All Chapters of The wolfless girl is the last obsidian : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Nobody tells you the rejection has a sound.They tell you plenty about the bond. The elders had been telling us since we were small enough to sit cross-legged on the pack-house floor, and they always said it with that soft, far-off look old wolves get when they talk about love. It clicks, they said. Two halves, one whole. You'll know it the way you know your own name.Nobody mentioned what it sounds like when it goes the other way. It sounds like wet canvas ripping. I heard it from the inside, somewhere behind my sternum, and for one strange second I thought someone had cut me open and I just hadn't noticed yet.But I'm skipping ahead. Let me go back to the morning, when I still thought I was about to be happy.The Claiming was held every autumn on the night of the full moon, in the big clearing behind the pack house where the grass never grew because too many boots had worn it down to packed dirt. The whole pack came. Three hundred people, give or take, standing in a loose ring with

I knew where I was. Everyone knew. Every kid in Moonstone learned it before they learned to read: *never cross the black oaks. This was Riven land. Riven didn't take prisoners. Riven didn't take slaves. The Lycan who ruled them, a monster called Vane, was said to feed trespassers to his hounds, just to hear them scream.My breath fogged in front of me. I took one step back.Go home, I told myself. Go back. Beg Garrick to let you scrub floors in the pack house. Anything is better than this. Anything... A twig snapped.It was loud, and it was deliberate, and it came from my left."Hey," a voice said out of the dark. "You. Girl."Panic went through me like a thrown knife. I spun. There were three of them, stepping out from between the trees like they'd been part of the trunks. Huge men in dark leather, boots silent on the dead leaves, each one holding a heavy crossbow. They weren't in wolf form. They didn't need to be."Please," I said, and put my hands up. My voice shook, and I hated

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, tor

And the iron at my neck, singing with ozone, glowing a furious cherry red against a throat that was suddenly a great deal thicker than it had been.I looked down at my paws. They were the size of dinner plates. Black fur, coarse as wire, covered the tops of them, but the undersides, the pads, the claws, were plated in overlapping black scale that caught the firelight and threw it back like wet slate.I let out a growl.It came from somewhere below my ribs. It rattled the dust down from the ceiling beams and shook the tapestries on the walls. It didn't sound like a wolf. It sounded like the ground moving.And the strangest thing was this: it didn't feel like *her.* For ten years there had been *me,* and there had been the thing in the dark, and a wall between us. Now there wasn't a wall. There wasn't a *her.* There was just me, and I was enormous, and it felt like coming home.I raised my head. Vane was on his feet again. He hadn't reached for a weapon. He hadn't shouted for a single g

Here's something nobody tells you about the moment before you die. It's quiet, and you notice stupid things.The bowstring hummed. Garrick had missed a button on his coat, the second one from the top. He'd dressed so carefully for the Claiming and then forgotten that one. A grain of dust hung in the firelight between us, turning slowly. Vane's roar was still going somewhere behind me, stretched thin, like someone calling across a lake.I didn't decide to move. My left arm came up on its own, the one with the scales, and the bolt hit it with a crack like a hammer on slate.It didn't go through. The shaft burst into splinters. The silver tip skidded along my forearm and carved a burning line from wrist to elbow before it spun away and rang off the floor.Silver.Every wolf learns about silver the way every child learns about stoves. Nothing prepares you for it. It went into me like cold fire, and the sound that tore out of my throat wasn't a scream so much as a sheet being ripped in hal