Chapter 30: The Mark

The letter was one page, in my father's slanted hand.

He resigned from the clinic and from the council, and he signed the building over to the territory hospital.

He wrote that he would testify against my mother, in any room that would have him, for as long as it took.

He asked for nothing.

He wrote that he had spent his life saying "Received" to people who needed him to say something else.

At the bottom he had written: I won't call. If you ever want to, you know the number.

Cora read it twice and folded it into her pocket.

"Not yet," she said.

"Not yet," I said.

That night I told Rafe I wanted to go up to the lake overlook, and not to bring the stretcher.

He drove, and said nothing, and rested his hand on my knee.

At the top the sky was clear and the ice on the lake had gone silver under the moon.

I got out of the truck and stood at the edge of the gravel.

For weeks my wolf had been a warmth behind my ribs, a pulse that stirred when I was angry or frightened or touched.

She had never come out.

I had been afraid of her the way I had been afraid of my own blood.

"Ivy?" Rafe said from the tailgate.

"I'm going to let her out."

"I'll be right here."

I closed my eyes, and for the first time I did not push her down.

The change came up through my spine and burst out along my arms, and the world dropped, and the moon turned bright.

The cold was gone.

I stood on four paws in the gravel, silver-grey and enormous, and every smell on the mountain came to me at once.

Pine and ice and exhaust and him.

Rafe stood very still.

Then his face broke into a grin I had never seen.

He kicked off his boots and stripped to his skin in the snow.

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