Chapter 13: Chelsea's Fall

The knife came at my face, and Orson's arm came down across it.

The blade opened his sleeve and the skin under it.

The smell of burned meat rose from his forearm, and he said one flat word I won't repeat.

"Drop it," he said, and closed his hand around Chelsea's wrist.

She twisted once.

Orson is a big man, and she threw him sideways.

He hit the post where the lanterns hung, and two of them swung down and went out.

Nobody in that hall had ever seen a dying woman do that.

I got my feet under me.

My shoulder burned where the scar was, and the pup was a hard small weight behind my hands.

Chelsea was only feet away.

She was smiling a little, with her teeth showing.

Clint hit her from the side.

He is not a graceful man, and he hit her.

They went down together across the planks.

She was up again before he was, her eyes gone gold and her coat torn at the shoulder.

Three patrol wolves came off the wall.

It took all four of them, and a table cracked under the pile.

Chelsea bucked under their weight and screamed, and it wasn't a frightened sound.

"She had everything!"

Clint got a knee on her back.

"Get off me! He was mine to keep! I was the one who was dying!"

"You weren't," said the healer, from her chair, in the voice of someone reading a lab result.

Chelsea's head turned.

She looked at me through the hair across her face.

"You had a father," she said. "You had a house and a mate and a name on the roll. I had a guest room."

"You had a year and a half of my husband," I said.

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