Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lucas
The first guards at the fence go down before they’ve unslung their rifles.
Then, the compound sees us.
A horn somewhere inside. Shouts. The watchtower bell. Men pour out of the central building and the outbuildings at a dead run, their clothes already coming off, the change rolling through them as they hit the dirt in shifted form, claws ripping into open ground.
They’re fast. Too fast.
I take the first one at the fence in a tackle, my jaws on his throat, and the impact alone tells me what I’m dealing with.
He’s dense. Heavier than his frame. His ribs hold under my weight where a normal wolf’s would have splintered.
I shred them anyway and drop him, pivoting for the next one before his blood has hit the dirt.
But the next one is on me before I see him.
He hits me from the side, a gray body with shoulders too wide for his height, and we go down hard against a metal fencepost. Pain sears through me.
I get my back paws under him and rake upward.
He doesn’t fall. The bastard twists, his teeth find my flank, and I have to break his grip with a roll that takes us both into the dirt before I can get back to my feet.
I kill him, but only barely.
Around me, my men are taking heavier casualties than they should be in the first thirty seconds of an assault.
A Silvercrest wolf goes down under two of the enemy’s.
Another is being driven backward by a brown blur.
Darius’s line at the south is coming up against the same ferocity.
I can hear his roar from across the compound.
These wolves are not normal.
We knew they wouldn’t be. Intelligence said “enhanced.” “Stronger” was what we trained for, not whatever this is.
I push forward into the press.
Two more come at me instantly. I take the first one low, dropping under his lunge to crush his foreleg in my jaws, but the second hits my shoulder with enough force to drive me a full foot into the ground. I roll, get my teeth in his neck, and hold until the meat gives.
The compound has emptied; no more wolves stream out of the buildings. I can see across the expanse of the yard now: fighters everywhere, my men working in pairs to bring each enhanced wolf down because alone, they can’t do it. Bodies litter the dirt. Most of them ours.
A Silvercrest wolf hiding near the north wall lifts his head and gives me the signal. As the perimeter fight rages on, the north wall is unguarded.
I lift my head and howl. The sound carries clean over the yard. Two notes. Long, then short. My signal to Sienna.
I don’t look toward the outcropping. Can’t. But I feel her in the bond—alert, moving, the pulse of her registering the sound through the link—and I know she has already started down the slope with Lydia, Violet, and ten soldiers behind them.
I turn back to the fight. Out of the blue, the fray in front of me parts.
A wolf walks through it.
He’s bigger than the others. Older. Gray at the muzzle, dark across the back, scarred along one flank from something that happened to him a long time ago.
He moves through his own fighters, and they step aside for him without being told.
One of them, mid-lunge at one of my men, breaks off entirely to clear his path. The yard belongs to him.
I’ve killed enough men in my life to know what authority looks like.
He comes to a stop ten yards from me. Then, he shifts.
A man stands where the wolf was. Tall, broad through the chest, sixty if he’s a day. White at the temples, beard trimmed close, eyes a pale gray that reflect the early morning light. He doesn’t bother with clothes. He has shifted in front of soldiers his whole life, and his bearing shows it.
The fighting around us slows as his own men watch him. They watch him with something I don’t understand at first and then, in the next breath, understand completely. Not loyalty. Deeper than that. They’ll die for him without thinking.
I shift back, standing up in the dirt with blood on my chest from the last wolf I killed. I’m panting. My ribs are bruised from the second hit at the fence.
The man inclines his head to one side. “Alpha Steele.”
“Who are you?”
He smiles. Not warmly. He has rehearsed this moment, and it shows on his face.
“Marcus Vale. I lead the Covenant.” He spreads his hands out at his sides. “We’ve been expecting you.”
The entire yard goes still around us.
Behind him, his men have stopped fighting, but they haven’t stepped back. Their eyes are on their leader, waiting for whatever he does next. My own soldiers become wary at this unspoken pause.
“Expecting me?”
“For some weeks now.”
“Then you know why I’m here.”
“I do.”
“I’m going to enjoy wiping out you and your organization,” I snarl.
