Her Brothers Scented Me at the Gate, Now All Three Claim Me novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Run

Lowen's POV

Torsten came back across the yard at dawn with his sister on one arm and a black line up the other.

I had his sleeve cut off before he was through the door.

At the clinic I'd packed wounds for dogs that had lost fights with porcupines, and the work was the same.

I flushed the cut with saline, drew the dark edge out with a poultice, and bound it.

"It will close," I said. "Slowly."

"It's closing," Torsten said. "I can feel it."

"Linnea says the Elder's knife is silver."

I told the three of them what she had heard, and Beck put down the coffeepot.

"Then every cut thread I've ever heard of," he said.

"Every one," Linnea said from the couch, wrapped in two blankets. "Dad held them down while the silver went in."

"We say that at the Stone," Stellan said slowly. "We say it, and nobody has ever once seen the blade."

"They will," I said.

Trial two was the run.

The Elder had sent word by a scout, polite as ever: the pack's old trail, eleven miles of ridge and swamp, the cord strung from the Stone to the Longhouse by dusk.

"To run it, you have to be a wolf," Beck said.

I sat on the edge of the table.

"I've never shifted."

"You've got wolf blood from your mother," Torsten said. "It's there. It hasn't been woken."

"How do you wake it?"

The three of them looked at each other, and I watched them decide.

"The first shift comes when the threads pull hardest," Stellan said, and he turned red to the ears. "My mother told Linnea. When all of them are... held at once."

"Say what you mean."

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