109

109

KAEL

The first wave of Order troops crashes down on us like a weather front, all claws and snarling and inhuman quickness. I fight with desperate fury, every blow driven by the awareness that in some part of these mountains, my mate and unborn child are depending on me to survive.

"Left flank!" I bellow, deflecting a sword that would have decapitated Vance. "Watch your left!"

My men remaining to me - six in all, now that Thompson died at the claws of a mutie - fight as cornered wolves. The rocky ground proves good for us, the enemy only capable of coming at us from a few angles, but there are too many of them.

“Alpha, I don’t know how long we can keep this position!” That’s Lukas yelling from behind a boulder, taking out Cardboard Stand-Ups with a rifle from long distance. "We need to move!"

“These b—- don’t die easy,” Merrick pants, holding out a wounded arm. "What the hell are they?"

"Aboms," I answer, eyes searching for the next enemy. "Offspring of the Order's "experiments".

Yet as I speak, I smell something in the air that chills my blood. A scent that does not exist, that is only in my memories I left recently in my heart.

“Aeliana,” I whisper, the word slipping like moisture through my lips before I can catch it.

"What?" "Reload!" Lukas shouts. "What did you say?"
I don’t respond because I can’t. The smell gets stronger, wafted by the night air, and with something that sounds close to… singing. A tune that exists in my memory of lazy afternoons and quiet evenings, from a life that seems to belong to someone that I no longer am.

Another wave of enemies surges over the ridge, and we plunge back into the fray. But the distraction costs us. I get a brief scene of him being knocked down by three mutants, followed by a blood-curdling scream, cut off by claw.

"Fall back!" I order, as if there’s anywhere to get to. "Defensive positions!"

We have to fall back to a group of bigger boulders that afford better cover, but I can tell from their faces how tired my men are. We have been battling for what seems like hours and bullets are in short supply.

"Alpha," Vance is low and panting beside me as we take cover. I make at least thirty more climbing that east slope. We're not going to make it."

Through the link I can feel Raven's horror rise and, with it, the visions press—piercing visions, somehow pressing through the bond. I see her in chains once more, see Order agents encircling her, see a silver-haired woman who’s uncannily familiar.

But the next image is the one that makes my heart stop. Raven is pregnant. Announcement It’s only four weeks since Liv was officially pregnant and it already shows: she cradles her bump protectively, which is rounded and clearly gravid, it’s no bigger than a four month pregnancy.

“The ritual,” I whisper, realization washing over me like cold water. “They are going to use our child in some sort of a ritual.”

"What ritual?" Lukas inquires, but before I have a chance to respond, all of that changes.

The attacking force then abruptly reverses course and pulls back down the slope with military-like speed. In moments the ridge is silent, apart from our ragged breathing.
"Why did they stop?" Merrick whispers.

The response is a slow, measured set of footsteps. Someone is ascending the ridge alone, looking with assured stride. The smell I had smelled earlier was stronger now and impossible and heartbreaking and wrong.

“Stay down,” I tell my men, but I get up to my feet myself, and my heart’s thumping against my ribs.

She comes to the edge of the ridge like a spirit taking shape. Tall and graceful, with that long, golden hair I used to love to run my fingers through so many nights. But there’s now a grayish pallor to her skin, and when she raises her head, her eyes are agleam with eerie, blue light.

Aeliana's voice comes from behind the dome. "Did you miss me?"

The world appears to be tilted on its axis. One of my men behind me emits a sound of disbelief, but my eyes can’t pull away from the woman who was supposed to be dead.

“It can’t be him,” Vance whispers. "She died. We buried her."

"You buried what remained," Aeliana corrects, approaching with smooth movements. “But the Order also has ways of... keeping... what they like.

She resembles her old self, but for the slight wrongness that pours from her like the heat of fever. It all seems too rehearsed, her smile too perfect, her eyes too bright.

"What did they do to you?" I whisper.

“They gave me a thing to do,” she says. "They showed me what I could be, if I didn't feel such useless emotions like love and loyalty. “They taught me that power is the only truth that makes sense.”

"You're not her," I beg him. You’re some kind of copy, or some kind of —”

I am who I always was, others be damned, Kael. Just... improved." She cocks her head, and looks at me with those too-bright eyes. “Do you know what I first recalled when they baited me back? It was you with another woman. Your precious Raven."

The way she says this makes my flesh crawl. Her voice is full of nothing but contempt and hunger.

“The Order, you know, showed me everything. How quickly you forgot me. How quickly you moved on to someone new. How did you give her the life that should have been mine.”

"Aeliana, please—"

"Please what?" It is that breaking-glass laugh of hers. "Forgive you for replacing me? You chose a child over the woman that loved you first?

I hear Lukas behind me, the sound of his shifting, probably positioning for a shot. But I cannot allow him to fire, not yet. A part of me still hopes this nightmare can be reversed, and with it, the killing can stop.

“You used to love me, too,” I plead. “I know there’s still a little bit of that in you.

