We fortified the house the way you batten a ship, and we waited for the new moon.
It took four days. They were the strangest days of my life — the estate filling up with wolves who had never set foot on Blackwood land, Cole drilling the perimeter at dawn, Voss running supply lines down into the city, the packs sending fighters and wards and, from two old she-wolves in the northern hills, a bundle of dried herbs they said would keep the child's line "quiet" from any instrument that tried to read it. Adrian took the herbs like a treaty. June brewed them in the kitchen she'd seen in drawings, humming tunelessly, and for a few hours the house smelled of cedar and chamomile and something that made the mark on my shoulder drowse down to a low warm coal.
It worked, mostly. I could feel the Dire
