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Well, fuck.
My eyes scanned the crowd to look for my men, but the bloody albino elf fucks were too numerous to see past. I tentatively tried to pull on what I felt was the sense of them in my head, but didn’t get a reaction. Another howl came, closer now. Fucking hell. Chase me, Sylvan had said. I snarled at the woman, herding her away with lunges, until she stumbled off into the night as I followed after her.
I headed straight for the central gate, not wanting to chance jumping over the palisades ringing the village. I strode past the woman, then veered towards her, thinking maybe I might be able to put her on my back like my Tirian had me in my change induced visions, but she just screamed and ran away. The howl came again, and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw the glowing red eyes of Sylvan’s wolf form, his fur blending with the night. Chase me and then what? Ralnor’s voice rang in my ears. Is this the year when Lonan brings his mate to ground, swallowing the light for ever? If the fucking seer thought I was Branwen for some stupid reason, I needed to run or fight.
For a moment, a violent flashback to the way his fangs had felt when he dug them into my shoulder shot through me, my fangs clamping tight on the whines that froze in my throat. Venom pooled in my mouth at the thought of getting my own back on him, of biting down on that pale flesh and marking him as he marked me. But I had no idea how to fight, in this form or my human one.
Run, my Tirian insisted. Run fast. So I did.
I would like to describe the chase, but it was all a mess to me. I ran out of the village and onto the dark plains beyond. I was no longer really in the driver’s seat, merely watching as my Tirian instincts took over. She knew what she was doing, perhaps because there was a somewhat preordained feel about all of this. My heart may have pounded, my eyes darting for signs of pursuit, yet it all felt oddly familiar. We swerved out to the left, the great empty flatlands opening up before us, and the moon hanging in the sky, as if to tell us which way to go. Our eyes lifted to it as we ran, then another howl rang out.
There were sounds of hoofbeats and calls from the man things, but they weren’t what I paid attention to. It was him. I could hear his paws eat up the distance between us, as if they were my own, getting closer and closer. My body lengthened, paws snatching at the ground now, thrusting our body faster and faster. For a moment, there was that feeling of the machinery of my body working in perfect tandem with my mind—I told it to run and it did, so very fast.
But there was a spanner designed to be thrown into the works, a deliberate one, now I thought about it. We guests were given our own bottle of mead to share, something I’d put down t
o politeness, but the first time the ground felt like it shifted under me, I knew. I stumbled and managed to rally, but it cost me precious seconds. They knew it too, the Uldariel, their whoops too loud, too practised for this to be an accident. Where were my mates? The fact that they weren’t here was telling enough. My head spun now from the effects of the alcohol, the previous sharpness I’d gained from fear and anger bleeding out as my body churned through its stores of adrenalin. I veered right sharply, then swerved left as I tried to correct. Sylvan’s howl grew louder, and the men’s shouts became hard to comprehend as my paws seemed to forget how to move together.
Something’s wrong, my Tirian said, as if from very far away. I just nodded in response, my legs now moving haphazardly. The moon seems to waver in the sky, but it's what I stared at as I collapsed to the ground. I studied the strange craters and pock marks as they approached.
“I got the black one with a tranquilizing arrow,” a voice said.
“Good, good. Go back to the village and bring the carts. We’ll take the ancillary men to the Volken first, then this one and her pack.”
20
I woke to a world of pain, a world that swayed back and forth with nauseating regularity, with an aching head and a burning desire to vomit. I cracked my eyes open and regretted it the minute I attempted it, as the sun felt like knives stabbing into my sockets. We had to be moving somewhere, I realised, as I heard the low rumble of wheels on a rough surface, but with no reassuringly even hum of a motor. I forced my eyes open, keeping my lids narrowed, and tried to make out what was happening.
The first thing I noticed was bodies everywhere. We’d been slung inside a caged cart, one on top of the other. Slade was leaned partially sitting against the mesh sides of the cart, Finn laid across his lap, and Brandon was crumpled into a ball underneath Aaron. I saw other limbs as well, but a heavy weight kept me pinned to the cart floor. I shifted, reaching for my Tirian strength and coming up empty. “Fuck…” I grunted into the rough wooden floor, my head throbbing in a rapid tattoo as I panted, trying to pull some energy from somewhere, anywhere.
“Should we give the little white bitch a seeing to before drop off?”
The rest of my body went limp as I craned my neck as much as I could. I saw the familiar backs of two beasts pulling the cart along, and riding them? The fucking Uldariel.
“Want to see if she barks like a dog when you stick it in her?” a different voice said. “Don’t know how tight she’d be, what with the dick she was taking.”
“More like a howl, wasn’t it?” The first guy did his best to imitate a wolf’s song, turning it into some kind of exaggerated yodelling sound. It sounded ridiculous, but both of them snickered afterwards, so I assume it suited their purpose.
“Not as good as that little morsel we caught last night. They taste all the better after running them down, something we need to include in next year’s celebration.” The second warrior wriggled on his beast’s back, doing his best to imitate the cries of a raped woman. He ended it with a raucous laugh, joined by the other man enthusiastically.
I lay there, against the fucking base boards of a fucking cart we’d been dumped into like wild animals, and felt a sharp hollow feeling inside me. I took one shuddering breath, my lungs burning with the effort due to the weight compressing my chest, and then opened my eyes.
I’d thought I’d saved the wolf woman. I’d thought we were in a safe enough place to become a pack. Instead, we’d been drugged and she’d been caught, and now we were about to be delivered to our enemies. It wasn’t just the weight of the bodies pressing down on me that had me lying face down on the worn wood.
Get up, my Tirian said.
Fuck off, I said, sinking into the darkness of our psychic space. It was soothing, I could pretend for a second that none of this was happening. The drug was still in my system, I could feel its chemical pull like a tide, drawing me inexorably under.
Get up, she insisted, but I paid her little mind.
I was aware my lungs were struggling to draw breath in, but the effort felt like too much hard work right now. I let my face mesh with the floor of the cart and just let go.
Get. Up.
The words rang through me like a bell, my eyes jerking open, and there she was beside me. She stood in all her translucent glory, the spirit of the White Wolf, and she looked around, at the cart, at my men, at the warriors on horseback. She nosed each of my pack, their eyes fluttering at her touch. It took a while, too long, for them to open, but when they did, they wore the exact same expression—one of wonder.
It was Sylvan who was lying on top of me. She touched him last, and he finally rolled off me, which felt just dandy on my bruised flesh. His eyes darted to me, then the cage, and then the Uldariel.
“We’ll pull up in the forest just before the drop off point. She’ll still be too groggy to fight much. A few punches to the head should sort her out,” the guy on the left said.
