Claiming the Spare Twin novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: You Drink First
Dorran took the packet out of my hand and smelled it.
His face did not change, but his shoulders did.
"Keegan," he said. "Get my grandmother."
Hester came down the lodge steps on her cane in her slippers, with her white braid half undone.
She sniffed the packet once, and then she ate a pinch of the leaf off her fingertip and spat it into the snow.
"Monkshood root," she said. "Ground fine, in lemon balm and honey. A dose a day." She looked at me. "Since when?"
"I was nine."
"Every morning?"
"Every morning. My father said I had weak lungs."
"Have you ever had a weak breath in your life?"
I thought about it. I had run the creek trail every dawn for ten years.
"No," I said.
Hester shut her eyes for a moment.
"Wolfsbane doesn't kill a wolf in small doses," she said. "It sits on her. It keeps the wolf asleep in the girl, and the girl grows up thinking she was born without one."
Keegan had stopped chewing the apple he'd been eating.
"Fourteen years," I said.
My voice sounded like somebody else's.
"I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I was broken."
"You weren't," Dorran said.
He had not taken his eyes off me since the crate was opened.
"I'm going to kill him," Keegan said pleasantly.
"No," I said.
They all looked at me.
"Not yet. If I tell him I know, he'll lie, and he's a good liar. He's been lying to me every morning for fourteen years." I closed the crate. "I want him to say it in front of people."
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