My Pack Erased Me. The Lycan King Didn't. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Highcrest

Thora signs the Lycan King's keeping terms and adds a line that he never lies to her; he tells her about the census no one can explain, and her wrist, where the cord was cut, catches fire and silver fur breaks through her skin.

Highcrest Hall sat on a rock shelf over the lake, and I saw none of it, because it was after midnight when we got there.

All I saw was a lit door and a woman in a grey cardigan holding it open.

"Soup," she said, before I had both feet out of the car. "And socks. Those boots are for show."

She was the housekeeper, and she did not give her name or ask for mine.

She took my bag out of my hand and marched me down a hallway of dark wood and into a room with a fire already lit.

There was a bed twice the size of mine at home, and a bowl of soup on the table by the window.

I ate all of it standing up.

Nobody had told me I was hungry.

Twenty minutes later a guard knocked and said the King would see me in the library, if I wanted to be seen.

I went in the wool socks.

Caspian Lorne had taken off his jacket and rolled his sleeves to the elbow.

He sat at the end of a long table with a single sheet of paper in front of him and a pen laid across it.

"Sit anywhere," he said.

I sat at the far end.

He looked at the distance between us and let it stand.

"Terms," he said, and turned the paper around so I could see it. "I wrote them in the car."

There were four lines.

One: thirty days under the Crown's name, from tonight.

Two: her own rooms and her own door, and the lock is on her side.

Three: nobody touches her unless she says so, the King included.

Four: the King asks nothing of her for the keeping, not work, not company and not an answer.

I read it twice.

"That's not a trade," I said.

"No."

"You said you hadn't decided what you'd get."

"I haven't. The keeping is not a trade, so I get nothing. You can look suspicious about it for thirty days, if that helps."

I didn't want to smile, so I picked up the pen.

I wrote a fifth line in my own handwriting: "Five: he never lies to me."

He read it upside down.

"Never," he said. "Even when you won't like what I say."

"Especially then."

I signed.

He signed under me, and his handwriting was small and square and extremely neat.

The fire popped behind me.

I sat there with my hands around nothing and asked the thing I'd been holding since the lawn.

"Why did you refuse the seal?"

He didn't answer at once.

"Because of a census," he said.

"A census?"

"The Crown counts every pack every year. How many wolves, how many pups, how many lost in winter, how fast each one shifts. Boring numbers. I've read them since I was nineteen."

"And?"

"A pack of three hundred loses about four pups a year to sickness or accident. Greywater hasn't lost one in twenty-four years. Your father has never asked the Crown for help, not once. Your brothers shift faster than my guards. Your pack is the strongest in the north and it has no business being."

"Maybe my father is just a strong Alpha."

"Maybe."

He said it too carefully.

"I've spent six years trying to work out why," he said. "Tonight I watched them cut a cord off your wrist, and your mother look at the floor, and I thought: whatever that was, they're not going to like what happens next."

I looked at my bare wrist, still red.

"It was a braid," I said. "She tied it every full moon since I was small. For luck."

"Did it keep you warm?"

I frowned.

"You've been wearing a wool cardigan and socks in a heated room since you came in," he said. "Your hands are shaking a little."

"I'm always cold."

"I know," he said quietly. "It's in your file."

"I have a file?"

"The Crown has a line on every wolf. Yours says: slow, cold, no wolf. I'd like to know who wrote it first."

That was when my wrist caught fire.

It started right where the cord had been, a hot bright line around the bone, and I put my right hand over it and it did nothing.

"Thora?"

The heat ran up my arm.

I looked down.

Pale silver hair was coming through the skin of my forearm, thick and fast, rippling up from the wrist.

The chair went over behind me.

I heard myself scream.

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