Chapter 11: The Missing List

Roan's POV

I did not sleep that night.

I sat in my office with every lamp lit and two files open in front of me.

One was the list of the vanished.

The other was Edric's list, written in his cramped hand, which he had kept in secret for a year because he said my list was missing half of them.

He was right.

There were forty-one names on his page.

I read them again.

A seer from the north pack.

A woman in the southern hills who could find water under rock.

A boy of eleven who could call wind.

A healer who had saved forty lives in a plague winter.

I turned the page.

A man who could hear lies.

A girl who could not be tracked by scent, by anyone.

Every one of them had a gift.

I put down the pen.

For a year I had asked who was taking wolves from the packs.

I had never asked what they had in common.

The woman I had kissed in the baths that afternoon had a gift, and she had hidden it for three years.

She had lived among the runaways, and I had been hunting those runaways for that same time, filling my cells with them and calling them rogues.

I closed my eyes and saw her white hair spreading in the water.

I could still taste her.

I couldn't stop thinking about the way she had bitten my lip, and the way she had pulled back and thrown my own words in my face.

I deserved every one of those words.

She had asked me to ask, and I would have asked a hundred times.

The door opened.