My Family Sent Me to the Lycan King to Die, So I Walked In Alive novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Border Stone

Her father's escort turns on her at the stone where no one is waiting; she fights, is bitten, and crosses the line.

We reached the border stone on the sixth evening.

It stood alone on a bare ridge at the top of the Black Range, a grey pillar twice my height with a wolf carved into its face.

Beyond it the land dropped into a valley of dark pines, and nothing moved in them.

The escort had not said ten words to me on the whole road.

There were four of them, the captain and three wolves from the Beta's guard.

The youngest looked about nineteen, and he had not once looked me in the face.

"This is the last of our ground," the captain said. "By custom we go no further."

"I know the custom."

I waited for the king's wolves to come out of the pines.

Nobody came.

The wind moved over the ridge, and the stone threw a long shadow down the slope.

"Nobody's here to meet me," I said.

"They never come to the stone," the captain said. "She walks the rest."

"Then go home."

He didn't move.

The other two had drifted wide of me while I was watching the trees, one on each side, so quietly that I had not seen them go.

The youngest stayed where he was, with his hands hanging empty at his sides.

"Kneel," the captain said.

"What?"

"It will be quicker if you kneel."

I understood him a breath later than I should have.

"Whose order?" I asked.

"The Alpha's."

He said it plainly, and it was the plainest thing anyone had said to me in a week.

I had known my father didn't love me.

I had not known he'd pay four wolves to walk me six days so that he could be sure.

"Kneel, girl," the captain said.

I drew my mother's dagger out of my boot.

The silver along its edge caught the last light, and the wolf on my left stopped short.

"That's not a toy," he said.

"No."

He came at me anyway.

He shifted halfway through the leap, with his jaws wide, and I stepped inside it and put the blade up under his ribs.

It went in all the way to the hilt.

He fell against me, heavy and hot, and then he was only weight, and I let him drop.

The second wolf hit me from behind.

I went down on the rock with his claws raking across my back, and I rolled and drove my knee into his belly and cut the tendon behind his leg.

He screamed and tried to crawl away.

"Stop playing," the captain said. "Take her."

The youngest wolf did not move.

"Take her," the captain said again.

The boy shook his head, once, with his face grey.

The captain shifted.

I had never fought a man that size. He crossed the rock in two bounds, and his jaws closed on my shoulder through the cloak.

White pain ran down my arm and I dropped to my knees on the stone.

I stabbed up at his throat and missed.

I stabbed again, and the blade opened his muzzle from the nose to the eye.

He let go with a roar and reared back.

I did not wait.

I ran for the line.

It was only a short dash, past the carved face of the stone, to where the ground fell off into the dark pines.

I felt the captain's breath on my neck.

Then he stopped.

I heard him stop. His claws scraped the rock and he skidded to a halt, and I understood that he could go no further.

No wolf of any pack could step over the line without the king's leave.

I crossed it and went down on my face in the needles.

Behind me the captain shifted back to a man, bleeding from the face, and he stood at the stone with his chest heaving.

"Run!" he shouted. "It won't matter! There is nothing out there for you, girl!"

I lay on my side with my hand pressed over the bite and tried to crawl.

My shoulder felt full of hot sand.

I got to my knees and one hand and made it as far as a fallen log.

Then the pines moved.

Shapes came out of the dark one after another, wolves bigger than any I had ever seen, black and grey, with shoulders level with my head.

Eight of them.

They closed into a ring around me without a sound.

Every one of them had silver eyes.

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