All Chapters of Rejected Under the Blood Moon: The Alpha's Regret: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

KAELI didn't turn round.I'd like that remembered, if anything about me is. I stood on the shingle at Skarra with my back to the slope and the lake lapping at my boots, and I heard her go up the hill to him, and I heard them talk, low, the words lost in the wind. Then I heard nothing at all for the space of a breath.I knew what that silence was. I didn't need to see it.I didn't turn round.The bond under my ribs didn't tear. I'd half thought it might. It didn't even pull. It just ached, the way an old break aches in cold weather, steady and deep and not going anywhere. I stood there and let it, and kept my hands open at my sides, and watched the lake."You love her," said Liv.She was sitting on a rock a little way along the shore, with her blanket round her shoulders and her knees drawn up. I'd forgotten she was there."Yes," I said."Then why didn't you go up the hill?""Because it wasn't my hill," I said. "Not this morning."She looked at me for a long moment with her red, tired

SERAPHINA They were coming, and some of them weren't going to make it. That was the first thing I understood, sitting on the cold shingle at dawn with Liv asleep at last under three blankets and Kael's coat, and my eyes still black from looking. All across the North, the embers were moving. Slowly. Steadily. The way sheep move when the dog's behind them. Out of farmhouses and shepherds' huts and charcoal-burners' camps, out of villages I didn't know the names of, girls were getting up in the night and walking. Barefoot, half of them. In their nightdresses. Across the moor in the dead of winter, towards a lake none of them had ever seen. Towards me. "Some of them are a week away," I said. "More. Up past the Teeth. Over the high passes." I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. "They'll freeze. They'll walk into rivers. They won't even wake up to know it's happening." "And the ones who make it," said Kael quietly, "walk straight into Hallvard's arms." I looked at t

SERAPHINAAsta didn't sleep that night. She said she'd slept for eighty-one years and wasn't going to waste another minute of it.She sat on a rock at the edge of the shingle with a blanket round her shoulders and her bare blue feet wrapped in Torvald's scarf, and looked at the sky. Just looked. Her head moved slowly from one side of it to the other, the way a child looks round a room full of presents.I sat beside her. I didn't say anything for a long time. I didn't want to break whatever it was."The Wolf's Eye," she said at last, and pointed. "There. Low over the hills. I've been writing its name in my books for sixty years. For forty of them I drew it on the charts by feel. I knew exactly where it was." Her voice shook. "I never knew it was blue."I looked. It was blue. A small, cold, steady blue."Asta," I said. "Can I ask you something?""You can ask me anything, girl. Tonight I'd tell you the colour of my own blood.""His house," I said. "Hallvard's. He built it to catch every

KAEL There's a trick to walking past a guard. Maren taught me that too, though she was talking about getting sweets out of the kitchen at the time. You don't creep. You don't hurry. You walk as if you've been sent, and you carry something. I went back down the corridor, round two corners, and found the kitchens by the smell of onions. A long warm room, lit like everywhere else by that soft yellow glow from the walls, with a fat cook stirring a pot and two boys scrubbing trenchers. Nobody looked at me. I took a bowl of stew off the end of the table, and a heel of bread, and a cup of water, put them on a wooden tray, and walked out again. The guard by the door didn't even get off his stool. "Supper," I said. "For her." He grunted, fished a key off his belt, and unlocked the door without looking at my face. A man who smells of nothing. I went in, and the door shut behind me. *** It was a small room. Bare. Lit like everywhere else, from the stones themselves. And in the middle of

RONAN I read Kael's note four times. The first time, I read it the way you'd read a battle report: where, how many, what's the ground. Hearth room. Iron door. Key on his belt. Eight in the gallery. The second time, I read the last lines. He gave me the knife, Sera. I'm the one who'll be holding it when the moon goes out. Trust me. The third time, I read it for the handwriting. Cramped and slanting, written in soot with a burnt stick on a scrap torn off something, by a man who'd washed himself in wolfsbane until his own wolf lay down inside him. Who'd walked into my uncle's house without a single friend in it, and stood in a corridor, and taken a silver knife out of Hallvard's hand without letting his face move. The fourth time, I didn't read it at all. I just held it. "Well?" said Seraphina. She was sitting across the fire from me with her hands wrapped round a cup she hadn't drunk from. Waiting. Not for permission. She'd never needed that from me. Just waiting to see what I'd