Chapter 19: The Night Before

The pack healer was a square, gray woman who smelled of mint and had never once smiled at me.

She turned my wrist over in the kitchen and looked at it.

"Wolfsbane in the claws," she said. "It goes in through any scratch and stops the heart in a quarter hour."

"A wolf your size would last longer."

"How much longer?"

"Not enough."

She put a brown bottle on the table.

"This coats the blood for a day. It will make you sick as a dog and slow your wolf by a breath."

"Drink it at moonrise, not before."

I put the bottle in my pocket.

Ash had been standing against the counter the whole time with his arms crossed, saying nothing.

When she left, he looked at the scar through his left eyebrow.

"Rowan did this," he said. "I was seventeen, and he was thirteen."

"Thirteen?"

"He already liked to see what a thing did when it hurt."

I put my hand against his cheek.

"Come upstairs," I said.

He didn't ask why.

We went up the stairs together, past my old door, and I locked the Alpha's room behind us.

I ran the bath in the big claw-foot tub in the corner.

Steam fogged the tall windows, and the pines went soft and blurred behind it.

I pulled off my sweater.

Ash watched me with his hands hanging at his sides.

"I've been scared all day," I said. "I don't want to be scared in this room."

"Then don't be."

"Take your shirt off."

He did.

I stepped out of my jeans, and I let him look.

His eyes went slowly over every inch of me, and his throat moved.

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