Chapter 3

Chapter 3

KADE

She didn't believe me.

I saw it in her eyes the second the words left my mouth. First the shock. Then the anger rising up behind it, hot and fast, like a fire catching dry grass.

"Liar," she whispered.

I let go of her wrists. She stumbled back from me and held her bleeding arm against her chest. Her dark hair was wild around her face. Her cheeks were wet. She was shaking so hard I could hear her teeth click.

And she looked at me like I was the worst thing she had ever seen.

Maybe I was.

"Hilda will clean that cut," I said. "Eat something. Rest."

"I don't want anything from you."

"I know."

I picked up the little fruit knife from the floor, because I wasn't a fool, and I walked to the door. My arm stung. So did hers. I could feel it, a faint echo of her pain sitting under my own, like a second heartbeat. That was new. Two days, and I still wasn't used to it.

At the door, I stopped.

"The farther I go, the more it will hurt you," I said without turning around. "I'll stay close. The room across the hall. If you need anything—"

"I need you to die."

I closed my eyes for a second. Then I opened the door and walked out.

Hilda was waiting in the hallway, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. She took one look at my bloody sleeve and clicked her tongue.

"Well," she said. "That went about as well as I thought."

"Clean her arm," I said. "Don't let her see the other scars yet. Not until she's ready."

Hilda's face went serious. She nodded once and went inside.

I crossed the hall into my study and shut the door. Then I sat down in the chair behind my desk, pressed my hands against my eyes, and let myself remember.

Two nights ago.

I had been on the northern border with a small patrol when I smelled the smoke. Not wood smoke from a chimney. Something bigger. Something wrong. The wind was coming from the south, from the valley, and it carried the smell of burning thatch and burning flesh.

Willowbrook.

I didn't wait for the others. I shifted and ran.

I have run many times in my life. I have run toward fights and away from them. But I have never run the way I ran that night. Through the trees, down the hill, across the river, my paws tearing up the ground and my lungs on fire.

It didn't matter.

By the time I got there, it was already over.

The whole village was burning. The church roof had fallen in. The bakery was a black shell. Every house on the main road was on fire, the flames climbing up into the night sky. And in the streets, there were bodies.

Men. Women. Old people. A little boy lying face down near the bakery door, one small hand still stretched out toward it.

I shifted back into my human form and stood in the middle of the road. The heat pressed against my bare skin. I couldn't move. I just stood there and stared.

Then I saw something on the ground near my feet. A strip of black cloth, torn and half burnt. I picked it up.

Stitched onto it, in dark red thread, was a thorn.

Our thorn. The Blackthorn mark. We tied these bands around our arms when we rode out as a pack. Every warrior I had ever trained wore one.

My hand closed around it so tight my knuckles turned white.

Somewhere close by, I heard it. Faint. Weak. So weak I almost missed it under the roar of the flames.

A heartbeat.

I followed it down a small side road to a house at the edge of the village. The roof was burning, but the walls still stood. I knew this house. I had been here once before, a long time ago. I didn't let myself think about that. I kicked the door open and went inside.

The heartbeat was coming from under the floor.

I found the cellar door behind an overturned table and tore it open. Smoke poured down into the dark, and I followed it.

She was there. Lying on the dirt floor between sacks of potatoes and shelves of old jars.

A girl. A human girl, maybe nineteen or twenty, in a torn blue dress. Her face was gray with ash. A knife was stuck in her side, just under her ribs. Around the wound, her skin had turned dark, and thin black lines were spreading out from it like cracks in ice.

I knew those lines. Every wolf knows them.

Wolfsbane.

That blade had been made to kill one of us. Wolfsbane on a wolf burns slowly. It takes hours, sometimes days. We have time to find a healer. But on a human, it moves fast. Too fast.

I knelt beside her. Her eyes opened. They were brown. Warm brown, like her mother's.

She saw me, and she tried to crawl away.

"No," she gasped. "No, please."

"I'm not going to hurt you," I said. "I'm trying to help."

"You're him. You're the alpha."

"Yes."

She was crying. The black lines were climbing up her neck now. I could hear her heart stumbling, skipping beats. She had minutes. Maybe less.

Hilda was an hour away. There was no cure I could give her. There was only one thing strong enough to fight wolfsbane in a human body.

A wolf's healing.

And there was only one way a human could share a wolf's healing.

"Listen to me," I said. I took her face in my hands so she would look at me. "You're dying. The blade was poisoned. I can't stop it. But there's one way I can save you."

"How?" she whispered.

"A mate bond. If I bond you to me, my body will heal yours. You'll live."

Her eyes went wide.

"But it can't be undone," I said. "Not ever. You'll be tied to me for the rest of your life. You need to understand that. You need to choose."

For a moment, I thought she would say no. I thought she would rather die than be tied to a wolf. To me.

Then she grabbed my arm. She pulled herself up onto her knees in the dirt, shaking so badly she could barely stay up. She held onto me with both hands, and she looked up at me with tears cutting clean lines through the ash on her face.

"Yes," she said. "Please. Please. I don't want to die. My mother told me to find you. Please."