Half Claimed novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Ravine

I did not decide to run.

My body was already out of the Archive door and across the yard.

There was ink on my sleeve and pain burning down my left side.

"Odell!" I shouted.

He came out of the stable with a saddle in his hands.

"It's Idris," I said. "East. He's cut open and he's losing."

"How do you know?"

"I can feel it."

He did not ask again.

He threw the saddle on the nearest mare, boosted me up, and hit the road behind me on a bay gelding.

I leaned into the horse's neck and let the bond steer.

It pulled under my ribs, tighter with every mile.

When the ground fell away into the ravine they call the Gullet, I did not need a guide.

I could hear it, steel on stone, and a roar that was too deep to be a man's.

I flung myself off the mare at the rim and went down the bank on my heels and one hand.

The Gullet is a long dry cut in the hill, with a stony floor and walls twenty feet high.

Six Silverpine riders lay against the sides, two sitting up bleeding, two knocked senseless, two on their feet with swords.

In the middle, in a ring of black-coated men, stood Idris.

He was bare to the waist.

He had shifted halfway, the way an Alpha does in a fight, his shoulders huge and his hands ending in claws.

There was a long red gash across his ribs, and another down his left arm.

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