Chapter 2. The Wolf Who Woke Up

June's POV

Bram didn't move from the stone.

He just stood there above the black water, with the moon behind him and the ford glittering at his feet, and he looked at me the way he'd looked at me every year on that same stone. Patient. Almost kind.

"Come home, June," he said. "Nobody will touch you tonight. You have my word."

His word.

The Hunt was screaming through the forest behind me. Rhett had promised to make me beg. Every wolf in the pack had cheered when Bram said keep what he catches.

And now Bram was standing alone at the river, offering me his word that nobody would touch me.

It made no sense. Unless he'd never meant for the Hunt to catch me at all.

Unless he'd sent them to drive me here.

"Where were you?" I asked.

My voice came out cracked. I made it carry anyway.

Bram's head tilted slightly. "What?"

"That night. Eleven years ago." I swallowed. "Where were you when my parents died?"

For one second, his face changed.

Not much. A tightening at the corner of his mouth. A flicker in his flat, patient eyes. Nothing anyone else would have seen.

But I'd been watching that man's face my whole life, from the floor.

"Who have you been talking to?" he said softly.

I ran.

* * *

Not across the ford. Not toward him. North, along the bank, into the trees.

"June!" His voice cracked through the night behind me. Not calm anymore. "June!"

I didn't look back.

There was only one other way across Halden. Two miles upstream, at the Weeping Falls, where the river dropped thirty feet off a cliff of black rock. Nobody went there. The rocks were slick, the drop was deadly, and the pack said the falls were haunted.

Perfect.

I'd never run like this in my life. Eleven years of scrubbing and hauling had made me strong in a dull, ugly way, but my lungs were on fire after the first half mile. A rock cut my heel open. I didn't stop.

Where were you that night?

Who have you been talking to?

He hadn't said anywhere. He hadn't said at home. He'd asked who told me to ask.

A shape burst out of the trees to my right.

A brown wolf, big and shaggy, with a torn ear I knew. Jory. Rhett's friend. The one who used to trip me on the stairs and laugh until he cried.

He snapped at my legs. I threw myself sideways, rolled down a short bank, and came up with the bone-handled knife in my fist.

Jory skidded to a stop above me and shifted. Bones cracked, and then he was a man again, naked and grinning.

"Look at the little Keeper," he said. "Got a knife and everything."

"Stay back."

"Or what?" He laughed and stepped down the bank. "Rhett's going to be so jealous I found you first. You know what he promised? Whoever brings you back gets a night with you before—"

I lunged.

I didn't aim. I just swung. The blade caught his forearm and opened a long, shallow line.

Jory snorted. "That's it? That's all you've—"

He stopped.

Blood ran from the cut, slow and dark, down to his wrist. He waited for it to close.

It didn't.

He wiped it with his thumb. It welled up again.

"What the hell," he said quietly. All the laughter was gone. "What did you do?"

I didn't know. My hand was shaking so badly I almost dropped the knife.

Jory took a step back. Then another. He stared at me like I was something out of the stories they told children to keep them out of the woods.

"Witch," he breathed.

Then he threw back his head and howled, and every wolf in the forest answered.

* * *

I ran until the roar of the falls swallowed the howls.

The Weeping Falls dropped into a pool of churning white foam. Mist soaked my hair and clothes in seconds. The rocks along the edge were black and slick as glass.

I climbed out onto them anyway, on my hands and knees.

Thirty feet down. White water. Black rock. Beyond it, the far bank, and rogue land, and nobody's law.

I couldn't swim that. Nobody could swim that.

"Get down off the rocks, June."

I turned.

Rhett stood at the edge of the trees, a pair of jeans pulled on, his chest bare and heaving. His right hand was wrapped in a strip of torn shirt, soaked through, red dripping from his fingers.

Two hours. And it still hadn't closed.

Behind him, Odette stepped out of the trees, then three more. Flashlights. Ropes.

"Father says I bring you back alive," Rhett said. His voice was wrong. Not cruel, not smug. Hoarse. "Only alive."

"Why?" I shouted over the falls. "Why does he care if I'm alive?"

Something flickered across Rhett's face. He didn't know. He didn't know, and it bothered him.

Then he held up his bleeding hand.

"What did you do to me?"

"I rejected you," I said. "Everything else is your problem."

Odette laughed, high and sharp. "She's stalling. Rhett, just grab her."

Rhett stepped onto the first rock.

Behind me was thirty feet of white water and the dark. In front of me was the boy who had once shared his apples with me, and who had promised his friends a night with me as a prize.

I knew which one was more dangerous.

"Tell your father," I said, "that I'm going to find out where he was that night."

His face went pale.

I stood up on the edge of the rock, turned, and jumped.

* * *

The cold hit me like a fist.

The current grabbed me and pulled me under, spinning, slamming me against stone, dragging me down into the black. I didn't know which way was up. My lungs were bursting. My arms were useless against the weight of the water.

I was going to drown in the same river as my parents.

And in the dark, deep in my chest, right where the bond had torn, something opened its eyes.

Pain exploded through every bone in my body.

My spine cracked. My fingers twisted. My jaw stretched and split.

And a voice I hadn't heard since I was nine years old spoke inside my head, low and rough and absolutely calm.

Swim.