Chapter 16 Into the Darkness
Foster
At dusk, I walked the rogue encampment like I owned it, which technically I did. At least until Arabesque decided otherwise.
My boots barely made a sound against the packed earth as I studied the shifting mood of the camp.
More snarls than usual, hackles raised at every minor provocation, wolves bumping shoulders where they’d given space before, their eyes a little too wild, their claws a little too close to the surface.
A thousand rogues with cabin fever and growing aggression.
Two months ago, I could’ve controlled them with a look. Now I was counting down minutes. Calculating odds. Watching shadows.
Dominic Loving stood at the edge of the training yard, his posture rigid as he supervised Cosmo’s combat training with Elio, Devi watching from the sidelines. His brown hair was pulled back in a messy knot, and the hollows under his blue eyes had deepened since yesterday. Death walking and talking.
Just like me.
I caught his eye and tilted my head toward the tree line. Giving me a nod of understanding, he said something to Devi, then made his way to me, shoulders hunched to appear smaller. Smart. He’d learned to navigate this prison camp well.
“Half an hour,” I murmured as soon as he was close enough. “Behind the big barn. Bring your pups.”
A spark of something almost like hope flashed in his eyes.
“Me, too?”
“That was the deal.” I kept my eyes forward, scanning for watchers. “You leave tonight or not at all.”
Dominic’s heart rate spiked.
“Arabesque—”
“Will be occupied. Got a diversion planned. Be ready. No hesitation, no goodbyes, no grabbing extra shit.”
“Understood. The plan?”
“I’ll explain at the barn.” I flicked my eyes to his. “Last chance to back out.”
“Back out to what? More of this?” A humorless smile twisted his mouth. “Elio had nightmares again last night. Cosmo broke down crying yesterday behind the supply shed. And Devi hasn’t spoken in three days.”
Devi. My biggest headache, the one who kept me up at night. The only she-wolf in a camp of a thousand rogues. My warnings bought her reprieves, but there were always others willing to test boundaries. Hungry, cruel men who saw her as prey.
“Make sure it looks casual,” I warned him. “No packed bags, no suspicious behavior. Just a midnight patrol with your charges, following some bullshit order I gave you.”
“We’re all ready.” Dominic nodded. “Been ready.”
“Keep them close. Elio’s smart, but a nervous wreck, so make sure he doesn’t panic and bolt.
Cosmo’s got wit and skills to spare. Let him help, and it’ll keep him calm and grounded.
And Devi…” My eyes fixed on the girl, remembering the latest bastard who’d tried to force himself on her.
I’d ripped his throat out and scattered his bones for the birds, but she’d never be safe here.
“Don’t let her out of your sight for a second. ”
“Never,” Dominic growled, a flash of fang showing the fierce protector beneath the broken shell. “No one will touch her again.”
I clasped his shoulder, feeling the coiled strength there, the determination. We weren’t so different. Two lone wolves, battered and scarred, hanging onto our humanity by a thread.
Leaving him, I continued my rounds, nodding at the guards posted along the perimeter.
Rogues weren’t built for packs, families, or homes.
Not for long stretches, anyway. They weren’t cooperative by nature.
Arabesque had been gathering them for over a year now, and the cracks were starting to show. Too many predators, not enough prey.
I was surprised they hadn’t turned on each other more often. Keeping them busy had helped: Training drills, building projects, clearing that apple orchard and turning it into an open field last month. Still, it was only a matter of time before the whole place exploded.
And those kids were getting out, one way or another. They had to. Because if they didn’t, if I failed them, I wasn’t sure I could live with myself.
I studied each face as I passed by. Most pretended to ignore me while tracking my every move with sideways glances. The last few months as Arabesque’s enforcer had bought me respect born of fear. Fear worked fine. Fear kept me alive.
A broad-shouldered wolf with a jagged scar across his nose lumbered toward me, his eyes glittering with some dumbass idea.
“Foster,” he grunted.
“Bryce.” I didn’t break stride, didn’t offer anything more.
“The boys are saying you’re being soft on those pups.” He matched my pace, muscling into my space. “ ’specially the girl.”
“The boys should mind their own business.” I kept my voice monotone and bored.
“Maybe it is their business. Maybe everything in this camp is everyone’s business. Ain’t that what pack means?” His lips peeled back from yellowed teeth.
I stopped, turning to face him fully.
