Page 90 of The SnowFang Secret


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And given how I’d found the thing, one should not rule out “magical enchanted holy relic.”

Werewolf pups were warned about handling gold, as said gold was usually not pure gold, but a gold alloy. Often, an alloy containing silver. We got taught to look for warning signs. Bright or white-ish gold? Probably a high silver content. Cheap gold? Alloy. Reddish gold? Probably a copper alloy, but may still contain silver.

For the same reason, we were told tonever evereat gold flakes, or any food that had been decorated with any sort of metallicanything. Edible gold could (and usually did) contain some percentage of silver, with the cheap stuff being up to ten percent silver. More than enough to give a wolf hellacious food poisoning and burn ulcers throughout the digestive tract, and things went downhill from there depending on how much got ingested. Not exactly a pleasant rest of your life.

This particular gold looked very bright, so that suggested high silver content.

I pushed my pinky into the hinge, which was the biggest exposed piece of gold. Then sat and stared at the wall and wriggled my toes.

It started to sting almost immediately. But not in the way I was used to silver stinging, although itdidfeel like a silver burn. Just… different.

I lifted my pinky. Pad of my pinky now branded with the hinge. It stung, and while I watched, the edge of the skin around the burn charred, turned black, and died. But it was like frostbite, not a heat-burn, and didn’t go deep. Usually silver kept burning and burning its way through the layers.

I wriggled my finger and waited for the stinging pain of the silver traveling through my bloodstream, but that didn’t happen either.

So what the fuck was this thing? Water from the Font? Liquified star? A cosmic level? Divine candy with a liquid center? Gaia’s bath water?

Accounts of jewels and crystals existed in the Collections as records of scuffles, challenges, treaties, and brideprices, and I’d read a half millennia worth, because they’d usually been extremely entertaining, with pride or contempt oozing from under the ink. But innoneof those records, had I ever encountered anything close to a jewel, crystal, gemstone, or rock containing a glowing liquid.

Granted: the Collections at that point had been challenging because of assorted language issues. A number of the accounts were translations from the local language of the pack into the language of the Chronicler serving at that time. So the original translations of the original requests were primarily Old Norse and Latin, with the English and Danish translations coming much later when the Chroniclers realized Old Norse and Latin were falling out of common usage. Similar updates had happened (according to my father) every few centuries for as far back as our history went. The translations weren’t always complete, they were frequently partial for run of the mill nothing-to-see-here transactional records. It was the juicy ones that got the attention, and deciding what tea was best spilled for future generations was a Chronicler’s job.

But there weremoreCollections, stretching back (supposedly) over two thousand years, stored in that doomsday vault in Norway. The super-secret doomsday vault I wasn’t supposed to know about, even as an Apprentice.

Granted, anything I might find wouldn’t be in English, or at least not a version of English I could read, and doubtful my kindergarten-level Latin or Old Norse would be sufficient either.

I pivoted on my stool. “MaryAnne.”

She looked up from her work. After a second, she sighed. “Whatnow?”

Good to know I was still upending the established order of things. “I want to go to the Archives.”

“You’reinthe Archives.”

“Norway, MaryAnne.Norway.”

She dropped her pen and jumped out of her chair. “Norway?”

“I know about them,” I said before she could choke out a denial. “Dad told me.”

MaryAnne gasped like a fish. “He didwhat?”

I shrugged.

“How long have youknown?”

What difference did it make? “About four years. One tends to remember when their father threatens to kill them. And means it. But.” I held up the box. “This isn’t in any of the Collections I’ve read. So time to see the older ones.”

She stared at me, smelling ofwhy the fuck meregret.

“I figured I’d let you make the request, but if you’d rather watch me throw my father’s legacy under the bear, pull up a seat.” I was hunting holy secrets. Gloves were off, claws were out.

She recovered enough to say, “And let them thinkItold you, or it wasmyidea? No, we can put that carcass right in front of Rodero.”

“Fine by me.”

Her expression and scent got a little tighter and sharper. “You don’t care about preserving his legacy?”

What a truly odd question to ask. “His legacy is Sterling’s legitimacy and not letting this species breed itself into a corner. Of course I care about it.”

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