Page 56 of The Chosen Fae

Stone wasn't for it at all, but he did wonder what Rune had in mind. She was always thinking out of the box. But sometimes, she seemed to do something that was so surprising, and it worked, that he wondered if maybe she was right about this.

"Why?" Lolita ate a scallop.

"I don't know. To throw them off, maybe? To empower one of them for a change? To get them off our backs so they tear into each other instead? Though I guess that kind of negates the effect of us getting them all together."

Stone thought about it as he continued to enjoy his meal. "Let's see what the next challenge is, and then we can decide."

"That sounds good to me." Rune finished the last of her spaghetti.

They glanced at Lolita. She shrugged. "Yeah, count me in. They're playing games this evening. They have a featured movie on. Are you going to do anything like that?"

"Not me," Rune said. "I might go on a hike in the woods."

Lolita sighed. "Okay, I'm going to the movie."

"I'm going to clean my sword and get some practice in." Stone glanced at Rune. "Be careful. Watch your surroundings."

"I will."

They practically scraped their plates clean.

"I wish we could win another challenge and eat like this again," Rune said.

16

Stone didn't know what to think, but all he cared about was protecting Rune. He guessed he'd always felt that way about her from the first time she'd seen him and given him a love bite. It was the only way he could look at it. She was beautiful, smart, and just his kind of wolf.

He didn't really care about being a pack leader, though he still wanted to win against the others. It was just his competitive nature.

He thought Rune was the same way.

"I can't believe you were nearly dead when you were born, you were finally abandoned, and you ended up here," Vesper said, learning Stone's secret as they walked into the weapons room.

As if it was no big deal, Stone shrugged. "We all have to start some way."

"You're not going to win." Vesper sounded so sure of himself.

Stone always loved a dare—Rune was always daring him to catch more fish than her or run or swim faster—and he figured he could win against Vesper even if Stone didn't beat anyone else out. He was eager to finish him off.

"I think you might be missing a few brain cells," Stone said, smiling, since he and Rune had already won most of the challenges.

The next day, fae competitors were dropped off on a field marked by evenly spaced rolls of hay. The field was a patchwork of golden cylinders, a maze of uniform shapes that stretched to the horizon. They looked to be six feet tall and around five feet in diameter. This was going to be some kind of a challenge.

The Game Master said, "A wolf totem is buried in a haystack in the Haystack Challenge. One hundred rolls of hay are here to search, and there is only one totem to find. The first to find it wins. You have twenty-four hours to locate it. Since you're wolves, you can see at night, so you won't have any trouble looking for it after dark if you're all still out here."

"Is it all right to be a wolf to find it?" Caspian asked.

"Yes," the Game Master said. "Wolf or fae is fine."

The field was quiet in the way open spaces always are—wind moving through dry stalks near the baled hay with a low, papery rustle that made it hard to hear anything approaching. A red barn was off in the distance, cattle in a fenced-in field, and a forest surrounding the whole area.

A farmer was out feeding his chickens and paused to watch the fae gathered at the beginning of the bales of hay. Stone figured the Game Master had paid him to use the hay for this competition, and then the farm would have to use a round baler to create the round bales of hay again.

“What are you going to do?” Stone asked Rune.

"I don't know; I might switch back and forth. I could probably use my fae form to climb on top first, then pull off the hay, and when it is flatter, dig as a wolf. I think we'll need to start at the top of them."

"That sounds like a good plan." He would have done that if he hadn't asked Rune first.