He smirks. “You misunderstand, Alpha. I’m not the obstacle. I’m the courtesy.”
I don’t answer him. He lifts one hand, and the yard erupts into chaos again, enhanced wolves versus Darius’s and my soldiers.
Vale and I shift at the same instant, and he hits me before I’ve fully landed on four feet.
The impact drives me twenty feet across the yard, and my shoulder slams into the dirt with a crack I feel through my whole body.
Pain whites out my vision. He’s on me again before I can roll, his teeth at my throat, and only the angle of my head saves my windpipe from being crushed in the first second of contact.
I get my hindquarters under him and kick. Hard. He flies back. Lands on his feet. Comes again.
Twenty years of training my own army. Ten minutes of fighting enhanced wolves.
Nothing has prepared me for this. He’s faster than the enhanced rogues or even the fighters here.
Stronger. He doesn’t telegraph; every move he makes, I have to read in the half second after he has already committed to it.
Twice in the next thirty seconds, I’m almost too slow.
He opens a slash down my flank. I roll out of his next lunge and barely get my teeth in his foreleg before he tears free.
I’m losing.
A gray blur comes in from my left.
Darius hits Vale in his ribs at full speed, and they go down together, snarling, claws raking. I get my feet under me on a hard lunge. The two of us drive Vale back across the yard, paw over paw, his teeth flashing for whichever of us is closest. He fights both of us at once and almost holds.
Almost.
Darius sinks his jaws into Vale’s haunch. I find his stomach and bite into it.
Vale staggers. Drops to the ground. Convulses once. The gray wolf shifts back as he dies, Marcus Vale the man lying naked in front of me with his throat in ruins, blood pooling around him.
He laughs.
It’s a weak sound, low, his chest hitching.
I shift back and drop to one knee at his shoulder.
His pale eyes find mine. He’s grinning. Blood on his teeth. “You think…I…was the threat?” His chest shudders on the next breath. “I’m one piece. I was always one piece.”
“What does that mean?”
He laughs again. His head tips back against the dirt. The smile widens. “You’ve been raising the next leader. Right among you.”
The world tilts. My body locks where it kneels. The breath stops in my chest.
“You know her, Alpha.” His voice is fading. The smile is still there. “You’ve trusted her for twenty years. She’s been by your side since you were a child.”
The blood goes from my face, from my hands, from somewhere deeper.
Lydia.
Horror fills me. “You’re lying!”
He shakes his head, grinning despite the pain. “She brought us that hybrid woman. She led us to your mate.”
I stare at him, my head reeling. “But…Jacques. He was your—”
“A patsy.” Blood gurgles from his mouth. “She arranged it. He’s already dead. She’s the next leader, the proper leader for us. She will realize all our dreams.”
My mind is spinning.
She’s in the compound. With Sienna.
Vale’s chest stops moving.
I stay where I am, on one knee, hands open in the dirt. The fighting around me continues, my men taking the last of the enhanced wolves down in pairs, blood on every surface I can see. The sound of all of it has turned strange and thin to my ears, far off, behind glass.
The understanding is too large to fit in my body all at once. It comes into me in waves, each one taking another piece of what I thought was solid out from under me.
I lift my head.
The compound is in front of me. The central holding building is at its center, the same building I’ve looked at for six hours from the outcropping, the same building I sent my mate into twenty minutes ago with the woman who has just been revealed to me as the next leader of the Covenant.
The north service door was open. My spy confirmed it.
That means she’s in there. Sienna is in that building.
And Lydia is in there with her.
Twenty years…
The wind off the compound has shifted. The smell of wood smoke is gone. There is only the rancid stench now, sharp and close. I can’t tell if it’s rising from inside the building or from my own throat.
I reach for the bond.
Sienna is there. Alert. Moving. The pulse of her in the link is steady, focused, the strategist face fully on. She doesn’t know yet. Whatever Lydia has been waiting twenty years to do, she hasn’t done it yet, because I’d feel that through the bond before I felt anything else.
I have minutes. Maybe less. I get to my feet.
Sienna.
Her name is the only thing left in my head that is whole.