Claiming The Spare Twin novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The White Wolf

It didn't hurt the way I had been told it would.

It hurt worse, and then it stopped hurting at all.

My spine stretched, and my hands hit the stones as paws.

The cold of the ring came up through them.

The lamps looked different.

Every face in the courtyard was suddenly sharp, and I could smell all three hundred of them at once.

Fear, sweat, pine smoke, wine.

I stood up on four legs, and I was taller than the elder.

Nobody breathed.

My fur was pure white, with no gray in it anywhere, and moonlight ran down my back.

Somebody in the crowd whispered, "That's a white wolf."

Somebody else said, "There hasn't been one since the first Alpha."

I turned my head toward Odette.

She stood in the middle of the ring in her silver gown, and she was not glowing.

The light had gone out of her skin all at once.

Under it she was only a pale, shaking girl with a bandaged arm and her hair gone flat in the damp.

She looked down at her own hands.

I felt the twin bond in my chest, thin as a thread, and for the first time in ten years nothing was pulling out of me.

Every drop of what I was stayed inside.

Finlay shook off the two Council members.

He walked into the ring with his gauzed hands open, and he didn't stop until he stood at my shoulder.

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