Chapter 10: The Run

"You can't run on that," the matron said.

"I'm running on it," Auden said.

It was an hour before moonrise.

He sat on the edge of an infirmary bed with his left arm on a steel tray.

She was putting the last of nineteen stitches into it.

The cut had closed overnight to a raw red seam.

Lycans heal fast. Not that fast.

"It'll open on the first hard push," she said.

"Then sew it up again after."

She looked at me over his head.

I'd been up all night in the chair by his bed. My skirt still had his blood on it.

"Tell him," the matron said.

"He's running," I said.

She tied off the stitch, hard.

"Then you're both idiots," she said, and walked away.

The guards had taken the motorbike away to the palace garage. The cable had been handed to the captain.

Nobody had said a name out loud.

Nobody needed to.

At moonrise the whole court stood on the summit of the ridge.

The Moon Temple was a ring of old white pillars with no roof.

Moon Rock sat just past it, a flat gray slab at the very top, worn smooth by three hundred years of paws.

Torches burned around it.

The King stood at the rock with the five Alphas. My father stood beside me.

The twins were at the lip of the drop, leaning so far out that the second prince had a hand in each of their collars.

From up here, you could see the whole face of the mountain under the moon.

The forest at the bottom, black and thick around the palace.

The trail coming out of the trees and zigzagging up the open slope in eleven pale switchbacks, a torch at every corner.

And the chute, a long gray scar straight down the middle, glittering.

Far below, at the palace gate, a horn blew.

The sound came up the mountain thin and late.

"They're off," my father said quietly.

I couldn't see them in the trees.

I could hear them.

Everyone could. Two big bodies tearing through the forest, branches cracking, the thud of paws on earth.

My wolf was on her feet inside me, every hair standing up.

Bertram's hand found mine.

I held on.

Then the black wolf came out of the trees.

He was enormous. Twice the width of any wolf in the court, with a heavy ruff and a long, low, eating stride.

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