Chapter 85 86
Beta Xander POV
The march began before dawn, when the mountains still held their breath and the mist clung low like a secret. I rode at the front of the column, horse’s flank slick beneath my palm, cloak pressed close to keep the chill from biting through bone. Three hundred wolves followed—warrior veterans, Alpha Gregor’s loyalists, and fighters from smaller packs who owed favors or blood. We were not an army in any formal sense; we were a hunting pack with torches and purpose and a single unspoken promise: bring them home.
My boots kept time against stirrups. My mind did not.
There had been an email from the king that morning—formal, glossy, and inconveniently helpful. His Majesty will send his contingent it read. The royal seal had been affixed with all the pomp required by court ceremony. Whoever had written the message had been careful, but the content had a smell I knew well: politics. The king’s men would arrive in a day, maybe two. That might help Prince Leon and Sugar—whoever had the power to count on royal troops had already proven they moved fast—but it wouldn’t save our Alpha and the female Dark Warrior on its own.
How the king had learned anything at all made my teeth grind. Signals between courts were supposed to be controlled, screened; the palace was a web of spies and counterspies. The queen could leak it for her reasons; the ASA could plant it; even the prince could move pieces behind the throne. I noted the details and shelved it. The question wasn’t who told the king. The question was what price would be paid for his involvement, and whether his troops would be more useful than they would be liability.
We rode in silence, that tight, sharpened quiet of wolves on a hunt. The ancient Fae, Barbie led us from the canopy—her small glow a pale, ridiculous beacon in that gray world. She had insisted on staying despite the near-disaster at the lake; I’d seen the set of her jaw when she spoke of Alpha Gregor and Marigold. There was steel in her sass tonight. For someone dressed like a glittering disaster, she was a force of nature.
“Keep formation,” I said finally, to the flankers and the scouts. “No lights. No whistles. If you draw the Black Fang and ASA together, we lose the cover.” My voice carried across the ranks, steady enough to cut through the soft clattering of rain on leather.
Barbie swooped lower, her wings beating silently. “Cover’s overrated,” she quipped, but her eyes—tiny and frantic—surveyed the tree line like a woman reading pages of doom and deciding which to burn first. “Also, if the fae wakes and decides it doesn’t like our shampoo choices, we’re all in trouble.”
We entered the valley like a shadow folding in on itself. The first signs were small—pale mushrooms clustered in impossible spirals on the trunks, their caps humming with a light that was not fire but memory. The air tasted metallic. The trees seemed to lean inward, listening. The ground occasionally flickered beneath the horses’ hooves, like old magic sluicing through stone.
“Fae residue,” Barbie said under her breath. “She’s near.”
That should have calmed me, but it didn’t. If the ancient Fae stirred, the balance of everything did not simply tip—it roared. The fae were old as bone, older than the first wolf hunters, and they did not wake for trifles. Their presence was not a blessing to be called on; it was a tide to be respected, feared, and, if it was on our side, earnestly thanked with a whole lot of wine and possibly a sacrifice of something frivolous. But I know, the Fae was about balance, and she could not directly turn the war towards whatever result she wanted and she could not directly intervene.
As we drew nearer to the ravine, the valley tightened; the cliffs closed in like the jaws of an enormous beast. I sent the scouts ahead in pairs—silent, masked with the damp and the smell of earth. I kept three guards with me: my right hand, Maro; an old wolf named Jerek who had survived an entire campaign on stubbornness and bullets; and Lys, who was good with maps and silence.
The first trap we saw bore the ASA’s signature: black nylon trip lines strung across animal trails, small boxes of metallic teeth set at ground-level to catch paws and hooves. Someone had come through this way recently and not carefully. That told me a story: ASA had been thorough, but the setup suggested speed. They’d moved too quickly, eager to intercept. That was both a good and a bad omen.
Then we heard it—too late and too close—the thin mechanical whine of a drone, cutting through leaves like a blade. I know about their guns with wolfbane and we all knew it was lethal to us.
“Scatter,” I ordered low. “Down!” We melted against rock and roots. Horses slid, men swore quietly. The drone swept the ravine, a jewel of ASA engineering with eyes like red suns. Its camera’s focus thudded between our still bodies and the ruin of an old watch post. It paused. For an excruciating second I could smell the bad mechanics: oil and wolfsbane residue.
The drone blinked, recalibrated, and then a sound crawled through the trees: distant, measured—the staccato drum of Black Fang boots. Communication chatter sliced through the heads set by me. Someone had heard something; the enemy was moving in force.
“Brace,” I said, and my voice became metal. The wolves rolled to make space, spears readied. I had no illusions about a clean win. The Black Fang we would likely face were not the mindless ferals from folklore; they were elite—trained, augmented by the Queen or by whoever fed them cursed blood and raw orders. ASA’s agents were not regular soldiers but technicians turned killers. Together they were a machine.
We moved on, closer, each step measured. The first sign of the Fae’s awakening rose as sound: a low chiming wind threaded through the ravine, like glass being stroked by distant fingers. The mushrooms at our boots flared and sang—notes that felt like memory, an ache tuned into music. The world shifted: shadows lengthened and withdrew as if bowing, small birds rose in a furious cloud, and the stones underfoot hummed.
Barbie flew ahead and called back, her voice sharp. “There—by the water. The ward stones. She’s awake enough to stir the ground, but not loose.” She pointed with a glittering hand. In the shallow basin, ancient standing stones had been newly disturbed, faint glyphs burning with a color I’d never seen in my lifetime—cold violet, like bruises made visible.
We held at the edge of that circle. The air felt thin, charged with a truth beyond politics and power. I felt the raw magic prick my skin, like pins, and somewhere in my chest a wolf I did not own answered. It was not Alpha Gregor’s call; it was something older and slower, the heartbeat of a world that had watched empires rise and drown.
“Keep your distance,” I said quietly. “No one steps into the ring unless they have to.” My words were almost a prayer. The pack settled, eyes down, breaths measured. Even the brave ones kept a hand off their blades.
Barbie hovered, and for a sliver of a second she looked little—exhausted and human with too-old eyes. “She’s not a chair you can move,” she whispered. “She’s the furniture of the world, and you don’t sit without permission.”
Permission or not, we had to try. For Alpha Gregor, for Marigold, for Prince Leon and Sugar who might still be breathing in some cold cell: we were their gamble, crude and dangerous. The king’s troops might show; ASA might be a day ahead. The Black Fang would not wait for epiphanies.
I touched the hilt of my blade and felt the weight of history—the scars stitched into it, the names it had answered. “Ready?” I asked, to the few who needed the ask while the rest of my men shifted into their wolves.
“What other choice?” Maro said, voice calm and certain.
“Not many,” Jerek finished.
We moved then, a controlled surge down into the ravine where the first enemy scouts began to appear like wounds in the fog. The taste of wolfsbane was in the air. The Fae’s song swelled behind us—an undercurrent that made my joints ache and my mouth taste of iron—and I wondered how close to right we were. How many things could awaken and still choose our side?
If the ancient one truly rose on our behalf, it would change the rules. If she did not, we would die like every other noble goddamn thing that tried to bend the world for a cause.
Either way, the valley would not forget the sound of our march. And neither would I.