One Minute Younger Always Second Best Until I Walked Out the Door novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Thirty Days

Roxana agrees to thirty days as Black Creek's guest strategist, beats three of its best at dawn, and sees Colt's convoy at the north line.

Black Creek's lodge was a long timber house above the river.

At five in the morning smoke was already coming out of three chimneys.

I had slept four hours in a spare room and woken to a pad of grid paper and a box of pencils on the dresser.

Hard ones, 4H, the kind I like.

I did not ask how he knew.

Jonas was waiting in the kitchen with two mugs.

"Terms," he said, and slid one across the table. "You stay thirty days as our guest."

"As your prisoner."

"As a guest who can leave through that door at any hour. I'll say it in front of my pack."

"And in return?"

"You draw. You tell my wolves where your brother's patrols run, and where his lines are weak. You owe me nothing else."

I wrapped my hands around the mug.

"And the other thing," I said. "The scent."

"We don't talk about it."

"No."

"And I don't touch you," he said. "Not unless we're in a fight and it can't be helped."

"That's a strange rule."

"It's the only one I can keep."

He said it to the table, and I looked at the table too.

"Thirty days," I said.

"Thirty days."

We shook on it, and I made sure it was only the hand.

His palm was dry and hot.

It was a very long handshake.

"There's something else," he said, and let go. "My pack won't take you on my word. They lost a patrol, and you carry the Radley scent."

"I dropped the name last night."

"They haven't heard that yet."

"So what do they want?"

"They want to see what you are. Dawn trial, in the yard, three wolves. Nobody is expected to bleed."

"Who picks them?"

"They do."

I finished the coffee.

"I'd like my hair tied back," I said.

The yard was frozen mud with a ring of trucks around it.

Sixty Black Creek wolves stood in coats and boots in the pale light, and none of them was smiling.

The first fighter was a broad woman with a shaved head.

She was good.

She was slow to the left, though, and I had watched her cross the yard on the way in.

I took her down in the third exchange and put my forearm across her collar until she tapped.

The second was a man twice my width.

He wanted to throw me, and he did, once.

I rolled, came up under his guard and put him on his back in the mud.

The third was a young wolf with quick hands, and he knew the ring better than I did.

He caught me on the cheek and I tasted blood.

I stopped, and I looked at the pack instead of him.

They were watching me, and not one of them looked bored.

I saw it then.

They did not need me to win.

They needed to see whether I'd stay down.

I did not stay down.

I went in under his arm, took his wrist, and turned him until he knelt.

"Enough," someone called.

I let go.

I stood in the mud, breathing, with blood in my mouth and my braid come undone.

Nobody clapped.

The broad woman with the shaved head stepped out of the ring, picked up my dropped coat, and held it out to me.

"Your pack ranks you second to a boy who can't hold a ridge?" she said.

"Yes."

"Then your pack is stupid," she said, and walked away.

That was how it began.

Jonas stood on the lodge porch the whole time with his arms folded.

He had not moved to help me once, not even when the young wolf hit me.

When I looked up he was already looking at me.

His eyes had gone amber at the edges.

I was bleeding, and I was muddy, and I wanted very much to go up those steps.

"Breakfast," he said, in a voice that was not quite his own.

Inside, the pack's cook set down eggs, and I ate until the plate was bare.

I had the pad of grid paper open beside the plate and my pencil moving by the second cup.

Black Creek's side of the Gravel Fork road, laid out in my hand, for the first time in my life with a name beside it.

My own.

Then a boy burst in from the yard without knocking.

"Alpha," he said. "There's a convoy at the north line. Six trucks, Ironwood plates."

I put down the pencil.

"They've got a white banner on the lead one," the boy said. "They want to talk."

Jonas looked at me.

"It's not even nine," I said. "Colt didn't wait one day."

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