Chapter 23: The Mark Is Hers

Orla's POV

We did it on the hill above Hazel's cottage, where the grass runs down to the creek.

The moon was fat and white, and the beans in Hazel's garden stood in rows in the dark.

Hazel sat on a folding chair at the top of the slope with a blanket over her knees and her stick across them.

Tobias stood a few yards back with his hands behind him, looking at the sky.

The old elder had come, too, and a handful of Silver Creek wolves stayed at the fence and kept their voices down.

I wore a plain green dress and no shoes.

Lucan wore a clean white shirt open at the throat.

He took my hands, and I felt him shaking.

"You'll feel it," he said. "All at once."

"I know."

"Say stop and I stop."

"Lucan." I stepped in against him. "Do it."

He pushed my hair off my left shoulder.

His breath was warm on the bare skin where the lie had been.

"Mine," he said quietly.

"Yours."

He bit me.

It was a clean bite, sharp for one second, and then it was not pain at all.

Heat poured out of the place in a flood, down my arm and into my chest and through my belly.

My knees went.

He caught me.

And then I felt him.

I felt the shape of him from the inside, huge and slow and old, a grey wolf turning in the dark.

I felt a nine-year-old boy at a funeral.

I felt five long years of a cold house, and his hands kept in his pockets.

I felt the jolt in his chest when he first saw my face on Brock's phone.

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