Chapter 3 #2
Canaan stares, mouth slightly open, like he’s trying to reconcile the frenzied man in front of him with the steady one he’s known for years.
“You’re serious?” he asks finally, his eyes searching mine like he’ll find the punchline hidden there. “You’re going to turn around now? When we’ve basically made it to our front lawn.”
“Last chance,” I snap, foot twitching against the peddle. “If you’re not coming with me, get out now because once I turn around, the only way off this ride will be by jumping. And for your sake, I really hope you know how to tuck and fucking roll, Canaan.”
Another second passes. Then he exhales and settles back into the seat. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he questions, gaze forward. “Let’s go.”
I don’t wait another heartbeat. I throw the black Escalade into gear and stomp on the gas.
My wolf’s momentary relief is shadowed by the panic eating away at both of us.
I try to tell myself that this is overkill, a knee-jerk reaction from being away from my scent match, but I’m so far past seeing any kind of reason.
I need to go back. I need to find her. I need to hold her.
The looping need is a rhythmic mantra in my head as the trees whip by us in green blurs and I break every traffic law between here and Ashvale.
The drive back is a haze.
The urgency raking its claws within me isn’t easing like I thought it would.
If anything, it’s only getting worse. You’d think getting closer to her would help, that the narrowing proximity would settle whatever part of me is spiraling, but no.
The iron grip on my chest doesn’t loosen. The frenzied panic doesn’t let up.
My wolf battles within me, throwing the entirety of his weight against the chains of my control. Sweat drips down my spine from the excursion it’s taking to keep him at bay. I keep silently promising him that I’m going back, that we’re getting close, but he won’t hear me.
We’re less than ten miles out when it happens.
A voice cleaves through the storm, the sweet sound silencing the chaos wrecking my mind and body for a single moment.
“Rennick. Please help me.”
I lose the ability to breathe, and if I were standing, the fear-soaked desperation in each syllable would have taken me to my knees.
Instead, I find myself wrenching the steering wheel to the side again.
The SUV fishtails, tires screeching against the asphalt as the vehicle skids to a wide, lurching stop.
Crooked, we sit halfway in the lane and the shoulder of the curved road.
I don’t care, can’t be bothered to pull forward more.
I don’t question it. Don’t take a single moment to wonder if it was a figment of my imagination or a trick of my anxious mind because I know this voice.
It whispered to me in my dreams for months, pleading for me to remember her, to choose her.
I foolishly ignored it those times, but I refuse to make that same mistake again.
Because I understand the significance of this honeyed voice, and, now, it’s calling to me.
My mate is crying out for me.
I can’t say if my wolf finally overpowers me or if I surrender first, but in the end, it doesn’t matter.
Canaan shouts my name, but it barely registers through the thundering roar between my ears.
The shift isn’t smooth and it sure as hell isn’t clean.
It’s an eruption. Bones snap and realign in brutal succession.
Tendons and muscle tear like frayed rope before reknitting into a new form.
There’s no buildup or time to brace for the familiar burn and twisting pain.
My wolf doesn’t ask. It’s a hostile, violent takeover. One that leaves me, for the second time in our shared existence, little more than a passenger in my own body. The usual give and take, the dichotomy of control, is gone. He gives me nothing.
The windshield never stood a chance.
Glass explodes as my wolf launches himself through it, landing in a crouch on the pavement before taking off for the tree line.
My second-in-command yells after me. My wolf doesn’t stop or wait.
His paws dig into the forest floor, his muscles already burning from yesterday’s long-distance run, but he pushes harder, devouring the space that separates him and his omega.
Behind, Canaan, now also shifted, sprints after me.
My wolf doesn’t give him the chance to catch up.
Moving like a creature possessed, my surroundings are vague blurs in my peripheral vision as we clear miles faster than I’ve ever moved in my entire life.
Adrenaline and desperation giving my body the fuel it needs to keep going, to push down any lingering fatigue.
My wolf has a singular focus as he darts between the foliage and over downed tree trunks, never once stumbling.
Get to Noa.
