This Time, I Won't Beg for His Mark novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Border Road

Valerie's first half-shift in the woods brings her face to face with Joss, who asks whether she saw the attacker, and she lies.

Agnes took the thermos and told me to eat nothing Hester sent over.

"Say nothing to anyone," she said at the door. "Not until I've tested it properly. Hester has known us both for fifty years."

Then she left, and I had two days and a half to leave the only home I'd ever had.

I did not sleep.

At midnight I put my coat on over the stitches and walked out the back of the compound, past the cattle fence, to the old logging road that ran along the north border.

I wanted to be alone where nobody could see my face.

The snow was ankle deep and squeaked under my boots.

About a mile out, my joints started to ache.

It was the ache I'd had every month of my life, the one Hester called growing pains, and then cramps, and then nothing at all.

This time it didn't stop at the joints.

My fingers went hot. My nails pushed out, thick and black, and dug into my palms.

I stood in the road and stared at them.

Then the forest got loud.

An owl on the ridge. A fox crossing a creek a quarter mile off. The sap moving in the pines.

I had never heard any of it.

"Easy," I said to myself, out loud. "Easy."

Something behind my breastbone pushed back, hard, and I bent over with my hands on my knees.

A twig cracked on the road ahead.

A big grey wolf stood in the middle of the track, forty feet away, watching me.

It had light eyes, and a white scar cut through the fur above the left one.

I had never seen it before.

It wasn't one of ours.

I wanted to run, and my wolf, for the first time in my life, wanted to stand her ground.

So I stood.

The grey wolf lowered his head and began to change.

It was fast and ugly, bone sliding and fur sinking back, and I turned my face away.

When I looked again, a man in jeans and a canvas jacket was pulling a boot on, one-handed.

He was lean and tall, with untidy dark hair and a short beard.

The scar ran through his eyebrow, the same place it had on the wolf.

"You're on Ridgeback land," he said. "Or you're about to be. This road is the line."

"I didn't know."

"You're Cold Spur."

"I was until last night."

He looked at my hands, at the black claws curling out of my fingertips.

His expression changed.

"You're half out," he said. "And you don't know how to hold it."

"Nobody ever taught me."

"Nobody taught you how to shift?" His voice had a dry edge. "At twenty-six?"

"How do you know how old I am?"

"The whole valley knows. You're the one who took the silver for Lucan Ellington." He crouched, picked up a fistful of snow, and held it out. "Close your hand around this. It helps."

I took it.

The snow hissed in my fist, and the claws drew back a little, one by one.

"Joss Galloway," he said. "Alpha of Ridgeback."

He didn't hold out a hand, and I didn't expect him to.

Ridgeback and Cold Spur had been snapping at each other over the water rights for a decade.

"Valerie Wray," I said.

Something moved across his face when he heard my last name, and then it was gone.

"Lucan says my pack threw that blade," he said.

"I heard."

"He's told the council. He's asking them to cut off my wolves from the valley market, and he wants me at a hearing in two days."

"That's none of my business."

"It's mine. I've got sixty wolves and a pack that has never once used silver." His grey eyes didn't leave my face. "So I came to scent the trail where the man left the hall. It ends at the cattle fence, on your side, and it smells like your own people."

I kept my face still.

"You were closer to that blade than anybody alive," he said. "Did you see who threw it?"

I had.

I could still see it, on the inside of my eyes: the arm coming up behind Lucan, and the strip of grey cloth tied around the man's collar.

Every wolf in Cold Spur wore that grey at the feast.

It was our harvest colour.

It meant the man was ours.

I thought about Agnes's voice saying, Say nothing.

I thought about what it meant that Lucan was already blaming this man, and about how fast he had done it.

I did not know what I knew yet, and I wasn't willing to hand it to a stranger on a road.

"No," I said. "I saw an arm. That's all."

Joss Galloway watched me for a long time.

"All right," he said, and he didn't believe me.

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