It took two weeks to piece together, working through Hollowmere's sparse records and Corvin's reluctant, grief-worn memory, the story that had calcified, over three decades, into an unquestioned truth.
There had been three deaths, in a single difficult year — two young wolves and one older one, all within eight months of each other, all sudden, all unexplained by anything Hollowmere's modest healer at the time had understood. In the absence of any clear medical explanation, and in the specific desperate need of a grieving community to find some reason, some pattern, some way to prevent it from happening again, someone had suggested — quietly, not as accusation, just as a frightened guess — that the deaths might be connected to bloodline activation. That something in the three wolves' bloo
