Taming the Wolf King novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: On the Mat

When the King's wolf surges in combat class, Sally kneels with her back to it and stops it cold, and that night she finds her room wrecked and her sanctuary photo burned.

The combat hall smelled of sweat, chalk and wet dog.

I sat on a bench along the wall with my knees pulled up and an apple in my lap.

Rule two said no locked doors, and the combat instructor had tried to lock me out.

So here I was.

Twenty seniors stood on the mats in white sparring kit.

Caspian stood at the far end, barefoot, taping his knuckles.

He hadn't looked at me since breakfast.

The instructor was a big man with a shaved head and a voice like a gravel truck.

"Ardane. Center mat. Human form only. First one to the floor loses."

His partner was Araminta's cousin, huge, sandy-haired and grinning.

"Easy, Your Majesty," he said. "We all heard about the window. Try not to eat anybody."

A few people laughed.

Caspian didn't.

They circled.

The cousin was fast, but Caspian was faster, and for two whole minutes it was just a fight.

Then the cousin caught him with an elbow across the scar on his jaw.

Caspian's head snapped sideways.

When it came back, his eyes were silver.

I put the apple down.

The sound that came out of him wasn't human.

His back bowed.

The tape on his hands split as his fingers lengthened.

Black fur rolled up his spine.

The cousin scrambled backward off the mat.

Everyone else did too.

In a heartbeat, a black wolf the size of a pony stood in the middle of the combat hall.

The white kit lay in rags around his paws.

He shook his head.

Then he turned toward the cousin, who was flat against the wall bars.

"Collar!" the instructor bellowed.

He was already running for the steel cabinet by the door.

Inside, on a hook, hung a thick collar lined with silver studs.

Silver doesn't calm a wolf. It burns him mad with pain.

We had a lost wolf at home who still flinched at the sound of a buckle.

"Nobody brings a silver collar near him," I said.

Nobody heard me.

The instructor had the collar off its hook.

So I got up and walked onto the mat.

"Coldwell, get off the floor!" the instructor shouted.

The wolf's head came around.

He saw me.

His lips peeled back.

The growl filled the whole hall and came up through the soles of my feet.

My mouth went dry.

He had broken a senior's arm in a room just like this.

And he wasn't himself.

I walked to the middle of the mat, about eight feet from him.

Then I turned around, so my back was to all that black fur and all those teeth.

And I knelt down.

I put my hands flat on my thighs.

I looked at the floor.

Behind me, the growl stuttered.

Somebody whispered, "She's going to die."

I breathed out slow, the way you do in a stall with a horse that's thinking about kicking.

"Hey," I said. "Hey, you. It's just me. Nobody's going to put anything on you."

Claws clicked on the mat.

They came closer and stopped.

I felt the heat of him against my back, a huge furnace of a body.

His breath ruffled the hairs on my neck.

He was panting fast and hard.

"I know," I said quietly. "It's too loud in here. Everybody's staring. Everybody smells scared. That's not your fault."

The panting slowed.

A cold nose touched the back of my ear.

It pressed there, hard, the way he'd pressed into my hair last night.

Then he huffed out one long breath.

His legs folded.

He lay down behind me on the mat with his chin on my shoulder, heavy as a sandbag.

The combat hall was so silent I could hear the radiator ticking.

I reached up slowly and scratched under his jaw.

"Good," I said. "That's all. You're all right."

I looked up.

The instructor was standing at the edge of the mat with the silver collar hanging from his fist.

He looked at it.

He looked at me.

Then he walked back to the cabinet and hung it on its hook and shut the door.

Twenty seniors stared at me.

"Class dismissed," the instructor said hoarsely.

They filed out past us, giving us the whole width of the room.

One girl, a tall redhead from the senior table, stopped in the doorway.

"How did you do that?" she asked.

"I turned my back," I said. "You should try it sometime."

She almost smiled.

Caspian shifted back twenty minutes later, curled on his side on the mat, and I threw a towel over him and didn't look.

He didn't say thank you.

He said, "Don't ever do that again."

"Say please," I said.

He didn't.

I walked back across the quad to the girls' wing to pack a bag.

I'd only been spending nights in the tower for two days, and I still had everything in my old room.

My door was open.

I could smell smoke from the end of the corridor.

Somebody had pulled every drawer out and dumped it.

My mattress was slashed down the middle.

My clothes were in the bathtub, under a running tap.

On my desk lay what was left of my only photo of Coldwell Sanctuary, the red barn and Grandpa and the back pens under snow.

It had been burned down to one blackened corner.

Across the mirror above it, in red lipstick, someone had written HUMANS GO HOME.

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