The Beta I Trusted

four, and the pack yard behind me was full of voices. If I went after her now, I would be a wolf who ran from

more out of me than the lo

rd on it, still wrapped in the inn's grey blanket, and the pack had gathered around it in a ring. When one of

came near him he received with a word and a touch on the arm. I watched him for a quarter of an hour. He knew every name. He knew which ones to

wrong with his behavior. That was the trouble. Grief makes wolves clumsy. It makes them forget

ck house with a basin and a cloth and her blonde hair tied back, and sh

bleeding,

ngernails and a long scratch on my wrist t

ose it is.

hands were quick and sure, and she talke

to send a war party to the Bosbach border tonight. You sh

ywhere until the Co

tied it. "The whisper in the kitchen is different. Half the pack is sa

ame up to mine

kill him,

her so plainly that for a

d. "I did n

re is talk about the woman at the inn. There is talk that sh

oing the

obias heard it

is head bowed, and a group of wolves had gathered behind him in a line that looked a great deal

things to," she said, and

ngs. A cot, a table, a chest with a lock on it. I went in and shut the doo

th itself had been cast from a real one, some ancestor's fang. The cord had been broken rather than unti

to the stone six years ago. The rogue had been a woman, and she had said nothing all the wa

It had not seemed

e cot and put my

d let the law run. That is what an enforcer does. Reinhard had taught me himself, standing in this same roo

ce and ask me how I knew the scent. I wo

ne kn

nd Dietrich stood there with his cup in his hand and hi

ome in?"

l room, and then he sat down on the chair by the tabl

is morning," he said.

alk. I need

about what happens next, and I want to say this before the rest of them get their teeth into it. You are the best enforcer this p

you came

every wolf in this territory, and that the investigation belongs to you and no one else." He watched me. "Tha

not wan

ight, then. Bring me a name. Any name that will hold up under the law. If you bri

ard his boots go down the hallway toward the kitchen,

nto the pines. The scent of her was faint as a breath on cold glass, and it led north and east, away from the border road, to

ry close, no more than twenty paces off among the trunks,

and came out of the darknes