Chapter 107
Chapter 107
KAEL
Consciousness is like a sledgehammer to the cranium, each pulse of awareness washing new waves of pain over us. I taste blood and ash in my mouth, and trying to get up is like moving mountains with muscle, all of mine screaming in protest.
"Alpha?" The voice is underwater, garbled and faint.
I pry open my eyes, instantly regretting it, as smoke and rock slam into my sight. Above me, mangled rebar extends at impossible angles and the air is a heavy haze of the acrid reek of explosives.
"Kael, thank the moon you survived." Lukas steps in front of me, his face painted with blood and grime. "We need to move. Now."
"How many?" Idrive rasp and battle to sit up, all despite the objection from my bruised figure.
“Seven confirmed alive, us included. Vance is awake, albeit badly injured. Merrick...” Lukas shakes his head grimly. "We lost too many, Alpha."
The pain hits me as a blast, as another explosion. Men of honor, of loyalty, dead because I had led them to Viper's trap. The burden of leadership has never been heavier than it is right now.
"The mutants?"
"Still active. They’re picking through the carnage, searching for survivors. Lukas lifts me up, keeping me on my feet when I sway precariously. “We have perhaps ten minutes before they locate us.”
The charred remains of the warehouse burn around us, unnatural flames devouring everything they come in contact with. I can hear the unearthly moans of the stronger werewolves in the distance as they search out their next prey.
'Get those that can walk,'" I command, placing my weight experimentally on legs that have turned to water. "We're getting out of here."
“Alpha, you can barely stand.” Maybe we should—"
"That's an order, Lukas."
He nods grudgingly and heads off to rally our wildly dispersed ranks. I consider the precious moments like gold, to steady myself when the pain would sweep me along. My pack needs me. Raven needs me.
The thought of my mate and a shock jolts through our shared bond, nearly making me trip with the power of it. Something's wrong. So it’s not just the standard risk of where we are but something essential has shifted in our relationship.
"Alpha!" Vance hobbles toward me, one arm dangling limp at his side. “We’ve got something that you should see.”
He takes me to a portion of rubble where the concrete has crumbled, not from the explosion but from something else. Hand-chiseled on the ground between them in shaky, fervent scrawl, letters spell out a message that chills me to the bone.
RAVEN - CAVE NORTH - TRAP
"Jonah", I breathe, his blade work undeniable even in its last, frantic iteration.
“We found his body 20 feet from here,” Vance whispers. "His final moments must have been spent warning us."
The boy who had betrayed Viper, who had been broken to the Order’s cruelty, died trying to save the woman that I love. And his sacrifice requires that I honor it with all I have, even if that means everything.
“He knew where Darian took her,” I realize. "And he knew it was a trap."
“We can’t just bust in there, not with what we've got left of our forces,” Lukas counters, walking back over to us flanked by four other survivors. “We need help, a plan —”
“We don’t have time for one or the other.” The bond with Raven throbs anew, stronger, and with a power that is at once familiar but utterly alien. ” There’s something happening to her. Something to do with her abilities.”
Late at night the survivors of the plane crash hear a chilling wail coming from deep within the wreckage, then another, and then another. The mutants have smelled us.
"Run," I command, and through the flames we stagger out from the inferno.
The improved werewolves pursue tirelessly, an un-natural stamina allowing them to keep pace where normal wolves would drop dead. We’re just a step in front of them, bounding over the carnage and picking our way through the bone of the warehouse complex.
“This way,” Vance pants, indicating a hole in the outer wall that the blast has made an escape route.
We fall out the doorway and into the woods below, but I can still hear our pursuers on our tails. The quality of their howling has changed now—becoming the sound that predators make when they have finally picked up the scent of their prey.
“We’re not going to outstrip them,” one of the warriors that remains pants.
“We don’t need to out-run them,” I say to him, scanning the tree line up ahead. “We simply have to get to higher ground.”
It is the longest twenty minutes of my life. We push our way through to cover, the thick forest trying to mislead our trail from the air on the way back, to no avail; the mutants track us by more than smell, it seems. They’re pursuing something more fundamental, more primordial.
At last we come to a rocky ridge overlooking the valley below. In the distance I can see the fires burning from the warehouse we ran from, and beyond…
“North,” I whisper, reading Jonah’s last text with my eyes.
To the north, the mountain range rises up in jagged teeth into the star littered sky, and somewhere between those peaks, a fine line of smoke ascends into the night. Not the black smoke of the end of something, but the gray smoke of an isolated fire. A campfire maybe or torches in a cave system.
