THE ALPHA WHO ERASED ME

Chapter Six — The North Ridge

It happened four nights later, at about two in the morning, and it took the top off my head.

I was asleep. I came out of sleep already standing, already halfway across the room, with a sound in my throat I had never made before — because something had gone into Rhys Blackwood's side and I felt the entry of it under my own ribs, left side, four inches below the heart.

The bond. Still open. Still mine.

I did not think. That is the part I am least proud of and most honest about. I did not stop to consider that he had rejected me in front of four hundred people, or that I had sworn in that stone room that I had not decided whether I wanted him. My body went out the door into the dark with my boots in my hand, and my mind caught up somewhere on the slope above the hall, where it informed me, too late, that I was running toward the north ridge in a nightshirt.

I was not the first there. I was the fourth.

They had him on the open ground below the treeline with two lanterns and Tomas kneeling in the wet with both hands pressed to Rhys's side, and the smell of the blood came up the hill at me and my knees nearly went.

"Keeper." Tomas didn't look up. "Not now."

"Let her through," Rhys said.

His voice was wrong — thin, with gravel in it — but it carried, because an Alpha's voice carries even when there is nothing left in it, and the men moved.

I knelt. The ground soaked through my nightshirt at once, cold.

"What was it," I said.

"Rogues." Tomas's jaw was tight. "Six. Off the north ridge."

"There are no rogues on the north ridge, there's nothing to eat up there." I was looking at the wound. Someone had got a knife into him under the short ribs, upward, which is not where an animal puts anything. "Tomas. That's a blade."

"I know it's a blade."

"Then say it's a blade."

He looked up at me then, and in the lantern light his face did something complicated.

"It's a blade," he said. "And it's not healing."

I leaned in. The edges of the wound were grey-white and curled back, like paper held near a flame.

Silver.

There are eleven pieces of silver in Ironridge territory and every one of them is logged. I logged them. I log them every year on the first of the month after Midwinter, because the inventory is part of the keeper's duty, and I could have recited the list to you in my sleep: four ceremonial blades in the council vault, two in the Alpha's house, three in the old chapel, two in the boundary cache.

Nobody holds silver in this valley without it being written down.

"Wren," Rhys said.

I looked at his face. He was going somewhere; his pupils were wrong, and the pain had taken the top layer off him, and what was underneath was younger and much more frightened than anything he had shown on the Choosing field.

"I'm here," I said, which was a stupid thing to say, and I said it anyway.

His hand came up and found my wrist and closed on it, hard enough to hurt.

"You smell like the north," he said.

"What?"

"Up there." His eyes were half shut. "The whole ridge. The old ground. It smells like you, it's always smelled like you, I thought I was — " He stopped. His breathing had gone short. "I thought I was going mad."

"Rhys."

"I went up there every week for four months," he said, "looking for whatever it was. And then you walked into the Choosing field."

Tomas said, quietly, "Alpha."

Rhys's hand slackened. Not unconscious — gone under, the way they do when the body decides to start the work.

I knelt in the wet grass with his blood on my hands and my heart going like a bird in a box, and I thought about the north ridge, which is empty, and burned, and has been forbidden ground since before I was born.

And I thought: empty of what?