Chapter7

After I was gone, Kael didn't leave Vivienne's bedside for over a day.

When she finally stirred and gasped with delight that she could feel her wolf again, he looked at her and noticed two things. A lock of hair at her temple had turned the pure, shining white of a white wolf's coat. And deep in her pupils, a faint silver light now drifted. That light used to be mine. He found no happiness in it at all. Only an itch of irritation he couldn't name, growing sharper by the hour.

The stone slab kept replaying behind his eyes.

No draught. Not a drop. And when the needle went into my spine, I had only clenched my teeth on my lip and gone limp without a sound. I hadn't cried. I hadn't begged him to stop.

Night was falling, and Vivienne hadn't stopped talking once. Her voice grated on him. He muttered some excuse and left the healing center.

The icy air helped, a little.

I was sulking, he decided. Being proud and stubborn, the way I always was.

He knew my habits. He was sure I'd be curled up in our old hiding place, the hollow in the ancient spirit tree behind the mountain, crying my eyes out over everything that had happened.

All he had to do was go to me, gentle his voice like he always used to, say a few soft things, and I'd wipe my face and trail home after him like I always did.

He was so caught up in the thought that he didn't realize he'd already reached the foot of the great tree.

It was older than the pack itself, its trunk broader than five wolves lying nose to tail. Its roots had grown into a hollow just big enough for two small pups to hide inside.

"That's enough sulking, Lyra," he called into the dark. But moonlight poured through the opening, and the hollow was empty. There was nobody there.

Something in his chest dropped.

He ducked inside anyway, out of pure stubbornness. Everything was where it had always been. The little straw pallet. The battered old tire we used as a seat. The weather doll with the silly face I'd drawn on it. The plastic superhero we'd found half-buried in the woods.

A smile tugged at his mouth as he looked around. Then his eyes reached the inside wall of the trunk, and the smile vanished.

Years ago, I had carved two little figures into that bark, holding hands. I'd worked at it for days, one careful stroke at a time. One figure was me. The other was him.

Now his figure was gone. Someone had attacked it with a sharp stone, gouging the bark so deep and so savagely that its face and hands were nothing but splintered wood.

Only my figure was left, standing all alone.

Dread rose up and swallowed him. He burst out of the hollow and tore through the pack, searching everywhere, nose to the wind for any trace of my scent.

At last, far off on top of the watchtower, he spotted a small shape wrapped in a fox fur coat. He had given me that coat for my birthday last year.

The tension drained out of him all at once, and in its place came anger. He'd been played.

Of course it was a performance. Climbing the watchtower in this cold, a day after losing her wolf, just so he'd come running? Who did I think I was fooling?

He took the stairs two at a time and spoke in the same lofty tone he always used.

"Are you finished with this tantrum? Go home and get some rest. As for that announcement, I'll smooth it over with the pack—"

The small figure turned around, blinking at him in confusion.

"Alpha? Um… were you talking to me?"

The moonlight fell across her face, and Kael finally saw it clearly.