The Price of Information

POV: Brill Cox

"So you want to know where the white wolf went," he said, speaking first.

I tightened my grip on the stone in my hand and said nothing.

No one on the waste knew me, and no one had any business knowing what I was looking for.

He stood on the slope and didn't come any closer; I couldn't make out his face. All I knew was that he had recognized me, and that he knew where I was headed.

The snow and wind cut off the way I had come, and I couldn't tell whether anyone had followed.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Elias Crowe." He said it carelessly.

I had never heard the name. Not once, in all the times the Silver Moon Pack patrols had come back from the outside, had anyone mentioned it.

"What Pack are you from?"

"I don't belong to any Pack." He tugged at his cloak and pulled the hood down lower. "Silver Moon Pack, Grayrock Pack, a few others, and the Rogue territories out on the waste — I go to all of them."

"The werewolf black markets too. I do one thing: I buy and sell information. If someone can pay the price, I can give them what they want."

"Brill Cox." He spoke suddenly, and said my name exactly right.

My heart lurched, and the wound on the back of my neck throbbed faintly.

How did he know my name?

"Silver Moon Pack. Twenty years old. Wolfless. A few nights ago, on the full moon, Adrian Voss recognized you as his Mate at the awakening rite and then rejected you in front of everyone. The Mate Bond broke, and you were driven out of the Pack that same night."

Every sentence he spoke put another ache through me.

Those were the things I least wanted anyone to bring up.

He had dug up even the details of how I had been rejected and cast out of the territory, which meant he plainly knew more than that.

I pinched my own palm and forced myself to stay calm.

Brill, don't panic. At the very least, don't let him see anything wrong.

I took a deep breath and asked him, "You know even that?"

He stopped five or six paces from me and didn't come nearer. "It's normal for you to be afraid of me. I only want you to understand that I really do have information. At least for now, I have no intention of hurting you."

The unease in my chest kept growing, so I asked him straight out, "What do you want? Just say it."

There was that short laugh from under the cloak again. "Something you can't bear to lose."

I looked down at my torn clothes. I had nothing of value on me except the waterskin the white wolf had left behind and that piece of meat.

I felt over myself and found something hard against my chest, and I froze for a moment.

The day the Rogues attacked, my hand had closed around a broken bone knife in the rubble, and I had kept it hidden against my chest ever since.

"You've already thought of it," Elias said.

My mother died at the border and they never even found her body. The people in the Pack thought she was bad luck and threw out everything she owned, and I hid this bone knife away in the confusion.

I kept walking toward Graymist Pack. Even if I walked until I dropped dead, I shouldn't hand it over.

But then I thought of the white wolf, and I hesitated again.

What if I let the trail to the white wolf slip away just like that?

The scene of the white wolf saving me kept rising in my mind, and the way it had lowered its head and licked the back of my neck, that gentleness.

In the end, I took out the broken bone knife.

I closed my eyes, reached into my clothes, and found the two pieces of bone.

I'm sorry, Mother. It's because I'm useless. I couldn't think of any other way.

If you knew, would you blame me?

"Only this one piece," I said, and held out half the knife, my hand shaking without stopping. "I'm keeping the other half."

Elias reached a hand out from under the cloak and took it.

He looked at the place where the name was carved. "Mara Cox."

My eyes stung, and I forced it down. "Now tell me what you know about the white wolf."

He put the half knife away inside his cloak.

"As far as I know, the white wolf died out hundreds of years ago. The one you saw either shouldn't exist, or it comes from one of the more secretive Packs."

I held my breath. "Which Pack?"

"I don't know." He said it flatly. "I only say what I know. What I don't know, I don't say."

I bit my lip. "Then what else do you know?"

"I know where the answers are." He tilted his head north. "Blackridge Academy."

I looked where he had tilted his head.

"Every Pack record in the werewolf world is kept there. They've preserved most of the Pack archives going back hundreds of years, even for Packs that have died out."

"Over the past few years, more than one person has seen a white wolf in the woods around the Academy."

My heart gave a hard jolt. "Seen it?"

"People reported it. After that, the reports went nowhere."

"Who suppressed them?" I pressed.

Elias shook his head. "I have no proof. If you want to find out, go to the Academy and look at the records."

My breathing went uneven. That silver-white shape hadn't been a hallucination from the edge of death. It was real.

"Where is Blackridge Academy?" I asked.

"North. Over three ridges." He pointed north.

"They only take elite werewolves. More than half are Alpha heirs, and most of the rest are Beta and Gamma. Someone like you, with no Pack and no wolf, couldn't get through the front gate."

My hands clenched.

I was about to ask something else when he brought something out from under his cloak.

A dark wooden token, a little smaller than my palm, branded with a mark I couldn't read.

"Blackridge Academy holds one open trial every year. Whoever carries this can enter. It doesn't matter whether you have a wolf, and they don't ask about Pack."

I looked at the token and didn't take it. "That wasn't part of the deal we just made. If I take it, what else do I have to pay?"

He didn't answer my question. He just held the token out a little further. "Take it."

"Why are you helping me?" I asked again.

"Go, before the snow gets worse." And with that, he turned and walked up the slope.

"Elias Crowe!" I shouted after him.

He had taken my mother's bone knife, and now he was helping me get into the Academy, and he refused to say why.

This trade was probably not over.

I was starting to wonder whether the half knife was really all he wanted.

I tucked the token inside my collar and was just turning away when a faint sound of snow crunching came from behind me.

I whipped around. There was nothing below the slope but wind-driven snow.

When I looked down, a string of fresh boot prints had appeared in the lee of the rock, less than five paces from me.

The prints didn't lead in the direction Elias had gone.

Someone had been hiding nearby the whole time, and they had heard our trade.