I’m half a mile away from the outskirts of town when I hear it again.
Rennick, please. I need you.
The broken plea of my mate is a twisting knife between my ribs, and for a few paces, our steady gait falters. Snarl ripping through a tense jaw, my wolf steadies himself and redoubles his efforts. Head down, he pushes himself even harder.
He knows what I know—that I’ve already failed Noa once.
And he’s unwilling to ever do it again.
The first sounds of chaos reach me just as we crest the final stretch to Ashvale. Shouting and screams echo through the air. A pulse of power, dark and malevolent, follows close behind, causing the fur along my wolf’s spine to rise. Something is happening.
The terror flooding me now is worse than anything I’ve ever known.
Every scream, every ragged cry echoing from the heart of Noa’s hometown sends a vise around my chest and turns my blood to ice.
Because any one of those sounds could be hers.
From this distance, I can’t tell. And not knowing is its own kind of torture, one that ushers me closer to the edge of madness with each passing second.
The thought of Noa in pain, of her being the source of one of those screams, ignites something violent in me. A protective impulse—no, it a savage, all-consuming need—to get to her, to shield what’s mine from whatever threat dare lay hands on her. It blazes through me like hellfire.
With a growl, my wolf breaks free of the tree line, claws digging into the narrow strip of road that leads toward her home just off Ashvale’s main street. Thirty paces behind, Canaan’s follows me into the fray.
The town is in shambles when we pass through.
The scent of death and blood hits me like a sledgehammer.
Witches and wolves clash in the open and a few bodies are already down.
A she-wolf lunges for the throat of a dark-cloaked witch, while another is flung back by a blast of power so cruel, her bones snap in midair.
The brave omega is dead before she hits the ground.
For a heartbeat I think I’m watching a battle between the Craddock wolves and Ashvale’s resident witches unfold, but Rhosyn told me about the love between Lowri Craddock and Amara, the coven’s High Priestess.
No, this isn’t a civil war.
This is an invasion. One that, by the dark magic humming in the air around us, is being led by an unknown faction of witches.
I want to help. My alpha instinct screams to jump into the fight. But I don’t stop. I can’t. Not when I haven’t found Noa.
My mate is my priority.
We fly toward her house, the deep maroon Victorian structure waiting for us a few streets down from the bloodshed. From the outside, it appears to be untouched. It sits too still, too silent. But I can smell the smoke. Something within the structure is burning.
The same instinct that pulled me back to this town now screams that Noa isn’t inside.
It claws at me, ordering me to go to the back of the property.
My wolf runs parallel to the iron fence he vaulted over just last night, pacing its length until he reaches the far corner.
There, half buried in ivy, a small gate creaks on rusted hinges.
Just beyond it, smoke rolls up from a hatch left open in the pine-needle-covered ground. The source of the fire. My heart twists knowing what that hidden dwelling below means to her.
My wolf lifts his nose to the air. He breathes deep, desperately searching for a hint of the scent that calls to him like it’s salvation. Brown sugar and spiced fig.
Canaan closes in behind. His large reddish-brown-and-gray wolf already has his nose lowered to the soil, hunting for the trail that will take him to his own mate. To Rhosyn.
At the same moment my wolf catches the sugary thread of Noa’s scent drifting on the wind, leading into the dense woods flanking the right side of the manor, and Canaan’s head jerks up.
He turns sharply, facing the opposite direction from where my feet are already pivoting.
He whines low in his throat, torn between instinct and duty.
Between the pull of his mate and the role he’s bound to by pack rank.
For a singular second, I hate myself for not sending for more of my enforcers when we turned around. For assuming this bone-deep urgency had only been about the strained bond. I thought I was just unraveling from the separation; I never expected to return to find her home under attack.
But I don’t have time to dwell on this mistake.
My wolf gives a single sharp, commanding bark—a wordless release of the obligation Canaan still clings to. He doesn’t hesitate after that, he takes off toward the other side of the manor, following the pull of his own female.
I sprint down the trail that leads into the woods.
Away from the smoke and madness hemorrhaging in Ashvale, Noa’s scent sharpens.
