Chapter 6: Rooke Hall

I didn't ask in the square, because three hundred wolves were listening.

I asked in the truck.

"What did you smell?" I said. "When you claimed me in the clinic."

Alaric looked straight ahead at the road.

"You," he said. "Rain and thyme and a little blood from your lip."

It was a good answer.

It wasn't the one I had asked for.

"My sister says you didn't smell like a mate to her," I said.

"Your sister was sniffing at a man she's afraid of," he said. "Don't take her nose over your own."

"My nose is useless. I've had a cold for three days."

He glanced at me for half a second.

"It'll lift," he said.

I thought I saw his shoulders loosen, but I was tired, and the light was bad.

I told myself Delphine would say anything. She had said it to hurt me.

It had worked a little.

The Hall looked different in daylight.

The grey stone was streaked with old moss, and the mountain behind it went up into cloud. A long gravel road ran down to a river.

The housekeeper met us in the hall with a basket of bread.

"Majesty," she said. "She's in the east room, as you asked. She hasn't eaten."

"I'll eat," I said.

"You'll do more than that," Alaric said. "Come with me."

He took me down a back corridor and through a heavy door.

It was a greenhouse.

The glass roof was streaked with grime, and the beds had gone to weeds. Clay pots stood stacked along one wall.

It smelled of earth, or it would have if I had a nose.

"My mother grew herbs here," he said. "Nobody has touched it since she died."

I walked down the middle aisle.

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