My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 215

Sera

I felt the iron under my hand.

"How did you cub them, then. If the bite is what it is."

"That is the long answer." Fenris's voice came down a notch. "Once a Northern wolf has gone rogue and gone out, there is almost no getting him back. The wild ones do not return the way the turned ones from our own do. The pack is not their pack anymore. The only thing that has ever worked on a wild one is a hunter who does not mind dying. We have not had many of those. The last Alpha to bring a wild Northern rogue back inside Ironmaw walls and bind him was three of my fathers ago. He came out of the hunt with a bite on the upper thigh. Took him into a fever for nine days. He kept the leg. He did not walk on it the same after. We tell the children that story so they know not to volunteer for it."

"And you," I said. "You went looking."

He did not answer. He looked at Yvara.

Yvara was opening the next carcass with a short knife. She did not raise her eyes. She said: "Twelve of us went. We brought back three. We lost two on the line."

Fenris said, "We do not tell that story to the children either."

I let that sit in my chest for a moment. Two men dead, three rogues bound. Nobody upstairs in the keep had ever told me a thing about it. The Alpha I had been sleeping next to had spent some part of the last two springs putting his men in front of an animal that nothing south of the mountains would have survived, and he had done it because the line needed it done.

I looked through the bars. The wolf at the gate was watching us.

I frowned.

"Are they always this black?"

"Northern thing also. Other packs' rogues keep their original coat. A grey wolf goes rogue, you have a grey rogue. A red wolf goes rogue, you have a red rogue. Northern wolves go black. Whatever they were before — silver, amber, brindle, pale — within a week of the turn the coat is what you are looking at. The reason is not known. The elders say it is the corruption coming up through the body and out through the coat — a visible mark so the pack can read it from a distance. The healers say the toxin makes a pigment and the pigment moves to the fur. Either way. They go black. There is no exception. If you ever see a Northern wolf turned and he is not black, give him a week."

"And the rest of it. The eyes. The lips."

"Same animal you knew. The eyes are bloodshot because the body is producing the toxin all hours and not flushing it. The lips are lifted because the canines have grown longer than the gum can sit over. The breathing is slow because the heart is doing more work, pushing thicker blood. Same parts. Same wolf. Different settings."

I made myself look at the wolf at the gate again. I tried to see it as a wolf I had grown up around, dialed to a different setting. I could not, completely. The first impression — that this was a thing my brain did not have a box for — had not gone away. But the box was getting wider.

"And Yvara binds them."

"Yvara binds. She has done sixteen of the twenty-six."

"And he."

"He is mine. From before Yvara was old enough to bind. I named him."

"What's his name."

Hotter than I had expected. Hotter than my own skin. Hot enough to feel through the cold air between us. Under the fur I could feel the muscle in the side of the head working. The jaw under skin was bigger than any jaw on any animal I had been close to. The skull through the coat was dense. I could feel the breath move in and out, and after three or four breaths my hand stopped shaking.

The wolf turned its head a fraction. Just enough that the side of its muzzle came against the heel of my palm.

I laughed. Once. Short. Disbelief.

"They are nameless until you name them," Fenris said. "The black takes the name out when it comes up. Most stay nameless. The named ones — the binder names, or the Alpha. If you give one a name, the wolf is yours. Comes when called. Follows you in a fight. Dies for you. They are not loyal in the way a cared-for animal is. They are loyal in a way I do not have a word for."

"Don't name me one."

I pulled my hand back. Slowly. Pulling it back fast struck me, even then, as a thing I would regret.

Fenris watched me.

"I am not going to feed something that is going to feast on me on a slow day."

He laughed.

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