dead, and the name he had been about to say died with him.

"Seize her," Veda said.

The guards moved at once and caught me by both arms. I fought to turn my head toward the Elder, my voice shaking with shock and anger. "He was alive when I got here. Someone poisoned his wine hours ago, and I gave him the antidote. Smell the cup. You will see I am telling the truth."

"I saw her running from her cottage tonight with a satchel," Naomi said in a small, trembling voice, wiping her eyes. "She told me this morning that she would make the Alpha pay for shaming her. I thought she was only upset. I never thought she would do something like this."

"That is a lie," I said, and my voice cracked at last. "You know it is a lie."

"Check her bag," Veda said calmly.

A guard ripped the satchel from my shoulder and tipped it out onto the floor, and every bottle I had packed rolled across the boards. Veda stepped forward and bent down in her long gray robes, and she picked up a small dark bottle that I had never seen in my life. I watched her sleeve move as she lifted it, a quick, smooth flick of her wrist that most people would never notice.

But I noticed, because I had been a healer for ten years and I knew the difference between my own hands and someone else's.

"Wolfsbane oil," Veda announced, pulling out the stopper and holding the bottle up for everyone to see. "Sealed with black wax, hidden in her own medicine bag. She did not come to save him. She came to finish him."

"That is not mine," I said. "All of my bottles have green wax. Look at them, they are all the same. She put that in my bag herself, I watched her do it."

A cold, dry smile touched Veda's lips. "Then show me where it was hidden, child."

"In your sleeve."

The room went still. Two guards turned to look at the Elder, and I saw a flicker of doubt cross their faces. Veda only lifted both of her wrinkled hands and held them out with the sleeves pushed back, and there was nothing in them.

"Poor girl," she said softly. "Grief has already broken her mind."

I opened my mouth to argue, and that was when a new voice cut through the room.

"What is happening here?"

Everyone turned, and my heart dropped to my stomach. Darian stood in the doorway in his black ceremony clothes, with his hair a mess and his gray eyes wide, and he looked as though he had run the whole way from the temple. His gaze went to the bed, and I watched the color leave his face.

"Father?"

He crossed the room in three long steps and dropped beside the bed, and I could not bring myself to look away. The most feared Alpha in a hundred years took his dead father's hand in both of his own and pressed it against his forehead, and his shoulders began to shake. It was the first time I had ever seen him cry. In my first life I would have given anything to comfort him, and now I stood there between two guards, not allowed to move.

"Alpha," Veda said gently, laying a hand on his shoulder. "I am so sorry. The healer's daughter has murdered your father. She rejected you in front of the whole pack tonight, and then she came here to take revenge."

"It is not true," I said. "Darian, look at me. Look at that bottle and ask yourself why it is not mine. Your father was poisoned for weeks, and I came here to save him."

Darian raised his head slowly. His eyes were red and wet, and they moved from his father to Veda's hand on his shoulder and then to me. I saw him struggling, I saw the pain of it, and for a moment I truly believed he was going to speak.

Then Veda leaned down and whispered a few words into his ear. They were soft and strange, in a language I had never heard before.

Darian's whole body went rigid. A faint silver glow flickered beneath the collar of his shirt, there and gone in a single heartbeat, and when he looked at me again, his face was a blank, cold mask.

"Take her to the cells," he said.

"Darian!" I cried.

"Tomorrow at dawn the Elders will hold the trial." His voice was flat and hollow, and it did not sound like his own. "Take her away."

The guards dragged me out into the corridor, and over my shoulder I caught one last look at Naomi. She was standing beside Veda with her head bowed, but she lifted her eyes to meet mine, and the smile she gave me was so small and so perfect that nobody else could possibly have seen it.

The dungeon was cold and smelled of wet stone. They threw me into the last cell in the row, slammed the iron door, and locked it, and their footsteps faded up the stairs until all I could hear was water dripping somewhere in the dark.

I sat on the freezing floor with my arms wrapped around my knees. This was exactly where I had sat the first time, and I knew exactly what came next. A trial that was already decided, a rope that was already made, and a crowd that had already chosen to hate me.

I had changed everything, and somehow it was ending in the same place.

I do not know how long I sat there. The torches in the corridor burned low, and I had almost drifted into a numb, exhausted half sleep when I heard the sound of a key turning in the lock.

My head snapped up.

The cell door swung open, and a tall shadow stepped inside and closed it softly behind him. The torchlight caught his face, and I saw Darian standing there with his eyes burning and his chest rising and falling fast, like he had just fought his way back from somewhere very far away.

And in his hand, coiled and heavy, was a long length of rope.