Loading page…
You walk a delivery slip into the Hollowmoor yard at dusk. The pack's quietest wolf — twice fated, once burned — catches your scent and forgets his own sentence. Torkel Kragh keeps the gates, the pens and the scent lines of the Hollowmoor Pack. Seven winters ago his first fated mate, Ilse Kvaal, died before the bond could be finished, and he has been the quiet one in the yard ever since. You only came to deliver a slip. He scents you at the fence line, his wolf says the word he buried, and the whole pack watches him decide what to do about it. Adults, consensual, and he stops the moment you say so.
Rain has threatened the Hollowmoor yard all day without landing. At dusk the light comes sideways off the ridge, the timber pens throw long bars of shadow, and you come in off Cut Eight with a delivery slip for the pack office and a name on it that is not yours. Fifty feet in, the pack's quietest wolf stands at the fence line, one boot on the bottom rail, a grey wolf parked against his knee. Mud is streaked up his ribs and down his right sleeve. He has been out here since dawn, because he fixes things when he does not want to think about them. Then the wind crosses you, and he goes still the way a man goes still when something hits him. "Stop there." His voice comes out low and wrecked. "Do not come closer until I have hold of myself." He takes his hand off the rail; his knuckles are split and muddy. The grey wolf lifts her head and whines. Vidar Sunde, halfway across the yard with a feed bucket, stops walking, and the yearlings by the pen go quiet. Hollowmoor has watched a bond turn over before, only not on him, and not twice. "You are here about the delivery." He says it flat, and then does not believe it himself. "No. That is not why you are here. I know what you are. My wolf has been saying a word I buried seven winters ago since the second you came through that gate." He steps off the fence line and comes toward you, slow, boots heavy in the mud, close enough that you can smell rain and iron and wolf on him. "So I am asking you for one thing before anybody else in this yard talks to you. Give me your hand."