Chapter 156: Chapter 156
Damien’s POV
“Damien! What have you found?” Kayden’s voice boomed as he, Ophelia, and the rest of the leaders crashed through the brush behind me.
Before I could respond, I heard voices rise from somewhere beyond the tree line. Two small groups appeared from the direction of the eastern and northern paths, drawn by the scent or by some other knowledge I could not account for. The foreign warriors stopped dead in their tracks when they saw the bodies. A female warrior from the Winter-Claw pack let out a ragged, agonizing sob, falling to her knees. “Mona!” Another cried out for Torin, weeping unabashedly.
The foreign warriors stopped dead in their tracks. Their eyes darted from the two slaughtered bodies clearly visible in the adjacent clearing to the bloody figure of Gareth and finally to me standing directly over him with a drawn dagger.
“He did this.” The voice was raw with grief. “The Head Tracker of the Crescent Moon! He is the killer!”
Immediately, both groups drew their weapons, extended their claws, and others shifted into their wolf forms. This was about to turn into a bloodbath.
“Stand down!” I calmly explained, keeping my voice tightly controlled despite the chaos. “There is absolutely no certainty that what you see is the truth. Look at him… he is completely unresponsive, likely staged. We need to secure the area and investigate this properly before drawing weapons.”
“Investigate properly?!” another foreign scout shouted, his voice cracking with rage as he drew a heavy broadsword. “He is a senior tracker in the most powerful pack on these lands. If he did not do this, why is he here? Why would your Head Tracker be completely covered in their lifeblood if he is not the butcher?! Has the great Crescent Moon Pack finally grown too big for its territory? Did you kill those two because they discovered something they were not supposed to know about your empire?!” The voice rose, filled with grief and anger and the need to point it somewhere.
I saw distrust twisting the faces of our allies. In that single, devastating moment, looking at the speaker, and the grief behind the accusation; I understood in that moment precisely what was happening.
This was not simply murder. The bodies placed at our border, the timing, Gareth found unconscious and covered in blood close by. This had been arranged. Every detail of it had been arranged.
Whoever had done this did not only want werewolves dead. They wanted the most powerful pack on these lands blamed for it. They were systematically staging a war and deliberately using Gareth to turn the entire alliance against the Crescent Moon Pack. It was clear that they wanted the alliance, the careful thing we had built over five winters of blood and sacrifice, to fracture from the inside.
And looking at the extended claws before us, their twisted plan was working perfectly.
How were we going to get out of this?
My mate stepped in between the mob and me. She did it so deftly, moving with the fluid, silent grace of a seasoned alpha female, that I did not realize she had done so until right that second. My hand shot out, one arm going around her slender waist immediately to draw her back. “Moonlight, what are you doing? Step back behind me.”
“Trust me, Damien,” she said through the bond, her mental voice calm in a way her body language mirrored perfectly.
She pulled away from me and took a step toward them. It went against every instinct I had not to pull her back into my arms. My wolf very nearly went mad. At least both packs were wise enough to hesitate despite their anger. They knew I would rip them from limb to limb should they touch her.
“I understand that this must be a profoundly difficult time for both your packs. You have come upon the bodies of people you knew, people your packs trusted and relied upon, and the sight before you demands an answer. I do not fault you for your anger, and we hope you accept our deepest condolences for the tragic death of your loved ones.” She held the gaze of the Winter-Claw warrior who had spoken. “But I am asking you to give us the space to give you the truth. Not an assumption. The truth.”
“We have nothing to discuss with murderers!” a fierce Bloodwood warrior spat, his lips curling back over his teeth in a vicious snarl. “Simply hand over your head tracker and be done with it. Our ancient laws state a clear, immutable truth: a pound of flesh for a pound of flesh, blood for blood! He must hang by dawn!”
She sighed. “It is imperative that you hear us out before blood is spilled in vain.” Her voice did not waver. “If you take his life now, you give the true monster exactly what they want,” she pointed out. “Look at Gareth. He is a master of the hunt. If he had truly butchered two elite warriors, do you honestly believe he would carelessly lay down right beside them, drench himself in their blood, and fall into a deep, drug-induced slumber? And what about his fangs? There should have been multiple puncture wounds on their necks if he bit them; however, there are only two. Why is that?”
The burly Bloodwood scout lowered his sword just a fraction, his jaw working as his eyes flickered toward Gareth's limp body. “Then explain the blood, Luna! Explain why they are drained like the scout from yesterday!”
“Because we are being hunted by an enemy that defies everything we know,” Ophelia stated boldly, gesturing for Mother to step forward from behind Kayden. I had not noticed when she arrived. “Just before you arrived, I examined the wounds on Mona and Torin. The puncture marks on their necks were not made by regular vampire fangs. Their necks were pierced open by the powerful canines of a werewolf. But the one who did this is a vampire. All I ask is that you give us time to explain all we have discovered.”