All Chapters of Rejected Under the Blood Moon: The Alpha's Regret: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

SERAPHINAWe made camp in the lee of a great slab of rock, half a day's ride short of the Hollow, with no fires. Sigrun's scouts had come back at dusk with news nobody wanted: tracks on the ridges all round us, fresh, men on foot who didn't smell of anything."They've been watching since the pass," Sigrun said. "Maybe before. They know how many we are to the last horse.""Then we don't surprise them," said Ronan. "We'll have to be better than them instead."We sat in a rough circle in the dark, twenty-odd Lycans and eight wolves of Ironmoor and a boy from the Greymarch, and Hakon drew the Hollow in the snow with the point of his knife from what Asta had told him.A great round bowl in the mountains. Cliffs all the way round, fifty feet high, a hundred in places. One way in, from the south, through a cleft in the rock barely wide enough for a cart. And in the middle, a single standing stone."They'll put the lanterns round the rim," Hakon said. "The way they did a hundred years ago. An

SERAPHINAI don't remember crossing the ground between us. One moment I was at the stone with Mira's chain in my hands, and the next I was on my knees beside Kael with the dark still pouring out of the earth all round us, and his blood on my palms.The knife was still in him. Under the ribs, on the left. Silver, polished bright. Around it, his skin had already begun to darken, grey spreading outwards in thin branching lines like frost on a window."Don't," he said. His voice was very quiet. "Don't pull it. It'll...""Be quiet."I could feel the bond going. That was the worst of it. Not the blood, not the grey lines creeping out across his chest. The bond. The warm whole humming thing that had knitted itself back together under the dark moon was thinning under my ribs like a rope fraying strand by strand, and every strand that went, I felt go.Mira dropped down beside me in the dirt. She was still trailing a length of broken chain from one ankle. She looked at Kael and then at me with

SERAPHINAWe came down out of the high country in a long, slow column, carrying the wounded on litters and Maren in chains on the back of a pack horse, and it took us four days to reach the valley road.Mira rode with me. She'd refused, flatly, to ride with anyone else. Not Tobin, who sulked about it for a day and then gave up. Not Ilse, who offered, and was looked at by a twelve-year-old with such withering contempt that she went and rode beside Hakon instead. Mira sat in front of me on the grey mare with her back pressed against my chest and my arms round her, and most of the time she didn't talk. When she did, it was in the dark, in that place behind my eyes where only the two of us could go.Does it always feel like this? she asked me on the second night. Like there's something enormous sitting in you, waiting?Yes, I said. I think so.Does it get easier?I thought about lying. I didn't.I don't know yet. I'll tell you when I find out.She was quiet for a while. Then: Will you sta

SERAPHINAThe miller's wife came up the path at a run, with her skirts in her fists and her hair coming down, and Mira stood up off the step and went very still.I'd been sitting beside her on that step for a day and a half. We'd lit a fire in the house with the blue door, the two of us, and slept in front of it wrapped in my cloak, and at some point in the night she'd told me about the dog, and the mill, and the time her mother burned the bread for the midwinter feast and threw the whole tray into the river rather than let the Alpha's cousin see it. She'd talked in the dark behind my eyes, where it was easier. She hadn't cried again.She cried now.They met halfway down the path. I don't know which of them made the sound. The miller came up behind, slower, grey in the face, and put his arms round both of them. Then Tobin arrived at a flat run from somewhere and flung himself on the pile, and a fat yellow dog came galloping up out of nowhere, barking fit to wake the dead, and tried to

SERAPHINAI told them in the morning, round the table in the house with the blue door, with the rain coming down outside and Pudding asleep across my feet.About the voice in the dark. About how big it had felt, and how cold, and how awake. About the way it had called me sister."What else did she say?" said Ronan."Not much." I wrapped my hands round my cup. "She asked if I was coming to Fenholt. I didn't answer. She laughed and said of course I was, I'd come for Cassia, it was in the stories." I hesitated. "Then she said, bring the Alpha. We'll talk like sisters. And then she was gone."Kael's face had gone very still."She knows about Cassia," said Ilse. "Before Garrick's letter even reached us.""She knows about everything," I said. "I could feel it. She's been listening. Maybe since the moon went out. Maybe she heard me find Mira in the mountains." I looked down at the table. "She's stronger than me. I don't know how. But she is."Nobody said anything for a moment."Then we'd bet