It’s stronger here, easier to track, and with this new clarity comes the full detail of it.
Sweet as ever, but it’s contaminated now with a note that makes my gut twist. Fear.
Grief. The taste of it makes my wolf’s jaw snap, his chest rumbling in warning.
But there’s something else. Something dark and reminiscent of the malicious power that hovered in the air back in town.
Another witch is out here with her.
Murderous rage thunders through me as my wolf barrels through the underbrush, following the trail she left behind.
His limbs are a blur beneath us. The river roars below me to my right, nearly drowning out the murmured voices coming from up ahead.
I catch a flicker of movement, a whisper of something just up the trail, and then—
A scream.
Not a cry. Not a shout. A piercing scream so full of dread, it nearly stops me in my tracks.
I can’t be sure if it’s hers, but if it is, if even a single note of that pain belongs to Noa, nothing on this earth will stop me from ripping apart whoever inflicted it.
Rounding the bend in the trail, the scene unfurls before me faster than I can fully register it.
There’s a figure crumpled on the ground—knees to her chest, hand held up like she’s keeping something invisible at bay—but this whimpering witch doesn’t hold my interest long.
Because beyond her, through the branches and leaves, I catch movement that makes my lungs seize and then release in momentary relief.
Noa.
Her hair is wild and streaming behind her as she runs deeper into the trees, every step she takes unsteady like her body is acting purely on fear-induced instinct.
She clutches something tight to her chest, the shape obscured by her arms and movements.
Her head turns, looking over her shoulder, but her eyes aren’t searching me out.
She’s making sure she’s not being followed.
My omega has no idea that I’m here, that I’m not going to let anything else happen.
That fleeting glimpse is all I get, but it’s enough—enough to reignite my body, giving strength to my drained muscles and bones.
I don’t know what Noa has endured or if she’s wounded herself, but just knowing she’s close by and fucking breathing allows me to redirect my focus on what’s before me.
My wolf skids to a stop in the packed earth, snarling as he closes the distance between us and the witch slumped in the path.
Her eyes are sightless white orbs at first, and then she blinks.
Pale-blue irises reappear, her vision sharpening back into focus.
She whimpers, body trembling as fright continues to seep from her pores.
Her sharp chin lifts, gaze searching for whatever had thrust her into this state, but when her attention finally snaps to where I stand, massive and seething, she goes still.
The witch does her best to hide it, grappling for a mask of fearless indifference, of superiority, but I can see the cracks in the facade. The lingering effects of whatever had a hold of her a moment ago have her reeling.
She pushes her hair off her face with a trembling hand and her head cocks, studying me. A sneer breaks out across her face as she cackles a humorless laugh.
“Let me guess,” she bites out, bloodless lips curled into a cold smirk. “You must be the pack Alpha, that little cunt’s Goddess-given mate. I’ve heard so much about you.”
My wolf lowers his head, a deadly snarl cracking in the air between us.
She’s unfazed; if anything, she’s thrilled to see my reaction, as if she feels victorious for having forced the sound from me.
“Arrived just in time to save the day, puppy. After the shit she just pulled, there was no way I was going to let that fucking crossborn make it out of these woods alive. Don’t care what anyone else has planned for her. ”
The growl that rumbles from my chest is vicious enough to rattle bones, a warning no creature with any self-preservation would ignore.
This foolish witch already forced my mate to march through an unknown degree of hell, and now she’s continuing to threaten what is mine?
That threat against his mate has my wolf’s body swelling, fur bristling, pure alpha dominance radiating from him in waves.
She’s about to learn the price of her mistake. I’ll paint this forest red before I let this witch or anyone else cause any more harm to Noa.
Sensing that her clock is ticking, her gaze flicks between me and the wicked-looking blade that lies forgotten in the dirt. It’s stained in dried blood. I can’t pinpoint whose it is, but I know it belongs to another wolf.
She lunges, reckless and desperate.
But my wolf’s already on her.
She doesn’t get the chance to scream or make a single noise before her throat is between his teeth.