Chapter 17: The Line

Rowan shifted so fast his shirt split down the back.

His black wolf hit the first rogue before I had finished turning.

"The law!" someone on our slope shouted. "He swore the law!"

The Rogue King had already backed into his own ranks. His voice came through the roar of the charge, calm and amused.

"A white wolf's challenge binds white wolves. I never swore to bind my sons."

He had worded it that way on purpose. I understood it as the first rogue hit me.

I went down under a grey wolf with yellow teeth.

I twisted and got my jaws on its throat and held on. It kicked and went limp.

I came up on all fours. A hundred more were coming down the grass.

The wolves of Ashgrove closed behind me.

They did not break. I felt them take their places, a wall of fur and breath at my back, and it was the best feeling I had ever had.

A wolf near enough can hear a packmate's thoughts. Mine had heard only silence from them for eighteen years.

Now it was full of voices.

Rowan held the center, huge and black, with a rogue in each jaw. He threw one clear into the rocks.

*Hold,* he said, and every wolf on the slope heard it. *Hold the line.*

Drew fought at his left side. I had never seen him in a fight.

He fought like he did everything else, slowly and without a wasted move, and a ring of broken rogues piled up around his feet.

Ellis was on my right, a grey-black wolf, the youngest and the least trained of them.

Two rogues took him from either side.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Offered Myself for Their Peace, and the Lycan King Was Waiting from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.