Chapter 87: Obedience and Fire

Chapter 87: Obedience and Fire
The cold deepened as we pushed into the hills.

Frost coated the pine needles like glass dust, and the trail narrowed until we were moving single file, boots crunching on frozen leaves, breath white in the air. The patrol had split just after the first ridge. Roran took point with Kalen and a pair of older scouts. I was assigned to the center flank with a younger wolf named Corren and a silent brute named Thatch.

Neither of them spoke to me.

Which was fine. I didn’t need conversation. I needed to listen.

Every snap of twig, every shift in scent. I mapped the silence like it was a language I used to speak and was trying to remember.

We reached a clearing by midday. The trees opened into a bowl of churned mud, long-frozen, with what looked like drag marks scored deep into the earth. Sorren’s blood, still dark and half-frozen, trailed into the trees.

We were close.

Roran signaled a halt. He scanned the perimeter, eyes sharp. Every muscle in his body coiled like a drawn bowstring.

He turned back to us. “Fan out,” he said. “Fifteen paces between you. We move forward. Quiet.”

We obeyed.

The line moved like a silent wave through the underbrush. Wind hissed through the branches. A raven croaked high above, circling once before vanishing into the clouds.

I moved carefully, senses wide open.

Something shifted. A scent on the wind. Burned wood and fur. Not smoke. Not blood. Wrong.

“Left,” I murmured, just loud enough for Corren.

He looked over, annoyed. “Stick to your line.”

“I smell—”

A scream tore through the forest.

Not human. Not wolf. Something higher pitched. Twisted.

Then movement—explosive and fast. A figure burst from the underbrush, lunging for Corren. He didn’t even have time to shift. The creature was on him, teeth flashing, hands clawed.

I didn’t think. I just moved.

I slammed into the thing from the side, catching it mid-air. We hit the ground hard. My ribs screamed. I rolled, came up on one knee, and drew the dagger from my boot. The creature snarled—half-wolf, but too thin, eyes wild and glazed with some sickness.

Feral.

I drove the blade into its thigh. It shrieked and twisted, swiping claws at my face. I ducked, yanked the blade free, and jammed it under its ribs. It went still.

Corren scrambled to his feet, wide-eyed. “What the fuck was that?”

“Quiet,” I hissed. “There could be more.”

Behind us, the rest of the group came crashing through the trees.

Roran reached us first. His eyes locked on the body, then me, then Corren.

“What happened?” he demanded.

“She saved me,” Corren said, still breathless. “I didn’t see it coming. She did.”

Roran’s stare shifted to me. “You broke formation.”

“I broke a feral’s face.”

“You disobeyed a direct order.”

I straightened, blood still dripping from the dagger. “And I’d do it again.”

Roran’s jaw clenched. “You were told to stay in line. Do not speak. Do not move without instruction.”

“If I hadn’t moved, he’d be dead.”

“That wasn’t your call.”

I stepped closer, not caring who was watching. “You want obedience. I get that. But if following orders means watching someone die when I could’ve stopped it, then no, I won’t fall in line like a soldier. I’m not your wolf.”

His eyes burned into mine. “No. You’re not. And that’s the problem.”

Something sharp passed between us then. Not just anger. Not just pride.

Heat.

I saw it in the way his throat worked, the slight flare of his nostrils, the pulse at his neck.

He turned away.

“Secure the area,” he snapped at the others. “Double perimeter. No one walks alone.”

The team scattered.

Roran stalked away from me, boots grinding into the frozen ground.

I stayed where I was.

Kalen approached a moment later, eyes amused. “You really like poking bears, don’t you?”

I wiped my blade on the grass. “He needed to hear it.”

“He’s not used to being questioned. Not out here.”

“Well, maybe he should be.”

Kalen chuckled low in his throat. “You’re either the bravest wolf I’ve seen or the stupidest.”

“I’m both,” I said, sheathing my knife. “And I’m still breathing.”

He nodded once. “Keep it that way.”

The rest of the day passed in tense silence. Roran didn’t speak to me again, and I didn’t expect him to. But I caught him watching me more than once. Not with disdain. Not with fury.

