CHAPTER 41: The Sickness

Nerissa POVIt started with the smell. The particular heightening of everything around me that arrived overnight and bymorning made the kitchen corridor unbearable.I stood at the entrance to it and pressed my back against the wall and breathed throughmy mouth and waited for it to pass.Meat from the morning preparation. Oil on the cooking fires. The layered smell of thekitchen that had been in continuous use for years and absorbed all of it into its walls.None of it had bothered me before.This morning it hit me like a wall.Harper appeared from the kitchen doorway with a cloth in her hands and stopped whenshe saw my face."What's wrong?" she said."The smell," I said.She looked at the kitchen. Then at me."It smells the same as it always does," she said"I know," I said.She studied my face for a moment."Come outside," she said.The outer yard was better.Cold morning air in an open space. The smell of earth and damp stone and the distanttree line.I pre

CHAPTER 42: Twin Heartbeats

Nerissa POVI didn't sleep again that night.I lay on my back in the dark of the small room and looked at the ceiling and turned theword over and over in my mind until it stopped feeling like something that had happenedto someone else.I was four weeks pregnant,maybe five.I pressed my hand flat on my stomach the way I had before Harper left. Nothing feltdifferent,nothing changed in any way I could detect from the outside. My body looked the same. I felt the same except for the tiredness and the nausea and the sensitivity thathad apparently decided to announce itself this morning.My wolf was different though.She has been different since the moment the healer said the word.She turned inward,watchful and orienting herself around something new with theabsolute instinctive certainty of an animal that understood things the human mind wasstill catching up to.I lay there and let my mind catch up.The morning after zaydens forehead against mine and together still even

CHAPTER 43: Hidden Beneath Fabric

Nerissa POV"She has to return now!” The healer from the mountain said I had passed out,and was unconscious. All I could see were blurry images of peoplestanding above me."Nerissa!” Dorian's voice was urgent. “She has to return, I do not have the necessary equipment. She can't travel” the healersaid.I returned to the red claw pack.Dorian left before sunrise.He came to the doorway of the small room Harper arranged for me and stood there withhis riding coat already on and his guards assembled in the yard behind him."The settlement people will wait for you," he said."Alright," I said.He looked at me for a moment.At my face on the way I was sitting on the edge of the bed with both hands folded in mylap over my stomach in a way that had become automatic in the twelve hours.He was the only one outside this room who knew and he was about to ride away andtake that knowledge with him and leave me inside the Red Claw Pack alone with it."Nerissa," he said."I'll

CHAPTER 44: Veil Forest Whispers

Nerissa POVThe howls started at night.It was distant and faint enough that I might have told myself it was wind through themountain passes if I hadn't spent weeks inside Obsidian Keep.I lay in the small room and listened.Three howls, spaced unevenly.My wolf was immediately awake inside me.I pressed my hand flat on my stomach and lay still until the sounds faded and the nightsettled back into its ordinary quiet.Then I lay there in the dark and thought about what ordinary quiet felt like before I knewwhat I knew.Harper heard them too.She found me in the outer yard the next morning with her jaw tight and her soft browneyes carrying something she had been sitting with since the night before."The howls,you heard them too,right?" she said."Yes," I said."The border patrol came back at dawn,two wolves short." She saidI turned and looked at her fully."Short how," I said."They left with eight," she said. "Six came back."The yard around us was moving throu

CHAPTER 45:Rowan's Obsession

Rowan POVI began breaking things.The first was a chair. I stood up too fast from the desk during a patrol report that wasn'tholding my attention and the chair caught the back of my knee on the way up andsomething in me decided that was reason enough and my hand came out and sent itacross the study before I had made any conscious decision to do it.The chair hit the wall and cracked along one leg.The second was a training blade.Two days later in the lower yard during a sparring session with a senior warrior who wasgood enough that he should have required my full attention. He didn't get my fullattention. My full attention was somewhere in the back of the pack house where Nerissahad been quietly existing for days like a splinter I couldn't locate precisely enough toremove.I hit the blade too hard at the wrong angle and the metal gave way.The warrior stepped back and looked at the broken weapon and then very carefullylooked at the ground instead of at me.Th

CHAPTER 46: Another Alpha's Scent

Rowan POVThe pack meeting ran for a long time.I stood at the front of the main hall and listened to senior warriors give their reports andwatched Alpha Magnus nod at the right moments and say the cautious measured things that Alpha Magnus said when he wanted to appear decisive without committing toanythingTwo wolves were missing.Border breach two miles inside the eastern edge.Howls reported by three separate patrol groups within the last four nights.And one wolf who came back without his partner and couldn't describe what he hadseen clearly enough for anyone to build a response around.I listened to all of it and made the decisions that needed making.I Tripled the eastern patrol,pulled the outer rotation closer to the walls.Sent a fast rider to the nearest allied pack requesting information on unusual rogueactivity in the broader territory.The entire time I stood at the front of that hall I was aware of one thing that had nothingto do with border breaches