Chapter 20: Over the Rope

Kellan's POV

The ring was packed to the edge by the third dusk.

Hester had cut the leather strip from the arrow open on the kitchen table that morning.

Silver dust poured out of the seam.

I told the old man with the cane.

He searched the Ironridge Alpha before the fight, hands and teeth and claws, in front of the whole pack.

He found nothing.

The scarred man held his arms out wide and grinned the whole time.

The old man asked to see the lieutenant's glove too, and the scarred man waved it off.

"Burn scar," he said. "He's touchy about it. Search me again if you like."

"Satisfied?" he said.

"Not yet," said the old man, and stepped out of the ring.

Brigid stood at the rope, in her plain brown shirt, and did not look at me.

I could feel what she was holding down.

It came through the bond in a flat grey wave, and under it was a bright thread of fury.

"If it goes wrong," I began.

"It won't."

"If it does."

"Then I'll kill him myself," she said. "Quietly. After. With a spade."

I laughed, and for a moment she almost did.

I gave her my hand, and she held it for a long moment.

Then I shifted.

It came the way it always does, with a sound in my bones and a rush of heat down my spine.

I stood on four legs in the dust, black and heavy, with my ears flat.

The scarred man shifted opposite me.

He was enormous.

He was grey and shaggy, taller at the shoulder than any wolf I had ever fought.

The old man dropped his hand.

We hit each other in the center of the ring.

He was faster than I was.

That was the first thing I learned, and it cost me a strip of flesh from my left shoulder.

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