With curiosity.

And something else he didn’t want to admit.

When night fell, the wind turned icy. We made camp under the edge of a high ridge, the stone curving just enough to block the worst of the gale. The others built a small fire. Mae had been found unconscious not far from the feral’s corpse, curled under a pile of brush. She was alive, barely.

I offered to take first watch.

Roran said nothing.

But when I settled at the edge of the camp, knife in hand, eyes fixed on the dark, I felt him sit behind me. Not close. Not far. Just there.

The silence between us was thick. Brimming with the things we didn’t say.

I didn’t look back.

But I didn’t move away either.

The wind sharpened as we pushed deeper into the trees. No one said a word. Not about the feral. Not about what had passed between me and Roran. His silence was heavier than his anger, like a blade left sheathed but drawn in the mind.

By mid-morning, the clouds had thickened, the sun little more than a smear behind them. The trail we followed dipped into a shallow ravine, where the trees grew gnarled and thin, bent sideways from years of storm and frost. The scent hit me first.

Blood. Old. Clotted. Tangled with something sour and wrong.

“Roran,” I said softly, already slowing.

He turned back. “You smell it too.”

We moved carefully down into the hollow. Kalen flanked right. Corren dropped into a crouch beside a crooked trunk. Then I saw the edge of fabric—navy blue and crusted with ice—tangled in a patch of thorns.

Roran got there first. He didn’t speak, didn’t react. Just moved the branches aside with gloved hands, slow and deliberate.

Mae lay crumpled beneath the underbrush, half-buried by snow and mud. Her limbs twisted unnaturally. Her neck was torn open, throat gone. One boot was missing. Her mouth hung slack. There was a knife still clutched in her hand—broken, but buried deep into something that had once had a face.

I swallowed hard.

“She took one of them with her,” Kalen murmured.

Roran crouched beside her, expression unreadable. He wiped a streak of blood from her cheek with two fingers, then laid her arm flat against her side. His voice was quiet. “She bought them time.”

No one argued. We all knew what that meant. The others were still out there.

“Mark the site,” he said to Kalen. “We’ll bring her home later.”

Kalen tied a strip of crimson cloth to the nearest branch. It hung limp in the dead air.

We moved on.

The snow came harder now, the wind rising in cold gusts that bit through even the thickest cloaks. Roran pushed the pace. He didn’t look back. I kept close behind, eyes sweeping the forest like they could will the missing scouts into being.

Another fifteen minutes passed before we heard it.

A voice—choked and faint—echoing through the trees.

Roran stopped. We all froze.

“Help!”

Kalen bolted first, cutting toward the sound. We followed, boots slamming into the frozen soil, branches snapping underfoot. The voice came again, closer this time.

We broke through a thicket of brambles and into a hollow.

Kai lay on his back against a fallen log, pale as death, one leg splinted with crude sticks. His face was slick with blood. Sorren crouched beside him, his left shoulder bandaged, jaw clenched tight.

They looked up as we approached, eyes wide with disbelief.

“Alpha,” Sorren rasped. “Shit. You found us.”

Kalen dropped to his knees, checking Kai’s pulse.

“He’s bad,” Sorren said. “But he’s breathing. Mae… she…”

“We know,” Roran said.

Sorren swallowed. “She led the ferals away. We heard her scream.”

Roran nodded once. “She died well.”

Sorren looked away.

Kalen started wrapping Kai’s torso with fresh cloth. “Can he move?”

“Not far,” I said, already stripping my cloak to use as a sling. “But we’ll carry him.”

I knelt beside Sorren, who was shaking with cold, and helped him to his feet. He didn’t argue. Just let me loop his arm around my shoulders and pull him upright.

“You came,” he said, barely audible.

“We said we would.”

We fashioned a stretcher from branches and cloaks, lashed it tight, and hoisted Kai between Kalen and Roran. Sorren leaned against me as we turned back toward the trail, slower now, burdened, but not broken.

The snow kept falling.

Behind us, Mae’s marker cloth flapped once in the wind and went still again.

We didn’t speak the rest of the way.

But we all knew: this was only the beginning.