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The Queen's Sacrifice
Dawn came, gray and bitter.
The watery brightening of the sky illuminated a lawn strewn with bodies and blood. Cye and Jun wept quietly inside, huddled on the couch in the living room. They were not badly hurt—just covered in gore and some scratches. Their attackers had recognized they were no real threat and largely ignored them. Sterling had a gash that had hastily closed with crude stitches, and various wounds and bites, but they were of no real consequence. The blood loss clouded his mind. The exhaustion made him unsteady. His body was in shock.
He cataloged each of his symptoms so he could control them. Dismiss them. He had navigated far worse.
Because inside the house, Winter’s life pulled at him by fragile threads. She howled for him, falling further and further away.
Demetrius leaned back against the porch railing, arms crossed.
Sterling tensed with a strange rictus and half-turned. His father’s hand caught his shoulder to stop him.
“Do not get underfoot,” Demetrius told him. “You can’t help her.”
Sterling looked at him, throat frozen, unable to speak.
Demetrius said, “This is our lot as males, wolf. I’ve felt Marcella’s life slipping away like this when she gave birth to our second. I have felt her suffering when the Council tried to break her. She has been part of my life for as long as I have been alive, we are bound together as tightly as you and Winter, and one day perhaps you will be able to speak to your mate as I speak to Marcella without many words. But today, you will be underfoot. You have to remain in control. You must be the rock mooring her to this world.”
The scent of her blood on the snow dug into his nostrils. The trail of blood leading up to the house where they had carried her in. The blood on the floor, smearing the stairs. The scent of her death. The sensation of her death, of everything, being torn away.
Garrett tapped an arrow on his shoulder and eyed the AmberHowl Alpha, but did not argue.
Demetrius looked over the lawn. “The GranitePaw moved swiftly. They had been planning this for some time. What did you do to anger them, SnowFang?”
“This is not the time,” Sterling growled.
“It is the perfect time, considering we have nothing but time. And why does your mate have a silver wound on her arm that is barely healed?”
“FrostFur,” Sterling snarled. “We found what you’re after, AmberHowl. The FrostFur did that to her. Alan and I will settle it this summer. Jerron is dead.”
Demetrius held quite still. “You were not supposed to get that far, and you were definitely not supposed to kill Jerron.”
“The only reason you still have your head attached to your neck is you showed up at the convenient last minute once I already had a claw in my thigh.”
“Then I suppose it’s to my benefit you have twenty stitches in it now.” Demetrius clearly was not threatened.
Sterling looked back behind him, remaining rooted to the ground by force of will. AmberHowl warriors moved around the property, the hunters and scouts flowing over the terrain looking for everything that had the scent of GranitePaw on it. Winter, though, was in the house, dying by inches while a AmberHowl doctor tried to put her together enough she could be moved.
They were many miles from anywhere.
The part of her that lived in him pulled away like spidersilk tearing: stretched farther and farther until the tendrils would drift into the void between them.
His fingers twitched. He looked at his nails. Dried blood, purple bruises. He’d lost a claw. Lodged it in a skull.
It came to him in bright pieces, like everything was a fractured window and he perceived everything with sharp, disjointed edges.
He had done this to her. He had been careless. He had been too confident. He should have been more protective. He should have done more to keep her safe.
Had there not been warnings? Had there not been a thousand times he could have called off the hunt?
