The Cold Breakfast Bride novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Original Vial

I gave the doctor Hatty's bed.

Hatty was in rehab down in the valley until October.

She said on the phone that anyone fired by Linnea Ketteridge could sleep in her sheets for free.

The doctor slept eleven hours.

She came down at ten the next morning in borrowed slippers and sat in the back booth with a cup of coffee.

She looked out the window at the pass for a long time.

At two, between lunch and dinner, the diner was empty except for the waitress filling ketchups.

I sat down across from her with a slice of apple pie.

"Eat," I said.

She ate the pie.

"I need to tell you something about the test," she said.

"Which test?"

"Both of them."

The waitress stopped squeezing ketchup.

"Three years ago," the doctor said, "after your first run with the pack, the elder did the old test. Silver and blood. Do you remember?"

The lodge's great room, firelight, the whole pack watching.

A needle in my arm, a needle in Cordell's.

Our blood mixed in a glass vial over a sliver of silver, and the elder holding it up to the fire.

If the bond was false, the blood would brown and curdle by morning.

It stayed red, and the pack howled.

"I drew both samples," the doctor said. "Yours and his. And the old way says the doctor keeps the vial until the first pup is born. So I kept it."

"Where?"

She opened her medical bag on the table.

Inside, wrapped in a white cotton handkerchief, was a small glass vial with a cork stopper sealed in wax.

She set it down between us.

The blood in it was red.

Not brown.

Red, as bright as the day she drew it, with a thin curl of silver lying in the bottom.

My wolf woke up so hard I put my hand on the table.

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