Chapter 9: The Voice

The pack healer stitched Elias's side for an hour.

She said he would live.

She also said that if the tooth had gone a finger deeper, I would have been carrying a dead man.

I stayed until she let me leave.

Then I walked back through the dark to the Luna's wing, and I did something I had not done in six years.

I opened the bottom drawer of my dressing table.

The pages were still there.

The nurse had found them tangled in my bedclothes, the morning my fever broke, and she had put them in my hands.

"Alpha's papers," she had said. "Better keep them safe."

I had.

I had never read them again.

I carried the stack to the lamp and unfolded the first sheet.

It was a border patrol report, dated six winters ago, in a plain upright hand.

*North fence, quiet. Two foxes at the creek.*

My heart began to hurt.

I turned the page over.

The margins were covered in small blocky notes.

*Luna drank water at three. Fever 104. Do not leave.*

*She said her mother's name. Wet cloth. Stayed.*

*Fever down a little. She asked who I was. Told her a friend.*

I could not remember asking.

I sat on the edge of my bed with the pages in my lap.

The handwriting was the same as the notes under the pins on the barracks map.

It was the handwriting of a man who did the double watch every night.

I went back to the sick house before dawn.

He was awake, propped on pillows, with a bandage thick around his ribs.

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