Chapter 137
Elara's POV
I stood at the edge of the clearing, watching Kress herd the students back toward the trail. Their voices faded into the dense forest, swallowed by layers of pine and shadow. Greg kept looking back, his face tight with questions he wouldn't get answered. Tina leaned heavily on Linda, both of them still trembling from what they'd seen. Sass walked with one hand cradled against his chest—the wrist I'd twisted—his eyes finding mine one last time before the trees blocked him from view.
Only Luke had said anything resembling kindness. "Be careful." Two words, quiet and genuine, before Kress pulled him along.
I waited. Counted heartbeats. Listened.
The forest had its own rhythm—wind through branches, distant bird calls, the rustle of small animals in the underbrush. I filtered through each sound, cataloging, dismissing. Kress's group moved northeast, their footsteps crunching over fallen leaves and snapping twigs. Heavy. Obvious. Exactly what you'd expect from frightened college students and one frustrated guide.
Thirty seconds. A minute. Two.
The sounds faded completely.
I turned and walked toward the cluster of boulders where Cole waited.
---
He'd positioned the bound man against a thick pine trunk, rope wrapped professionally around his torso and arms. The stranger's face was a mess—split lip, swelling around one eye, nose crusted with dried blood. His earlier defiance had crumbled into something rawer. Fear mixed with stubborn hatred, the kind that came from knowing you'd already lost but refusing to admit it.
Cole straightened when I approached, his expression unreadable.
"Well?" I kept my voice low.
"Forest core is definitely Wild Hunt territory." Cole's tone was flat, matter-of-fact. "He confirmed it. Or close enough."
I looked at the bound man. His yellow eyes tracked me, wary and resentful.
"But he's nobody," Cole continued. "Outer perimeter patrol. Low-level grunt. Doesn't know shit about their actual operations."
"Perfect." I crouched down, bringing myself eye-level with the stranger. "Let's talk about Lynette."
The man's jaw tightened. He tried to look away, but I shifted, forcing him to meet my gaze.
"A woman named Lynette," I said slowly. "What did your people do to her?"
Silence.
I didn't move. Didn't blink. Just waited.
He lasted maybe ten seconds before his resolve cracked. "I don't—" A cough interrupted him. He spat blood onto the pine needles. "I patrol the outer zones. I don't know what happens in the core."
"Bullshit." My voice stayed calm. Ice-cold calm. "You know something. Tell me."
Another pause. Longer this time. I could see him weighing options—loyalty to Wild Hunt versus whatever Cole had already done to extract information.
"A few days ago," he finally muttered. "My captain mentioned... they were driving some woman deeper into the territory. Silver-white wolf. Fast. They said she'd been running for days."
My chest tightened. Silver-white. That was Lynette's wolf form—my old body.
"What else?" I pressed.
"That's all I heard. They don't tell us much. Just said to watch for her if she doubled back." He coughed again. "But she won't. Not where they're taking her."
The world tilted.
Force. Into the core zone.
Not captured by accident. Not stumbled into danger. Deliberately driven into a trap.
I felt my hands curl into fists, nails biting into my palms. The urge to grab this man by the throat and shake more answers out of him surged hot and violent through my chest. But that wouldn't help. He'd already said he didn't know details. Hurting him more would just waste time.
"When?" The word came out harder than I intended.
"I—I don't know exactly. Three or four days ago? Maybe less?" He was talking faster now, eager to give me something, anything. "I've been on perimeter duty. Haven't been back to the main camp. I swear I don't know what happened after they took her in."
Cole's hand appeared on my shoulder. Steady. Grounding.
I took a breath. Let it out slow.
"He's telling the truth," Cole said quietly. "About this part, at least. He's too low in the chain to know operational details."
I stood, stepping back from the bound man. My mind was already racing ahead—Lynette, somewhere in that forest core, trapped or hurt or worse. And Wild Hunt knew exactly where she was.
"We need to move," I said.
Cole nodded. He pulled a small glass vial from his pack—dark liquid inside, almost black. "This'll keep him out for six hours. Maybe more."
He soaked a strip of cloth with the contents, then pressed it firmly over the man's nose and mouth. The stranger struggled for maybe three seconds before his eyes rolled back and his body went limp against the ropes.
Cole checked the bindings one more time, testing each knot with professional efficiency. "He's not going anywhere."
"Good."
I turned my attention to the folded map Kress had given me before leaving. I spread it across a flat boulder, weighing down the corners with stones. The paper was worn, creased from years of use, covered in Kress's cramped handwriting and careful notations.
Most of the outer forest was marked in detail—trails, landmarks, elevation changes. But the center... the center was almost blank. Just a rough circle with a few question marks and the words "UNEXPLORED - DANGEROUS" scrawled across it.
Cole leaned over my shoulder, studying the routes Kress had sketched leading toward that blank zone.
"Three main approaches," he said, tracing them with one finger. "North path follows the ridge. Fast, but exposed. West route cuts through dense undergrowth—slow going, lots of cover. And this one..." He tapped the third line. "Follows the river valley. Thick canopy, natural concealment."
I followed his finger along the winding blue line representing the river. The route curved through the heaviest forest coverage, staying low in the terrain where trees would be oldest and thickest.
"River valley," I decided. "If Wild Hunt is confident enough to lure someone into their core territory, they'll have sentries on the obvious paths. We need to stay hidden."
"Agreed." Cole started refolding the map. "We'll need to move carefully once we're deeper in. If they're holding Lynette, they'll have patrols."
"They'll have more than patrols." I checked my knife, making sure it sat secure in its sheath. "They'll have traps. Alarms. Probably some kind of perimeter warning system."
"You think they're that organized?"
"Wild Hunt doesn't survive this long by being sloppy." I met his eyes. "They're professional killers. We treat them like it."
Cole's expression didn't change, but something shifted in his posture. Recognition. He'd seen me like this before—not Elara Grey, high school student. Lynette. The Alpha who'd commanded a territory in the frozen north.
"Then we'd better get moving," he said.