Chapter 13: The Other Howl

I walked out onto the ice in his parka and knelt down beside him.

He didn't look up.

His palm lay flat on the lake, and I saw the skin around his knuckles had gone white.

"It's three in the morning," I said. "You'll lose a hand."

"I've done this every night for ten years."

"And you still have both."

"Barely."

I took his hand and pulled it off the ice and tucked it inside the parka against my stomach.

It was freezing.

He let me.

"Tell me the rest," I said. "I'm asking."

He breathed out slowly.

The moon made a path across the black ice, white and broken, and somewhere under our knees a deep voice shifted in the dark.

"I told you she called the Rite," he said. "I didn't tell you what happened at the Thaw."

"Go on."

"The ice went soft in March. She came to the open water with the whole pack watching.

"I stood on the shore with no wolf and no mate, a stranger in my own skin."

"What did she say?"

"She gave the Thaw word." He shut his eyes. "She said, Stay."

I held very still.

"If she'd said the other word, my wolf would have come up out of the ice.

The bond would have come back with him.

She didn't want that, and I don't blame her.

She said Stay, and she left for Duluth in the same week."

"She never came back?"

"She wrote once. A year later. She asked if I was alive."

"Were you?"

"I was the new Warden.

The old one had died that winter, and nobody else would take the post."

He gave a thin, tired smile.

"I'd spent six months learning what it was to be a man with nothing in him. I thought I might as well be useful."

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