“Love,” she says the word as if it leaves a bitter taste in her mouth. "Such a human concept. So limiting. So... weak."

She lifts her hand and I get a glimpse of something that looks like metal and is sharp in place of fingernails. Angel technology fused with deviant flesh.

“I do remember I loved you,” she adds, speaking conversationally. “But also, I remember the pain of watching you look at something else. The Order made me realize that pain was a gift--It made me see you for what you really are."

"And what's that?"

"A traitorous imbecile who smashes lust with love, and duty with devotion." Her smile turns predatory. "But don't worry. That, after tonight, you don’t have to pick one of us anymore.”

She’s absolutely fast as hell, crossing the space between us in a flash. I manage to get my blade up just in time to block her strike, which reverberates up my arm.

"Aeliana, stop this!"

“My name,” she growls, with a predatory precision that seems questionably human, “is Venom. Aeliana died when the day you left her to chase after that little girl.

My blades clash and clash with hers but she is quicker than any natural werewolf could be. The Order did something to her because it gave her abilities well beyond what was considered normal.

“She’s with child,” I gasp, as if to tap whatever humanity remains in her. "Raven is carrying my child."

For a moment, something passes through her surgically augmented face. Pain, maybe, or recognition. But then it disappears, replaced with a coldness beyond that.

“I do,” she says, and plunges her blade toward my heart. "That's why I'm here. The Order wants that baby, and you're the only thing in their way.

I parry the blow, but just. Behind me I can hear my men fighting new enemies - more Order troops have spilled over the crest of the hill while Aeliana kept me busy.

"Lukas!" I shout over my shoulder, and when I dare to look back, I see what makes my blood run cold.

Lukas is standing a few feet behind Merrick, wielding his knife, fighting something, but it isn't the Order soldiers. He's watching them systematically squeezing in on my guys.
"Lukas, what are you—"

The blade slips between Merrick's ribs before I can even speak it. Shock and betrayal fill my betas eyes as he topples over, echoing crimson against the stones.

"Apologies Alpha," says Lukas, emotionless. “Yet the Order pays better than loyalty.

The range of betrayal lands on me like a punch. Lukas has been at my side for three years. I had trusted him with my life, secrets and strategies of the pack, but now... How long has he been passing information to the toff side?
“You brought us into the warehouse trap,” I realize.

"Among other things, yes." He casually cleans his cutlass of Merrick's blood. “You didn’t think it was an accident they always knew where you were going to be, did you?

While I’m distracted, Aeliana takes advantage and hits me in a slice across my chest. The pain pulls me back into the present danger, but now, I’m fighting on two fronts—the woman I used to love and the man I thought I could trust.
“This is the end, Kael," Aeliana says as she uses the added fury to strike at him. "Betrayed by your friends, abandoned by your allies, dying in a world of nothing while your precious mate births the weapon that will annihilate everything you held dear!"

“Not if I get you killed first,” I growl, discovering depths of resolve I never believed I possessed.

"You can't win," Aeliana taunts, and her blade draws another line of red across his chest. I’m everything you have been and better. Faster. Stronger. I could do it without the weakness of emotion to hinder me.”

“That’s why I’m going to win, IDIOT,” I answer, and throw all I’ve got into a single, perfect blow.

My blade slips through the crack in her armor, slips between her ribs and slices through the heart My hands once held. She stumbles, blue light draining from her eyes and, for a moment, she looks like herself once more.

“Kael,” she whispers, and there is a pained note in her voice now. Real agony this time, not the artificial chilliness of her enhanced condition. "I... I remember now. I remember loving you."

“I did love you,” I tell her, catching the weight of her as she tumbles. “I never fell out of love with what we had.”

” And with that, her body starts to dissipate. "Protect your child. The Order…they are planning…worse than you think.

And then she’s gone, disintegrating into ash that the wind blows across the ridge.

The fight goes on around me, but Order is withdrawing yet again. They received what they were looking for — proof that I am killable, that I can be hurt, that the woman I loved was a weapon that could be used against me.

"Alpha!" Vance calls out. "Lukas is getting away!"

I look and my former beta is heading down the east side of the slope, which is to say back to report to his real bosses. Half of me has an overwhelming urge to chase him, to make him pay for my brother's death and for what he did. But over the bond, I sense another surge from Raven, this one tinted with despair.

"Let him go," I decide. "We have bigger problems."

There were four of us in my original party of rescuers. Three men versus an army, rushing toward a trap that only grows deadlier by the hour.

But as I gaze north to the mountains, to where Raven waits, to where our child is even now growing in the crucible of prophecy and insanity, I know there was never a true decision to be made.

“For the pack,” I say softly, I pick up my other remaining arms.

“For the pack,” Vance and the warrior left say.

And then, as the upgraded mutants start howling off in the distance and Order forces prepare for yet another charge, I begin the final stretch of a quest that may save everything I hold dear, but at the same time, could very well destroy us in the process.