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“You can use one of my talons to open the skin.”
I pat the knife case under my belt. “You already gave me a talon.”
“That was my first.” His eyes go to the case. “We keep a child’s first talon and make something of it. Mine’s a knife.”
I’ve been chopping herbs with his baby talon. “Keer pulled out one of his own teeth so Mel could do this part. I can manage a knife.”
His eyes come up off the case. “Your brother is claimed?”
“To a human. She kept the tooth. She calls it her sex tooth.” I can’t say that without laughing. “What else?”
He lifts his free hand to the pale fur across his brow.
“We put our scent here, and at the shoulders. Mine on you. Yours on me. We rub it in. When the bond takes, some of it stays.”
I raise my good hand and touch the pale band. The fur’s soft under my thumb, and his eyes close for a breath. Hm. I lower my hand to the pale fur at his shoulder and leave it there.
“And we’ll be able to feel each other?”
“When it’s all done. The hunt, the mating, the blood and the scent. You’ll know I’m alive, and roughly where I am. I’ll know the same of you.”
“Even if you’re here and I’m at the pack?” My fingers stop in his fur.
“Farther than that.”
Keer stood right in front of me today, and I couldn’t feel him. I had my hand flat on his back, and I still needed the scars to know who’d grabbed me.
“Will you feel what I’m feeling?”
“No. Thoughts, feelings, pictures—none of those. Only that you’re alive, and where to look for you.”
I rub the pale fur between my fingers again.
“That would’ve been useful this morning.”
His hand closes a little under mine, and he watches my face.
“It won’t bring your wolf back.”
Thanks for that. “I know.”
“Or your bond to the pack. This would be between you and me.”
I nod, looking at the hand holding mine.
“Tell me the rest.”
Rauk looks down at our hands.
“Our lives would be tied together. When one dies, the other can die too. The ones who don’t can fall gravely ill and barely live through it.”
I take my hand off his shoulder and lay it on his knee.
“Keer and Mel live with that. So if my brother had killed you today, he could’ve killed me too.”
“If we were claimed. Yes.”
He turns his hand under mine so I can hold on to it.
