Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Duff lay flat and waited in a depression thirty meters from a tripwire he’d strung between two trees.
The Swedish wilderness was vast and brutal, a landscape of frozen tundra covered by the first snowfall and a silence so deep it pressed against his eardrums. He’d been here for three days in a cabin nearby, where he’d set up camp.
When he’d woken up that morning, there had been a cream-colored envelope taped to his door.
Whoever had delivered it had managed to evade the traps Duff had set.
He pushed down the deep, disturbing unease that thought triggered.
The Council has ended. Erwan Doyle is gone, but his wolf mate will be traveling by himself. We will force him in your direction. Be ready.
He was ready. Duff had laid his traps along the most likely escape routes, using terrain analysis and something else.
Something he’d always called instinct but that felt different here, in the shadow of the Council, where the air hummed with magical energy.
He’d stood in the forest selecting trap locations, and instead of calculating probabilities, he’d felt…
a pull. A directional certainty that went beyond analysis.
Not predicting where the wolf would run but sensing it. Maybe even willing it.
It was the Bás gift. It had to be. But here in the Swedish wilderness, surrounded by ancient landscape and with so many dragons nearby, the gift was louder than it had ever been. Stronger. As if the proximity to all that power was amplifying whatever lived inside him.
He pushed the thought aside and finalized the traps, then waited.
Night had fallen when he felt them—dragons were nearby.
He hurried outside and sensed them before he saw them, three dragons moving fast and purposeful overhead, driving something through the forest below them.
Then he felt something else. Another presence.
That had to be the wolf, though Duff hadn’t expected to be able to sense him.
Yet the pull in his chest was warm and insistent, like a compass needle swinging toward true north.
The wolf was coming, and he was running hard, running scared, being herded toward Duff.
Just like the anonymous source had promised—three dragons driving prey toward the hunter’s trap like beaters flushing a grouse. Dragons sending a wolf shifter straight into the arms of a dragon slayer.
Why? What in the name of Saint Patrick and all the saints was going on?
But he’d have to wonder about that later.
The dragons pushed the wolf south and west, away from open ground and into the dense forest where Duff’s tripwires waited.
A massive gray wolf burst through the undergrowth, moving at full sprint, and Duff felt that strange pull intensify—not just tracking now but guiding, nudging, a subtle pressure emanating from somewhere behind his sternum that said this way, come this way, a little farther.
The wolf veered left, exactly where Duff needed him to go, and hit the tripwire at full speed.
The trap yanked him upward, suspending him from a birch branch by one hind leg.
The wolf snarled and thrashed, powerful jaws snapping at the air, his body swinging in furious arcs.
Duff wasn’t stupid. There was no way in hell he could fight a wolf that size one-on-one and come out alive.
No, he’d bide his time and let the animal wear himself down.
And so he did, staying close but out of sight, watching as the wolf’s struggles grew weaker until finally, he passed out.
Duff approached slowly and looked at the massive gray wolf dangling before him—powerful, yet utterly helpless.
He should feel triumph. This was his destiny, his birthright, his sacred purpose.
He’d caught the very thing that would lead him to the White Dragon. His father would’ve wept with pride.
But Duff felt nothing. Nothing but the hollow ache of a fire that had almost gone out and the echo of Maeve’s voice asking questions he still couldn’t answer.
He cut the wolf down with efficient, practiced movements, binding him with ropes reinforced by the Irish blessings he’d learned from his father, who had learned them from his father, and so on.
He managed to get the wolf on the makeshift carrier he’d created, then dragged him back to the cabin.
Once back inside, the wolf shifted—a transition Duff had read about but never witnessed, fur receding into skin, bones reshaping, until a man lay where the wolf had been.
Roughly Duff’s age, muscular, still unconscious.
This was a man. A man with a mate and a family and a life, reduced to bait by the same anonymous hand that had guided the slayer network for years.
No, he couldn’t think like that. By catching Rhene Hightower, he finally had the opportunity to find answers, and he couldn’t give up now. He managed to get Rhene into a bed, quickly covering him with blankets, then rekindled the fireplace and stoked it high until heat radiated from it.
Then he sat at the small kitchen table, alone with his prisoner and his doubts and the dying ember of a fire that used to be his whole identity.
The hunter had caught his prey. But for the first time in the long, bloody history of the Bás family, the hunter wasn’t sure he was on the right side of the hunt.
And Maeve’s voice, gentle and Highland-soft, whispered from the empty chair across from him: We should know what we’re killing, and why, and for whom.