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He watched as she pulled out the block and found the cubby it hid She took out the doll he kept there and straightened the pretty yellow skirts, her fingers lingering on the faded tearstains

A child cries with her whole heart, keeping nothing back A child lives in the present, and that gives her pain an endless quality Magic-shorn as he was, he could taste the power of those tearstains from here

She put the doll back and replaced the block thoughtfully Then she looked at hiician, subtle and powerful Once the flower of a powerful High Court—later the bane of it, the first dark root of destruction Able to hide from the best trackers”

“I don’t knoho they are or what they say,” he told her truthfully, trying to hide his temper

She sue with the sentiment” She walked toward him and touched his face with her left hand

His glamour fell away, the illusion that truly represented the lord he had once been But as his ic had twisted and fouled, so had his true form twisted and fouled over the years He waited for her to recoil; he was not good to look upon, but she sift and a task”

“What task is that?” he asked warily

“Don’t worry,” she said, putting her right hand on the side of his neck “You’ll enjoy the job, I promise”

And hishis body like the heat of the dead He screaony enveloped him

She bent down and whispered in his ear, “But there are rules”

CHAPTER

1

“Okay,” said Charles Cornick, younger son of the Marrok who ruled the olves in North America and also, Anna had come to believe, the rest of the world De facto if not officially If Bran Cornick said, “Sit up and go there,” there was not a olf in the world, Alpha or not, ouldn’t obey

Charles had inherited a lot of the dirty work that allowed his father to keep their people, their olves, safe The fallout when a good man was forced to commit heinous and necessary acts was that Charles’s emotions could be mysterious even to himself

For instance, he’d just said “Okay” when Anna could tell he was anything but okay with the topic at hand She knew that froot up abruptly frouitar up on the wall hook Restless, he wandered across the hardwood floor to the bigand looked out at the February snow falling down There was a lot of it: it inter in the mountains of Montana

If he had been a little less self-disciplined, she was pretty sure he would have hunched his shoulders

“You said I should look into it,” Anna told hi her way She knew Charles better than anyone, and still he was sometimes impossible to read, this wonderful and co with your brother Sa on the probleh not quite fro of an obsession of his before he found Ariana again Did you know that olf DNA is just like human DNA? You can’t tell the difference unless the sample is taken e are in our olf form—then it’s different”