Chapter 19: The Needle

I ran before Rhoda finished her smile.

"Hold her," Torin barked at his guards, and then he was running beside me.

We tore up the bank and over the green.

The infirmary door was open.

The housekeeper was sitting on the porch step with blood running from her lip and my son clutched against her chest.

"She came through the back," she gasped. "The Chillingworth girl. I had the baby boy and she hit me with a lamp."

"Where is my daughter?"

"She took her. Out the kitchen door, toward the river path."

I did not hear anything else.

I was already shifting.

The change tore through me and I was white on four legs, and the world was suddenly all scent.

I smelled Priscilla's sweet perfume.

I smelled my daughter's milk-and-skin smell, thin and frightened.

They ran together along the river path, three minutes ahead.

"Go," Ember said. "I have her."

I went.

I went flat out through the cedars, with Torin's rust-brown wolf a length behind me, and it was not a chase.

It was the whole of me, pouring down the path.

The trees thinned at the old logging road.

A dark car was waiting there with its engine running and its lights off.

Priscilla was halfway to it.

She had my daughter wrapped in her silver shawl and held out in front of her.

I cleared the last ditch in one jump and landed between her and the car door.

She stopped.

She was breathing hard, and her hair was out of its pins.

I stood with my head low and my teeth bared and my whole body trembling.

"Stay back," she said.

I did not move.

"Stay back, or I'll do it."

She put her free hand into her coat.

It came out with a glass syringe full of yellow-green liquid.

"Rhoda made it up for me," she said. "It's the strong kind. One dose in a baby's neck and her wolf never wakes."

"She'll be a wolfless little thing, like you," she said. "She'll never hurt anybody."

The baby squalled.

Torin stepped out of the trees behind me, human again, with his hands open at his sides.

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