บททั้งหมดของ Rejected Under the Blood Moon: The Alpha's Regret: บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

SERAPHINAWe left Anders in a shepherd's hut at the foot of the mountains with the horses, a fire, and more swearing than I'd have thought one man could manage with a broken leg. He wanted to come. He couldn't stand."Go," he said finally, and threw a boot at Hakon. "Go on. Go and get him."After that it was Hakon and Ilse on the last two horses, and me.I ran.I'd never run like that in my life. I hadn't known it was possible. The silverroot had been working on me for more than a week now, and my wolf was stronger every day. She'd filled out. Her legs were long and her lungs were deep, and she ran the way water runs downhill, as if it cost her nothing. The horses fell behind within the first hour. By dusk I couldn't hear them at all.The forest thickened. The ground began to climb. And then, as the last of the light went out of the sky, I smelled the river.And smoke. And horses. And, underneath all of it, that clean burning emptiness that I was beginning to hate more than anything i

SERAPHINAWe made camp in the lee of the ridge, where the wind off the Scar couldn't reach. Hakon built a fire. Ilse cleaned the cut on my flank and the scrape along my shoulder where the stitches had pulled, and said nothing at all about anything, which I was grateful for.Kael and Ronan didn't sit together. They didn't sit apart, exactly, either. They sat on opposite sides of the fire like two dogs who've agreed not to fight tonight, and they both kept not looking at me.Nobody slept much.Somewhere past midnight, Ronan got up and walked out to the edge of the firelight and stood looking at the sky. After a while I got up too and went to stand beside him.The moon was very thin. A white paring, low over the trees to the south."Tomorrow," he said."Tomorrow."We stood there for a while."I should say this now," Ronan said at last. "Before there isn't time." He didn't look at me. "Ilse's right. If Asta's right, and if Aldous has more of those lanterns, you may need a bond to stand on

SERAPHINAI'd watched Kael fight before. Everybody in Ironmoor had. Border skirmishes, training bouts, the time a rogue came over the south wall when I was fourteen and he went out to meet it with his bare hands. He'd always fought the way he stood, as if the ground belonged to him.He didn't fight like that tonight.Garrick shifted first. He was bigger than Kael in wolf form, heavier through the chest, a great shaggy brown thing with a scar across his muzzle, and he came off the stone in a rush that shook the frozen ground. Kael went to meet him a heartbeat later, dark as wet slate, and they hit each other so hard I heard it from the trees.I'd never seen him hurt before. I saw it now. He was tired. He'd run half a night to reach the Scar and fought there and slept on stones, and it showed in every move he made. Garrick caught him across the shoulder and threw him down, and the whole clearing gasped, and beside me in the bracken my hands closed on frozen earth so hard my nails broke.

SERAPHINAIn the morning, half the elders of Ironmoor wanted to declare war on the North, and the other half wanted to declare me a goddess. Neither half had slept.I sat at the end of the long table in the hall where I'd once carried bread to the Alpha's guests, in a borrowed dress, with Cassia on one side of me and Wenna on the other, and listened to them shout."A Lycan King on our land!" Old Bennick's face was purple. "Under arms! On the night of a pack ceremony! The Stone Treaty is broken, and every southern pack from here to the coast will expect us to answer for it...""He came because I asked him to."Kael didn't raise his voice. He never had to. He was standing at the head of the table with his shoulder bandaged, and the whole hall went quiet."I wrote to the Lycan King," he said, "twelve days ago. I asked him to protect a member of this pack when I couldn't. He did. Last night he stood in our clearing and fought men who'd come to murder her in front of all of you. If the tre

SERAPHINAThree weeks in Skarholt, and I'd learned to put out a candle from across a room without anyone seeing me do it.It had taken eleven days to learn that. Asta made me practise in the star tower, where there was nothing to break but paper, and every evening at dusk she'd light a single candle on the far side of the brass instrument and sit back in her chair and say, "Well?"The first night I put out every light in the tower and half the torches on the stair below it. The second night I got it down to the tower. By the end of the first week I could do the candle and only the candle, but it came back with a headache that lasted until morning."You're pushing it," Asta said. "You're treating it like a door you have to shove open. It isn't a door. It's a tide. You don't push a tide. You let it come in and then you tell it where to stop.""How?""Practice." She cackled. "Same as everything."So I practised. Every morning in the yard with Ilse, learning to shift clean and fast, learn