Page 49 of The SnowFang Storm

“The pack took it from me.”

“You’re telling me the great Rodero of SilverPaw let his pack strip his daughter of something she’d earned?”

No. No, that wasn’t what had happened.

“He didn’t have to beat you and reduce you to emotional ash to control you. That’d have been too obvious. That would have left a mark. No, he was much more insidious. I’m not letting history remember Rodero of SilverPaw as anything but an example of the worst of the species cloaked in the vestments of a holy mandate. You are my mate, my wife, the other half of my soul, the mother of my pups, and he does not own you, our lives, or our future.”

“There is no future if you burn all this down! There will be no pups! There will be no life, there will be nothing!”

He cupped my face in his hands, his skin burning warm. “You’re shivering like a leaf.”

“I’m not.” I tried to get away from him.

“I’m not angry at you,” he said with sudden tenderness.

I shoved him off me. “I don’t want your fucking pity! I should have seen this coming! Be mad at me! I should have known, I should have stopped it, I should have prevented this!”

His look of pity cut me in two pieces. “We will take what is ours, Winter. All of it. Or set it on fire.”

The drumbeat matched my heartbeat, each throb sending ripples of empty echoes across me.

An alphabet without a language.

“It isn’t true,” I told him, throat raw with trapped howls and screams. I searched my memories for one warm memory I could share, and it was like going into an unexpectedly empty pantry. Not even a damn cockroach skittering from the light. Even the year I’d been a Solstice Hound, he’d seemed cold and remote. I’d told myself he disapproved because I was young and he had been worried. I’d told myself he hadn’t doted on me like other werewolf fathers because he was Rodero of SilverPaw.

Sterling took my hand in his. Then, when I didn’t pull away, he pulled me close. “You are still my mate. We know it’s true. No one will take that from us.”

Mother-Wolf

I fell through a rotted door.

I was in a single ruined room, no windows, and just the rotted door I’d come through. Centuries of debris pressed against the walls. The floor was scattered with old schoolwork, chess pieces, chips of paint, broken furniture and fixtures. A huge iron spike punched the safe deposit box into the opposite wall, and all around it a thousand copies of the spring photograph were arranged like petals. The pages of the Volumes lined the decrepit walls, an endless litany of names, except for pages that had been smeared with thick slashes of black ink, but stamped all over with blue wax seals: my mother’s seal, the seal of Luna Autumn of SilverPaw.

Purple-black mist that slid exploratory fingers through the cracks and gaps.

A war-form female wolf stood in the center of a room. She was white mottled with black, and her face was a blurry swirl. From one hand dangled the blue necklace on a silver chain. In the other, she clutched the brown newborn puppy. It whimpered and squirmed.

The other two puppies cowered in the wreckage behind her, whimpering in terror and crying.

She gestured to the surroundings and informed me—her war-form throat forming the human words clearly—“You can decorate it any way you like.”

Her voice. It was familiar—

It was my mother’s voice. And Cerys’ voice, too.

“Mom?” I whispered, crawling to my feet as though I were swimming through concrete.

The war-form clicked her teeth, and I couldn’t see her eyes but knew they were wild with glee. Her scent was glee and violence and blood. The puppy clutched in her paw cried piteously in tune to my heartbeat.

“Give me the puppies.” The words shredded my throat. “Keep the room, the necklace, the secrets, whatever it is, let me have them.”

The war-form brought the brown puppy to her maw and crooned at it. The pup mewled in terror. I howled and lunged at it. “Give it to me!”

The she-wolf back-handed me into the rubble.

I sprang up and shook off the dust, then tried to dart behind her to the two other pups. She slammed me back again. The blue necklace danced wildly in all of this, glowing like the ocean outside the Mortcombe estate.

“Decorate the room,” the war-form scolded me. “You have to make it right for the pups.”

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