Chapter 8: The Border

On the third day after the hearing, a man jumped me on the boundary road with a silver blade.

I was carrying a bucket of kindling to the Beta's cabin and had my back to the trees.

He hit me from the side, and the bucket flew.

He was a Stonegate wolf, broad and young, with red eyes and the smell of whiskey on him.

"Faye said you'd tell it like she did it," he said, and slashed.

The blade opened my forearm from wrist to elbow.

Silver went into the cut, and the world went white.

I had no wolf to throw him off, so I used my knee and my teeth and the bucket handle, and I put him on one knee.

He hit me again, and I went down in the gravel.

He raised the knife over my face.

"He was twenty-three," the man sobbed.

"I know," I said. "I held him."

An engine roared up the road.

A truck door slammed, and something came out of the dusk faster than a man.

Jasper hit him side-on and drove him into the dirt.

The man swung the knife as he fell, and it caught Jasper across the ribs.

Jasper did not even grunt.

He took the man's wrist in his fist and snapped it, and the knife dropped.

"Alpha," the man gasped. "She killed him. She killed Mark."

"Go home and sober up," Jasper said, in a voice I had never heard him use. "If you touch her again, I'll take the other wrist."

The Beta's truck pulled up behind us, and two wolves hauled the man away.

Jasper turned.

Blood ran down his side and soaked his shirt to the belt.

His eyes were gold, and his chest heaved.

"Can you walk?" he said.

"I'm fine."

"You're lying."

He lifted me into his arms before I could argue, and I let him.

He carried me up the porch steps and through the house and up the back stairs, into the guest wing.

He kicked the door open with his boot.

It was the first time he had been inside that room.

He put me on the bed and brought a basin of hot water and a clean cloth from the bathroom, and his hands shook.