Chapter 20: The Ridge

I shifted in the yard without a thought for who was watching.

The change came up through me clean and fast, hot and white, and the cold morning opened into a thousand scents.

I put my nose to the window sill and breathed in cloves.

Underneath it ran a second line, sweet and sleepy and small.

Junie's shampoo, and her breath, and her fear.

I turned my head and saw the grey wolf beside me.

Rodrick had changed too, with the new bond between us humming.

I've got her trail, I thought, and felt him hear it.

He did not answer in words.

He only pressed his shoulder to mine, hard and brief, and ran.

We went up the mountain through the MacAlister pines with the dog and four of the pack behind us.

My mother stayed in the yard.

She stood with her hands at her sides and watched me go, and she said nothing at all.

Then she called after me, raw as a scraped knee, "Tegan! Don't take anything from his hand!"

I did not look back.

I followed Junie's scent over a ridge and down through a frozen creek, and the clove smell grew stronger as we climbed.

It came down the slope toward me thick as smoke.

It was the smell I had wanted for four years, the smell of a house that was warm and a man who would never let me go.

It turned my stomach.

By the time the sun cleared the eastern peaks, we were standing on the high ridge above Henshaw Hall.

The ridge was a long bowl of broken granite open to the sky, with a tumble of boulders along its rim.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Mate and Family's Choice from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.