nd it had been waiting

ld in a fire. The girl's screaming had stopped while we were still crashing down the slope, and t

nd the silver was already blackening in a ring, neat as a brand. Every few seconds her whole body tried to shift - instinct, a drowning thing g

nd went abso

nd a girl in a torn white dress, coming out of the dark at a run -

early decided to spend the last of her vo

, was a little border knife, the

that was not from the trap - and on the skin above the trap's jaws, in a r

it, maybe more, alone in the rain, an inch at a time - and sh

d decided she would rather we found

put it together, and her chin came up, and even with a broken

ot-" Fin

e her, because people believe you faster at their level. "This is Finn

, where the rain was finding its way in and out of me. Understanding arrived, and

issed. "Go, you

s your

nd I'm n

she fought me for it for one second, pure reflex,

rywhere, with a smell. The jaws were sprung for a grown rogue and the release bar was rusted half through, and the chain ran to an i

g at my hands.

es

in a trap you could

them got up. Not one, Mira. I counted later. I will spend the rest of my life counting." The trap moved. Another fingernail. My shoulder - the one

unds a

hem three men with the storm breaking around their shoulders. Crossbows down. Not hurried. Men who hav

d taught the pack's pups to track when I was nine years old. He had

inside it. Something moved across his face that mi

oney did its work, a

- I only have to make the ground agree with it." His eyes moved to Mira, and to Finn, and the ar

id. His voice shook. His whole body shook. "T

ta

folded - knees, spine, head, the whole of him hammered flat by a word. Beside me Mira made a small, suffocated noise and locked up too, caught by the edge of it

st me, like weather g

nderstand - really understand, maybe the first person alive to do it - what had

e you?"

alk back up that hill and tell Rowan the rain took my scent. Tell him I'

all. An inch was enough. The jaws shifted inside Mira's leg and the scream came out of her through a jaw the Comman

le he did it, the way a

nt. You always could outwait pain - your own." He leaned a fraction more, and then, mercifully or cruel

not even fall down without permission from his word still sitting on her chest. "Rabid wolves don't negotiate, Elara. Drop

had her jaw. But her eyes said it plainly, in the old

it to me with their silenc

ything, with the shoulder, with the torn ribs, with hands that had stopp

de with a crack li

out of the burns and up my wrists like ink finding cracks, and they had started to shake with a fine, fast tremor that had nothing to do

aside with the othe

the road snapped the other way, because a boy who had been leashed for a year had just

nly word for

hunter fi

d bolt with the wound still open, fast and clean and furious, the first true shift of his life with no leash on it - seventeen years old and all of it rage - and he hit Bram's crossbow arm a heartbeat before it fired. Bram's bolt went up into the storm. The hounds su

ther my body could afford her or not, because Mira was on the ground and the world had shown her

which I do not believe and he swears to. I remember the river itself - black, swollen, fast enough to kill us the honest way. Hound

wen

e a hand pressing down, and for

ined shoulder, turned me, a

ck water closed over my head, and some honest part of me - the part that had been running and ble

ved sixteen-year-old with a shattered ankle, and dragged my face back into the air a mouthful at a t

her, holding a direwolf's head above a flood river by the hair,

force with a hole through his shoulder, all of us shaking apart, alive, aliv

s girl holding my face in both hands, hard, the way you

furious about it. "You were dying and y

rk was coming down fast now and I wanted it on the record b

ark a