I Cut My Alpha's Bond, So the Lycan King Came Hunting novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Neutral Ground

At Mercy Dunlap's roadhouse she holds her husband through the fever of the cut bond while the old squad closes ranks. The Lycan King walks in bleeding and asks for coffee.

I came out of the Sauk on my hands and knees, and Halvard stood over me and shook.

He was not himself.

His jaw had gone long, his hands were half claws, and his breath came in whistling pulls through his teeth.

"Cass," he said, in a cracked voice. "Cass, it hurts. It hurts."

"I know it does."

"Make it stop."

"I can't," I said. "I cut it. You know I can't."

He dropped on all fours in the mud.

Then he lunged.

I'd been waiting for it.

I let the river water run out of my sleeve.

I caught his jaw in the crook of my arm and drove my knee into his ribs.

He was heavier than me by eighty pounds, but a slip makes a wolf stupid.

I had trained men bigger than him to fall down.

We hit the gravel together.

I put my wet jacket over his head, as we used to hood a panicking horse on patrol.

He breathed in.

The jacket carried my scent, and the cut bond wanted it badly.

His whole body sagged.

"Good," I said, and kept my weight on him. "That's it. Stay."

Behind us, out on the gravel bar, the King of the Lycans stood in the river and watched.

He had blood to the fingers of his left hand.

He did not come after me.

He could have crossed the channel in an instant.

He stayed where he was and let me haul my ex-husband up by the belt.

I didn't know what to make of that, and I didn't have the time.

Dunlap's Last Stop sits two miles down the old road, where Highway 20 bends away from the river.

It is a diner, six rooms and a gravel lot, and it has been neutral ground since before the Peace of the Sauk.

Nobody takes blood on a roadhouse floor.

That is the law, and the people who own the road enforce it.

I got Halvard to the back door with his arm over my shoulder and his feet dragging.

The kitchen light was on.

A short woman with red-brown curls and a stained apron stood in the doorway.

A shotgun was braced on the crook of her left arm.

The left forearm was steel and plastic.

"Sarge," Mercy Dunlap said.

"Mercy."

"You look like something the river coughed up," Mercy said.

"I feel better than I look."

"That's not hard." She lowered the gun. "Pack net's been screaming for an hour. Is that the Alpha?"

"Former husband."

"Is he going to bite anybody?" Mercy asked.

"Probably."

"Good. Bring him through."

The diner was full at one in the morning.

Six people sat at the counter and in the booths, in work jackets and flannel.

Every one of them had served in the Fourth Company.

The one-eyed cook put down his spatula.

A woman in a trucker's cap stood up from her booth.

Then, slowly, she sat down again with a hand on the knife at her hip.

Nobody said a word to me.

They didn't need to.

They had been in the Fourth for the same reasons I had, and they had kept their mouths shut for nine years.

"Cold room," Mercy said. "Put him on the cot. I'll get the tincture."

We laid him on the cot in the walk-in, among the crates of lettuce and butter.

Mercy strapped his wrists to the frame with webbing.

He thrashed, and then he lay still and stared at the ceiling.

His hand found mine through the webbing and held it.

"Sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"Stop it," I said.

"I'm sorry."

Mercy looked at his eyes with a penlight and her mouth went tight.

"That's not right," she said, low, so he wouldn't hear. "I've seen a dozen cut bonds. They hurt, they rage, they pass in a day or two. This one's burning on something. Look at his mark."

I looked.

The mark on his left wrist had gone black at the edges, and a thread of black ran up the inside of his arm.

"What would do that?" I asked.

"A bond that was cut with a lie in it," Mercy said. "That's the old tale. I always figured it was a story."

"What lie?"

"You tell me, Sarge. You were married to him."

"We took the vow on the ridge three years ago," I said slowly. "No lie between us."

"Yeah."

"He never lied to me."

"Or he never said it out loud," said Mercy.

I stared at the black thread in his arm.

I had been a good Ranger.

I had noticed everything, for years, and I had not noticed that.

Halvard turned his head on the cot and looked at me, and for the first time that night his eyes were his own.

"Cass," he said. "My father is going to..."

Then the fever took him again and he arched on the webbing and said nothing more.

I sat on a crate of butter with my back to the cold wall.

The shaking started in my hands.

It was only the cold and the river and the cut and the night.

Mercy put a coffee in front of me and sat down on the crate across.

"You did it," she said. "You actually did it."

"I did it."

"In front of Ansgar."

"In front of everybody," I said.

"How'd he take it?"

"He told me I'd never leave the valley."

"Well, you left." She raised her mug. "To the valley."

We clinked.

The cold room door swung open before we drank.

The cook stood there without his spatula, and his face had gone white.

"Sergeant," he said. "Mercy. You'd better come out."

I came out.

The diner had gone entirely silent.

A tall man in a black coat stood just inside the front door, with the bell still swinging over his head.

His left sleeve was soaked to the cuff.

He looked at the room, and the shotgun Mercy had picked up, and the booth where someone had very slowly reached for a rifle.

Then he took a seat on the nearest stool.

"Neutral ground," Dacre Vaughn said. "I'll have coffee."

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