“That’s where she’s at,” I say to my guys. “That’s where Darian has her.”
But even now, as I speak, I can feel it in my heightened senses, something that makes my heart drop. There was movement in the forest below, lots of it. Dark forms moving through the trees, like water, and they all seemed to be going the same way.
“Call in reinforcements,” Vance states, his eyes sharp as his own view follows its progress. "Dozens of them.”
The magnitude of what we are up against is evident. Even suppose we could get to Raven before the reinforcements, we should find ourselves in a trap from which we couldn't escape. Seven damaged warriors facing an army.
“We have to try,” I reply, even though the alternative is unimaginable.
"Alpha," Lukas rests his hand on my shoulder. "This is suicide. We have to fight our way back, regroup with what’s left of the pack—”
“She’s your mate, there’s no pack without her,” I interrupted. "There is no me without her."
The bond hammers once more; so hard I stagger this time. But I’m not feeling pain through the connection — I’m feeling power. Rough, unbridled, awesome power that feels like it’s breaking the metaphysical face of reality.
And below that power, something else. Something that takes my breath away and makes my heart skip some, and then.
"What is it?" Vance looks up at my face.
At first I can’t even form the words. The knowledge is too big, too life-altering to take in all at once. I don't understand what's happening between us, but I'm a part of him and he is a part of me, and in our connection I don't feel just Raven, I feel something else. Something further down, something more recent, but already giving out an energy wavelength all its own.
"She's in the family way," I mutter, so softly I can hardly even hear the words myself and I have werewolf super hearing.
"What?"
"Raven. She's carrying our child." What I know fills me with delight so deep it pushes away almost all other feeling. That’s why her powers have been up and down. That’s why the bond feels different.”
The consequences landed like a punch to the face. Our child, born of love yet within the reach of prophesy, one whose powers were apparent even in the womb. The “Moon’s Daughter” and “Storm’s Heir” described in the ancient tome hadn’t been Raven and me, they had been referring to our child.
"A baby?" Vance’s voice is filled with awe. "But if Darian realizes—"
“That’s how he will fulfill the prophecy in its darkest sense,” I conclude grimly. "A child of both bloodlines, one stronger than anything ever know, either bringing our world together or tearing it down completely."
I view the smoke darkening over the northern mountains and it seems that Raven's arm is still rising. She is over the edge now, strung out by fear, driven by desperation.
“We have to find her somehow,” I say, but as I speak a sight comes into view that fills me with a mortal terror.
More of the armed Order men are streaming out of the woods but these aren’t making their way north toward the caves. They are going up the ridge, right toward us. We've been ratted out.
“Alpha,” Lukas the says, urgent, “we’ve got company.”
The trap that Jonah died trying to warn us about was not waiting in the caves for us. It was all over, a network of foes Darian had been busy spinning together for months. And now, with Raven pregnant and losing her powers, losing control of powers she doesn't understand, with our child already a target before it even takes it first breath, I realize the real extent of what we're up against."
It’s not just the prophecy now. It’s about the future of a whole species, and that future is lying in the uterus of the woman I love and now with a madman in a cave who would use our child to toast the world.
The Order forces are approaching the base of our ridge and start climbing at odd speeds, not like normal human beings… And before we know it they are climbing up here. Behind them the mutants from the warehouse have at last begun to perceive their escape and their eyes glow even through the night gloom.
“They knew we would come here,” I realize in mounting horror. “This ridge, this lookout—Darian wanted us to come here. He wanted us to see the smoke, to know where Raven is, because he knows that no matter how long the odds are, I’ll find her.’
“It’s a trap within a trap,” Vance tells him grimly.
Through the bond, then, Raven's power roars, and I feel our unborn child stir, join its so-young powers to its mother's, and paint the northern heavens with aurora.
Darian has what he needs now: the Moon’s Daughter, the Storm’s Heir and the child who is prophecy and possibility. All he requires is for me to step into his trap—behind love and desperate to save the two most precious people in my world.
The Order’s reached halfway up the ridge, now, and their inhuman war-cries are ringing through the night. In minutes it will reach us, and any hope of escape will be gone forever.
Even as I watch that blinding light ripple across the northern peaks, even as my mate and child call to me through bonds stronger than the blood that ties me to them, I know it was never a choice at all.
“For the pack,” I mutter, counting my guns.
“For the pack.” the men who fight for me reply, a steady intonation of voices without hope.
And then, as our first enemy rises up over the ridge, and the night erupts in a roar of violence and death, I feel one more tug of the bond from Raven—a reminder that no matter what happens next, our unborn child will have a world worth fighting for.