Chapter 13 Kaden's POV
I found Elder Miriam in her garden, tending to her herbs like she did every morning. She was one of the oldest wolves in our pack, maybe seventy years old, with silver hair and knowing eyes. She'd been there when I was born, and had helped raise me after my mother died. If anyone could help me make sense of what I was feeling, it was her.
"Kaden." She said without looking up from her plants. "You look terrible."
"Good morning to you too.” I said, sitting down on the wooden bench near her garden plot.
"Don't deflect I can see it in your face you haven't been sleeping. Haven't been eating either, from the looks of you."
She finally looked up at me. "What's wrong?"
I wanted to tell her everything I wanted to explain about Elara, about the rejection, about the gaping hole in my chest that wouldn't go away. But I couldn't because rejection was my burden to carry, not hers.
"Just pack business." I said. "A lot on my mind."
Miriam snorted. "Pack business doesn't make an Alpha look like death warmed over 5ry again."
"I made a mistake.” I said quietly. "A bad one. And I don't know how to fix it."
She set down her gardening tools and came to sit beside me. "Tell me."
"I can't do all of it."
"Then tell me what you can."
I stared at my hands. "There was someone important and I pushed them away.”
“Hurt them badly now they are gone and I can't find them and I don't know if they're safe or if they're-" I stopped, unable to say the word.
"Dead?" Miriam supplied gently.
I nodded. "And you care about this person? Deeply?"
"I shouldn't have rejected them, I made my choice. But yes, I care more than I want to admit."
Miriam was quiet for a long moment. "You know what I think? I think you are punishing yourself. Whatever happened, whatever you did, you're carrying it like a weight on your shoulders and it's crushing you."
"I deserve to be crushed.” I said. "You don't know what I did."
"No, I don't but I know you, I raised you, Kaden, you are not cruel. You are not heartless. If you hurt someone, you have your reasons. Maybe they were good reasons, maybe they weren't. But torturing yourself won't change what happened."
"Then what should I do?"
"If they are truly gone, you mourn and you learn and you become better. If they are still out there, you find them and you make things right. Either way, you keep living, you keep leading this pack. You don't let one mistake destroy everything you are."
Before I could respond, my phone rang. Ethan's name flashed on the screen.
"I have to take this." I told Miriam.
"Go but think about what I said."
I walked a few steps away and answered. "What is it?"
"We have a situation at the northern border," Ethan said, his voice tight. "You need to get here now."
"What kind of situation?"
"Bodies are multiple, you need to see this yourself."
I ran to the northern border, my wolf pushing me faster than normal. When I arrived, I found Ethan and six other wolves standing in a small clearing. The smell hit me first, burning flesh and death.
"Show me." I said.
Ethan led me forward three bodies lay on the ground, all of them burned beyond recognition. But I could tell from their scent what they were.
"Rogues." I said.
"Yes. But that's not the worst part." Ethan pointed to the nearest body. "Look at the marks."
I knelt down, studying the corpse more closely. On the chest, burned into the flesh, was a symbol. It looked like it had been carved or branded there before the body was set on fire.
"There are marks on all of them." Ethan said. "The same symbol."
I moved to the other bodies. He was right; each one had the same mark burned into their chest.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I don't know. I've never seen anything like it."
I stood up, looking around the clearing. "How long have they been dead?"
"Based on the condition of the bodies, I would say less than twelve hours they were killed last night."
"On our border."
"Yes."
This was a message someone had killed these rogues, marked them, and left them on our territory as a warning. But a warning about what?
"Get the bodies to the pack house." I ordered.
"I want them to examine and double the patrols on all borders. If someone's targeting rogues in our territory, I want to know who and why."
"Already done." Ethan said.
I took one last look at the symbol on the nearest body. Something about it made my skin crawl. It felt wrong, dark, and dangerous.
"Find out what this symbol means." I told Ethan. "Search pack records, contact other Alphas, do whatever you need to do. I want answers."
Three hours later, Ethan burst into my office without knocking.
"I found it." he said, his face pale. "The symbol I know what it is."
"Tell me."
He set a very old book on my desk, opened to a page with a drawing. The symbol matched exactly what we'd seen on the bodies.
"It's ancient." Ethan said.
"From before the pack system we have now. Before Alphas and territories."
"What does it mean?"
Ethan looked at me, and I saw genuine fear in his eyes. "It belongs to Erebus."
The name sent a chill down my spine. Every wolf knew that name, even if most thought it was just a story.
"Erebus is a legend." I said. "A myth to scare young wolves."
"Maybe or maybe not." Ethan pointed to the text below the symbol.
"According to this, Erebus was real. A rogue Alpha who rejected the old ways. He built an army of outcasts and rogues, marked them with this symbol they burned everything in their path."
"When was this?"
"Two hundred years ago the packs united to destroy him and his followers; they wiped out all of them."
"Then this must be someone using his symbol. Trying to scare us."
"Or." Ethan said quietly,
"Erebus's followers weren't all wiped out. Maybe some survived, maybe they've been waiting to build their strength."
I stared at the symbol in the book. At the bodies we'd found. At the dark reality of what this might mean.
"If that's true," I said slowly, "then we have a much bigger problem than a few dead rogues."
"What do we do?"
I closed the book. "We prepare for war."