The Soul Stone

Chapter 3 The Flawed Saint

The Soul Stone had taken us back five years, to the middle of the Crimson Plague.

Iris stood in the public square beside a large cauldron. Sick wolves waited in a line that stretched past the healer's tent.

She filled their cups with a brown herbal brew while families thanked her for saving them.

Some bowed over their cups. Others called her blessed. That was the week the pack began using the word saint whenever they spoke her name.

The memory passed through the back wall of the tent.

I knelt on the dirt floor of a small hovel with my wrist open over a crystal vial. I had slept little in a week.

Gold collected one drop at a time, the only part of the brew that could cure the plague.

Empty vials lay beside my knees. Each one had gone into the public cauldron after Iris diluted it enough to hide the color and scent.

Iris tore aside the flap. “Are you done yet?”

“My body can only produce so much.” I held out the full vial. “This has to last.”

She snatched it. “Callan is waiting for his cure. Make more.”

Her private cauldron held swamp weeds and muddy water. She emptied the gold into it, stirred once, then scraped up the foul sludge at the bottom.

She had prepared the weeds in public so the pack would believe the cure came from her herbs. Without my blood, the mixture had no value at all.

The sludge struck my face and chest. It burned where my skin had split.

“Remember what you are, Selene. You are a bag of blood. Leave the saving to me.”

Several older wolves in the present pressed forward. They had stood in that plague line. One had lost his mate; another, both of his sons. Their thanks had gone to Iris while I bled behind the tent.

The first wolf lowered his head. The second kept looking between the empty vials and the woman he had praised for five years.

Callan stepped away from her. Shame came through our bond hard enough to make my stomach turn. It belonged to him, and it had arrived five years late.

He lifted a hand toward my image on the screen. The fingertips stopped inches from the light.

Iris pulled him back. “The stone is poisoning you. Selene wants you to doubt me. She wants to destroy us.”

Callan looked at the hand she held, then at the wolves gathering around her. If he accepted the memory, every punishment he had ordered and every honor he had given Iris would stand with it.

His whole reign rested on the story that I had betrayed his family and Iris had saved the pack. The screen had already torn through half of it.

His eyes turned crimson.

“Enough!” He threw the head elder away from the stone. “I asked for the battle.”

Both his palms struck the runes. Alpha power poured into them.

“Show me how my father died. Now!”

The Soul Stone gave a piercing cry. Black cracks ran from beneath Callan's hands to every edge of its white surface.

The stone had survived centuries of memory trials. Under the force of his command, pieces began to lift from its edges.

One of those cracks opened behind my head.