WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD
The word came from Della.
Not dramatically. Not in the form of a revelation dropped like a stone into still water. It came the way most life-altering information seems to arrive quietly, sideways, in the middle of something ordinary.
I was sitting in the medical station while Della checked the small cut on my forearm from a branch I had misjudged during my morning run, and she was talking in her comfortable way about pack history and bloodlines because the document from my mother's box had made its way into conversation, and she said it the way you say something you assume the other person already knows.
"Of course the anchoring power doesn't just protect territory," she said, unwrapping the bandage with practiced hands. "It bonds. That's the old function of it. Be
