The Collar-b

Then we walked in, and it all stopped.

It went out in a ripple. A hammer, a shout, the crack of practice swords, and then quiet, and hundreds of eyes, yellow and brown and green, turning toward me. To the collar. To the chain. To the mud on my face, my torn green dress, the blood on my shin. To Vane.

I'd spent twenty-two years learning how to be overlooked. I was good at it. I'd have traded anything for one of those shadows now.

"Moonstone," someone muttered. "Stray." A man spat near my boots. Vane's head turned a few degrees, no more, and the man became very interested in his own hands.

A little girl stood by one of the tents, maybe seven, a wooden sword in her fist. She wasn't glaring. She was just staring at me with her mouth open, the way you stare at a wounded deer. Her mother caught her by the shoulder and pulled her behind a skirt.

That hurt more than the spit.

Vane marched me through all of it without a word.

The keep sat in the middle of the camp like a fist. Black stone, torches guttering in iron brackets, a draft that went straight through my jacket. He hauled me in by the chain and up a spiral staircase, and my bad ankle knocked against every step until I was biting my lip bloody again. At the top, a heavy door. He shoved it open and threw me through it.

I hit the floor hard enough to scrape my palms raw on the boards.

It was the strangest room I'd ever seen, because it was nice. A four-poster bed with dark curtains. A fire roaring in the hearth. A washbasin with steam curling off the water, like someone had known to expect me. A rug that looked like it had been left there by mistake.

No windows. Thick stone all the way around, and one door.

I crawled backward until the wall stopped me, pulled my knees up and wrapped both arms around my ribs. Shallow breaths. Every one of them hurt.

Vane came in behind me and closed the door. The lock turned with a sound like a verdict. The gold in his eyes was brighter in here, in the firelight. He looked at the dead man's blood drying on his fingers, then at me in my corner, shaking. He crossed to the hearth and held his hands out to the flames with his back to me, so still he might have been carved.

I should have kept quiet. I know that now.

"Take it off."

He didn't turn.

"Please." My voice came apart. "It's burning me."

He turned around slowly. "Burning you."

"It hurts. Please, I'll do whatever you..."

"That's impossible, Sloane."

Third time he'd said my name. I'd counted. It didn't sound like a name he'd just learned. It sounded like something he'd said to himself a lot, alone, in the dark.

He came and crouched in front of me and ignored the dirt on his knees. His fingertips traced the edge of the iron where it met my skin. Gently. That was the worst part. Gentle, from a man who'd just broken a neck.

"A suppression collar doesn't burn a shifter," he said. His voice had dropped, quiet and almost conversational. "It puts them to sleep. It only burns a human who reaches for magic she shouldn't have. So which are you? You told my guards you were wolfless." His thumb pressed lightly beneath my jaw, and I felt my own pulse jump against it. "But you've been shaking since the border. Holding something back with everything you've got."

My chest locked. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't." Barely a whisper. "Don't lie to me. Not tonight."

"I'm not lying!" It burst out of me, and then the tears came properly, hot and ugly, and I couldn't stop them. "I've been wolfless my entire life. Ask anyone. Ask my father. Ask the man who rejected me in front of three hundred people, ask him what I'm worth..."

I clapped my hand over my mouth. Too late.

The room changed. I felt it. Vane didn't move, but something in him did, a kind of stillness that had teeth.

"Rejected," he said. He turned the word over like he'd found something dead in his palm. "Tonight."

"A few hours ago." I wiped my face with my wrist. "It doesn't matter."

"Who?"

"It doesn't..."

"Sloane." Gold eyes, level with mine. "Who?"

I don't know why I answered. Maybe because nobody had asked me anything all night. Not once. They'd told me, and they'd taken, and now here was the most dangerous man I'd ever met, crouched in the dirt on my account, asking, and something in his face wasn't cruelty. It looked, for half a second, dangerously like anger. Not at me.

"Garrick," I whispered. "Garrick Hale."

The muscle in his jaw jumped. He said nothing, but the heat I'd felt in the clearing rolled through me again, low and sudden, right into the hollow where the bond used to be. It wasn't pain. It was worse than pain. It felt like being warmed by something I had no right to.

Stop it, I thought at my own body.  He put a collar on you. 

That's when the iron began to glow.

I felt it before I saw it. A pulse of heat against my throat, then another, faster. Then the light reached the edge of my vision, dull red at first, then orange, throwing my own shadow up the stone wall. The skin under the collar started to blister, and I cried out and clawed at it.

The light caught something at the base of my throat. A leather cord. My mother's stone had worked its way free of my dress, and it was glowing too, a slow, deep, ember-black shine, like something breathing.

Vane went utterly still.

"Where did you get that?"

"My mother." I was gasping now. "She gave it to me when I was seven. It's just a stone, it's just..."

"What was her name?" "I don't know. I don't..." My voice broke. "She died when I was nine. Nobody would tell me anything about her. They put all her things in boxes, and I only ever kept this, please, it's *hot*, it's..."

"Show me your hands."

"What?"

"Your hands, Sloane."

I held them out. They were shaking so badly I couldn't tell if that was me or the room. Vane took my wrists, carefully, like they might shatter, and turned them palm-up in the red light. His eyes moved from my fingers to my face and back again.

Then the first crack came.

It wasn't the fire. I knew that instantly. It was a dry, splitting crack that came from inside my own body, from my left shoulder, like a branch giving way under snow. Then a second. Heat tore down my arm, and I screamed, and the sound that came out wasn't quite mine.

"Vane..." I couldn't feel my fingers. "Something's wrong, something's..."

The pain arrived all at once, like boiling lead poured into my marrow. My back arched off the wall. I looked down at my hands and watched, with the terrible slowness of a nightmare, as black spread out from beneath my fingernails. It crept along my knuckles like ink dropped in water. My nails lengthened, split, tore free.

They weren't claws.

Glossy, black, edged like broken glass, layered plate over plate over plate. They were scales.

I looked up, wild, choking on my own breath, and found Vane Riven, who had ripped a man's life out of his body without blinking, rising slowly to his feet. Stepping back from me. One step. Then another.

And in that bare, firelit room, with red light pulsing on his face, I heard him whisper, in a voice I'd never have believed could shake:

"So it's true."