Chapter 5: The Trial

The intern trials at Strathmore were held on the frozen training field behind the Keep.

Every wolf with an hour to spare came to watch.

By nine o'clock that morning there were two hundred of them.

They lined the rail in thick coats with coffee in their hands, and they stared at me.

"That's the Pinecrest girl," someone said. "The wolfless one."

"She's not wolfless. Alpha saw her shift."

"Alpha sees a lot of things."

I stood in borrowed training clothes at the edge of the ring with Ewan's coat still around my shoulders.

I should have been in bed.

But I had slept for fourteen hours, eaten four eggs and a pound of bacon, and I felt like I could run to the border.

"You don't have to do this today," Ewan said beside me.

"Yes I do."

"The scouts will give you a week."

"The scouts gave my sister eighteen years," I said. "I'd rather be bad in front of them than hide."

He looked at me, and the scar over his eyebrow moved.

"You won't be bad."

The top intern was a broad young man with a shaved head. He was twenty-two, six-foot-three, and the kind of wolf who had never lost a trial.

He cracked his knuckles and grinned at me across the ring.

"Pinecrest. You sure? I wouldn't want to hurt a wolfless."

"I've been called that," I said. "It didn't work on me last time either."

Somebody at the rail whooped.

"Shift on the whistle," the referee called. "First to the ground loses."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Severed Ties: Rise of the Silver Wolf from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.