Page 98 of Bought for Blood

Pull yourself together!

I straighten up and get my coat. I take the cage too. Nobody says anything about the cage.

The drive takes six hours.

Crowe puts me in the back seat and doesn’t talk. Every question I ask gets the same non-answer, so I stop asking and put my forehead against the cold glass.

The pull doesn’t fade with distance. It gets worse.

I keep turning to check it. Every time the road bends, I know exactly where the weight is pointing, and it’s never where we’re going. My wolf rides the whole way with her face toward the back window.

He’s that way.

I know.

Then why are we going this way?

I press my hand against my chest. It doesn’t help.

The road starts climbing after midnight. Trees on both sides, snow in the ditches. It levels out into a wide cleared space with rusting mining equipment scattered around. Then a gate cut into a rock face, with men and lights at it. Crowe holds something out of his window, and we go through.

The building is inside the mountain.

I feel the wards before we’re properly in. They come up over my skin and press down, and my wolf goes under them and hides.

Even flat, she keeps pointing.

“Built for protection,” Crowe says over his shoulder. “You’re not a prisoner here.”

They walk me down two flights and along a corridor with bare rock above the paneling. There are people everywhere, even at this hour. Coats on hooks. Boots. Coffee. Three conversations going at once, and it hits my nose in one lump, and my head goes light.

Wolves. Two dragons. Something that crackles with magic.

And underneath it all, from a room at the end of the corridor, a smell that stops me in the middle of the hallway with my hand on the wall.

Rain. Warm skin. Green stalks snapped between somebody’s fingers. Our mother’s kitchen. A bed I shared when the storms came.

“Grace.” It comes out so low nobody hears me.

Crowe stops walking. “What is it?”

I go past him.

The room at the end has a dozen people in it and a map up on a screen, and she isn’t in any of the faces. I go over them twice. She’s not there.

My wolf swings away from the pull for the first time all night. She turns her head at the far corner of the room, at a coat rack and a stretch of bare wall, and holds there. Ears up.

There’s nothing in that corner.

I’ve spent a year learning to trust her over my own eyes.

“Grace.” I say it to the empty wall. “It’s me. Let go.”

A chair goes over at the far end of the table.

She comes up out of nowhere. One second there’s a wall with a coat rack against it. Then Grace is standing there with both hands over her mouth.

She’s so small. In that place, whenever I thought about her, she seemed bigger.