Chapter 61

Chapter 61
Abigail's POV

The night pressed down heavy and cold. By the time I took the watch from Elodie a little past midnight, the fire had burned so low that I had to feed it a few sticks before I could even make out my own hands.

She went back to her bedroll rubbing her eyes, and within a few minutes her breathing had gone even and long, deep in real sleep, leaving me alone with the dark and the faint, dry crackle of the flames.

I sat with my back to the light, holding the posture I had trained into myself, keeping my eyes sharp on the trees. Two hours passed like that, the whole place quiet except for the wind moving high in the pines. Then, close to what I judged to be two in the morning, I heard footsteps.

They came from the east. Not the careful, halting way a thing moves through a hunt ground, but a step that was steady, unhurried, and made no effort to hide itself, as though it did not fear being heard at all.

Before she reached the edge of the firelight, I was already on my feet, one hand loose at my side, watching her come out of the dark. The moon lit her hair first, that pale gold gone nearly silver-white in the cold light, falling loose over her shoulders like a river running without a sound.

She was tall, and there was an ease in the way she carried herself, without a trace of unease. Behind her came a servant, holding something heavy and dark by the scruff, letting it hang at his side — the severed head of a mutant beast, still dripping, offered like a gift meant to be taken seriously.

"I hope I'm not intruding," she said first, the smile already set on her face to just the right degree. "We were passing through on the east side and saw your fire. It would have been rude not to come say hello."

Selena. Elodie had mentioned her to me in passing at the muster ground, the woman said to want Nicholas.

"Of course not," I said, letting my own smile settle steadily into place. "Sit if you like. Tonight this fire is yours as much as mine."

She came closer, her gaze moving slowly over me, like a buyer sizing up goods, taking in the mud on my boots, the set of my shoulders, the gear at my waist. In the end her eyes stayed a beat longer on the short blade at my hip — that knife carried the forge mark of the Winter Pack in the lines of its edge.

She recognized it, I could tell, though nothing showed on her face.

"We did well tonight," she said, settling onto a fallen log across the flames, folding her hands in her lap, her posture like a noble come to a dinner party. "Three marked beasts, and that one." She nodded toward the head in her servant's grip. "And you?"

"Not bad, either."

"Mm." She drew the short sound out. Then she leaned forward a little, her voice softening, a performed concern threaded through her tone. "Forgive me for saying so, but I heard your name at the muster, and I confess I was surprised. A girl who hasn't even had her Awakening, walking into the Silver Wolf Woods. This is not a place for the unproven, Abigail. The dens will not be gentle with you just because you're brave."

There it was.

She had wanted to fish a spark of anger off my face, and I gave her not the least bit of one. I only smiled, dipped my head slightly, as though I had received a kindly reminder from her.

"You're very thoughtful," I said. "But my place was granted by the Alpha King himself. I'd rather bleed than have him feel his trust was misplaced."

The expression on her face did not change, but something behind her eyes still stiffened, ever so faintly. That tiny pause, like a stone dropped into still water. She had not expected me to raise that name, and she plainly had no answer ready for it. The Alpha King was not someone she could pick up and probe with, idly, beside a campfire.

Still, she recovered quickly. She looked into the flames, a private smile rising at the corner of her mouth. "You know it's Nicholas running the security this year, don't you? Let me tell you, our two Packs fought side by side, long ago. My family and his go back a long way. I've known him since I was a girl."

She lifted her eyes to me on that last word, as though watching, as though hunting. "He was different back then. How should I put it — almost softer."

Before I could stop it, that dull, unseemly pull rose up from under my ribs, and it had nothing to do with reason. She was staking a claim, pressing an old history onto him like a hand, as if to say: this is mine, too. And so the part of me that had not yet learned how to control itself suddenly wanted to bare its teeth.

I forced my face to stay perfectly still.

"The Winter Alpha is responsible for the safety of this hunt," I said evenly. "I'm a competitor. We speak only when it's necessary. That's all."

She stared at me for a long while, and after a moment a small sound escaped her throat, not quite a laugh. Then she rose.

"All right." She brushed a bit of bark from her sleeve. "I do hope you make it through in one piece. The Silver Wolf Woods are not gentle, and not everyone gets a second chance in them."

The words hung in the air, left deliberately vague. Whether it was a warning about the forest or a hint aimed at me, no one could say. She turned and walked back into the dark she had come from, the servant trailing after her, dragging that bloody head along. I kept watching until the tree shadows swallowed that last pale gleam of light in her hair.

Then I sat back down slowly and let the fire fill that silence again.

When she said his name, when she draped that old history over him, my chest felt as though a hand had closed around it. I didn't know what to do with it, so I could only set it aside for now, and deal with it once the day came.

I turned my mind instead to the water.

Ever since I had washed at that ford the day before, I had kept my attention on the woods around us. By this coldest hour before the fourth dawn, I could no longer pretend the pattern away.

The marked beasts were on the move. On this one watch alone, I had heard five growls from five different directions, the sounds faint, but clear enough, as though rolling up out of the depths of the dark.

Yet across the first three nights, I had heard nothing at all. Something had roused them, and that something was following us.

As the sky began to gray, I went to my pack, checking the gear over first by touch, then looking again by the slowly brightening light. That was when I found it.

On the inner side of my vambrace, along the strip of leather that had brushed my forearm at the ford, there clung a layer of something exceedingly thin. If I had not been looking for it deliberately, I would almost have missed it. It caught a faint, oily sheen in the morning light, and when I brought it close, a trace of scent still lingered underneath — not strong, but unnatural, like something that raised the hair on my arms.

Carefully, with the back of my knife, I scraped that residue onto a scrap of oiled cloth, then folded it and tucked it deep into my pack. My hands were steady, but my thoughts had already run a step ahead.

This was no accident of the woods. Someone had put something into the water, likely some substance meant to stir up the marked beasts. Set that beside the iron wedge I had dug out from the collapsed cliff two days ago, and the tracks that had shadowed us since the very first night, and the whole shape of the thing revealed itself, fully, in the cold morning air.

Olivia.

It could be no one else.