“You redefining pack law now, Bryce? Because last I checked, Arabesque put me in charge, not you. Not ‘the boys.’ Me. The only one here with fucking alpha blood. Stand down or die.”
The dominance rolled off me in waves along with a quiet certainty that made lesser wolves drop their eyes. Bryce wasn’t anywhere near my level, but he was stupid. He’d been testing the waters for weeks, but he wasn’t ready to challenge me directly. Not yet.
“Just passing along what I’m hearing,” he muttered, taking a half-step back.
“Pass along this instead: Anyone touches those kids, they answer to me. Anyone gives them trouble, they answer to me. Anyone even looks at them wrong—”
“They answer to you. Yeah, I get it,” he sneered, but the stink of fear leaked through his bravado. “You’ve made your point. Just makes me wonder why you care so much about some random pups.”
“Maybe I don’t like waste.” I leaned in close, my voice dropping to a growl. “Those four have potential. Potential I can use. Potential that gets squandered if some asshole decides to take out his frustrations on them.”
He held my gaze for three heartbeats before looking away.
“Whatever you say, alpha.”
I watched him slink off before resuming my circuit of the camp. The exchange had cost me precious minutes. The barn was on the far side of the property from here, and I needed to get there without drawing undue attention before Dominic and the others arrived.
I didn’t know the details of King Julian’s plan, and I didn’t want to. Plausible deniability would keep them and me alive. All I knew was that I needed to get them to a rendezvous point by midnight to meet the king’s contact. Which meant they needed to be on the road within the next thirty minutes.
Problem was, the Gravewrought were already prowling.
#
The day Arabesque returned from Europe, every rogue had been on edge, disturbed by something they couldn’t name, but could sense, a wrongness that made their wolves pace and whine. An hour after she arrived, I’d been summoned to the farmhouse.
“Foster,” she’d said, her green eyes gleaming, “I’ve brought us some new friends. Aren’t they magnificent?”
That was a month ago. Now her “friends” had names and territories carved out across the property, and the rogues gave them a wide berth.
The Gravewrought. Arabesque’s latest weapons.
Four days after their introduction, I’d found a rogue named Mercer emptying his stomach behind the storage shed, trembling so hard, his teeth chattered.
“I saw it,” he’d gasped between dry heaves. “That white thing. It looked right through me like I was already dead.”
The next day, two rogues tried to desert. They made it half a mile before we heard the screams. Arabesque had me retrieve what was left and display it at the camp entrance as a warning.
The Gravewrought were three twisted perversions of things that Arabesque had dug up from their graves, bound to her will, and turned into something worse than dead.
The White Dread lived up to its name. Bone-pale, its body resembled an enormous warhorse built of ivory mist, a shattered horn jutting from its skull.
Black rot crept from its cracked hooves, wilting grass and flowers wherever it stepped.
Its mane flowed like smoke caught in an invisible current, and its eyes?
Moon Mother save me. Its eyes were pits of icy hatred.
The first time I’d been alone with it, despair rolled off of it in waves.
My knees had buckled, and I’d fallen to the ground, gasping like I was drowning.
That’s when I’d known this wasn’t just some monster Arabesque had cobbled together from spare parts and Dark magic.
No, this had once been something else. Something good.
And she’d cursed it.
“A unicorn,” she’d admitted when I asked, citing training purposes. “He was beautiful when I found him.”
She’d said it so casually, too, as if she hadn’t desecrated a sacred creature, one who was purer than the full moon’s silver light.
Ashmouth was hardly better, a hulking tangle of rotted wood and fungus. It moved like a shambling mound, all grasping vines and choking spores. I once watched it engulf a rogue who got too close, the poor bastard’s screams muffled by mushrooms and moss as it absorbed him into itself.
“A forest spirit. A leshy,” Arabesque had said. “It protected an old-growth woodland outside Prague until a chort slew it during a card game.” Her lips had curved in amusement at my expression. “The faerie king gave it a burial, of course, but forests are so poorly guarded these days, aren’t they?”
But the worst monster, the one that haunted my nightmares and made even the cruelest rogue look over their shoulder, was Splitter.
A hulking construct of bronze and bone, nothing but jagged edges and whirring gears.
It had no face, just a blank mask of ivory inscribed with glowing runes that burned red like hellfire.
“A war machine.” Arabesque had looked almost gleeful. “Created by a long-dead mage-smith. The runes guide its movements, but it was never alive.”