Chapter 13: The Cabin

"Which way did she go?" I said.

Garrick didn't answer.

He stood in the road with his hands hanging, staring at the empty space where a baby should have been.

I took him by the front of his coat and shook him.

"Garrick. Which way?"

"North," he said. "The trapline. Edric's cabin."

"How do you know?"

"Because he took her there every winter. Because it's the only place on this side of the river with no neighbours."

Bram was already moving.

He whistled once, and a dozen Greywater wolves came out of the pines, grey and brown and silent.

"Shift," I said.

Garrick looked at me.

"I'll follow."

"You'll lead," I said. "You know the way, and you're the one they'll obey."

He shifted where he stood, black and huge, and ran.

I let my own wolf come up, and the cold took my skin and my fur grew in, russet, with the dark stripe down my spine.

We ran north for forty minutes, and I smelled him the whole way.

Milk and wool and a faint trace of my own blood.

My son.

The cabin sat in a clearing at the end of the trapline, a squat grey thing with smoke coming out of the chimney.

Four of the Beta's enforcers stood in the yard with rifles on their shoulders.

They saw a black wolf come out of the trees and went white.

Garrick shifted back, naked in the snow, with frostbitten feet and his jaw set.

"Stand down," he said.

"Alpha," the biggest one said. "The Beta said..."

"I'm your Alpha. Not the Beta. Put them down."

Behind him, a dozen Greywater wolves stepped out of the treeline and spread across the clearing.