The Beta I Trusted

omething sour and eager from the short one behind me, and from Dietrich himself a scent so clean and steady that my wolf did not trust it for a moment.

e was a healer on the road. She took a room

his throat. Dietrich raised

with her a

room. The boy knocked, and I came out

forehead and he kept pushing them back, and his coat was still buttoned wrong,

d. "The pack will want a name, a

l want the tr

e to answer for it. You know the law as well as I

had dragged wolves to the border stone and read out their sentences. I had never once st

elt

, and I told myself I was looking at the wound for the pack's sake, for the report I would have to give. The wound

the glint a

wo fingers and turned it over in the grey light. A wolf's tooth, cast in silver, no longe

ps. I held the tooth in my palm and it was cold, and it carried a smell. Silver always smells of itself, that hard metallic sting that werewolves learn to fe

es

nd the tooth and did

e from behind me, patient and

the mist behind him and the sun on his face,

And blood. I am lo

what you

alm, and Dietrich leaned down and looke

his is one of theirs, then we are not looking at a rogue at a

ne reading

r reading

the way that stone is hard, and he had never once told me a kind word that I could remember. He had made me enforcer when I was twenty nine and had never explained why. I owed him a deb

to the pack house. The law says the body

ched them wrap Reinhard in it and lift him, and I walked behind them up the roa

and she is innocent, then she has nothing to fear fro

know whe

t me. "Because if you do not find her, the pack will decide you were

black roof with the smoke already rising from its chimneys. Wolves were gathering in the ya

ry now. The wetness I had seen in the meadow was gone, and in its p

y come, they will ask who was the last wolf to see the Alpha alive. And they will ask

rd where the pack was waiting, and his voice rose

the smell on it was faint enough that a wolf who did not know it would never have caught it. I brought i

had held this tooth aga

er, a wolf was running, and the sound of it carried to me clear and small and heading away from the p

ing toward the trees, and behind me Dietrich's voi