My Pack Erased Me. The Lycan King Didn't. novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Cord

My mother sat on the edge of a reading chair in the Archive with her hands pressed between her knees.

She would not look at the King.

She would not look at me either, for a long time.

"I'm of the Hollow line," she said at last. "That's what the Crown called us. I was born a lycan in this house."

Caspian said nothing.

He stood by the shelves with his arms folded and let her talk.

"The old King took lycan daughters," my mother said. "He took us at fourteen and bound us to the royal line, and none of us went home. I was seventeen when I got out. I walked for two weeks and ended up in the Greywater valley and a boy named Corwin gave me his coat."

"Dad," I said.

"He never knew what I was. I never told him. I said I was a healer's orphan from the south, and he believed it, because he's a man who believes what he's told."

"And me?"

"You were born in the plague winter."

She finally looked up.

Her eyes were grey, like mine, and red at the rims.

"Forty pups were sick that winter. Eleven were already dead. Corwin was walking the house at night with his hands over his face. You were nine days old, and when I held you, your wolf was already awake in you, gold and loud."

"Gold."

"A lycan's. The old King's riders could smell lycan blood from the border. If they came for you, I couldn't hide you. And if they didn't come, the pups would keep dying."

"So you made the cord," I said.

"I took your wolf and put it where nobody could find it. I tied it into the pack." Her voice shook. "It hid your scent from the Crown. It fed strength into every wolf in the valley. The pups stopped dying that week."

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