Chapter 15: Across the Ridge

Aldric was beside me before I turned around.

He took one breath over the rabbit in my hands.

His eyes went gold and stayed there.

"East," he said.

"I know."

The trail went through the back gate and straight into the trees.

Gardenia, and Clover's strawberry shampoo, and the sour smell of a scared child.

"Hold them back," Aldric told his enforcers. "If three hundred wolves go over that ridge, it's a war, and she's in the middle of it."

"Alpha, you can't go alone."

"I'm not going alone."

He looked at me.

I stuffed Mister Buttons inside my shirt.

Then I shifted, right there in the mud, and my clothes went to rags around me.

He shifted a heartbeat behind me.

We ran.

The eastern ridge was steep and thick with lodgepole pine.

My wolf went over deadfall.

He ran at my shoulder, huge and dark, and he never once tried to go ahead of me.

The trail went down the far side, onto Mossgrave land.

The ground fell away into a gorge.

At the bottom, a white river ran hard over rocks.

An old railroad trestle crossed it, black timbers and rusted rails, a hundred feet up.

Cordelia was standing in the middle of it, in her long white gloves.

She had Clover on her hip.

On the far end of the trestle, a dozen gray wolves sat in a row, waiting.

Clover saw us come out of the trees.

"MAMA."

She kicked, and Cordelia's grip shifted, and for one second Clover's legs swung out over nothing.

I stopped dead.

So did Aldric.

"There we are," Cordelia called. "Both of you. How romantic."

I shifted back.

I stood at the end of the trestle naked, with Mister Buttons in my hand, because my shirt was in the mud a mile behind me.

"Give her to me," I said.

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