Chapter 18 - Arthur
Arthur tried to listen.
He really did.
Kiara’s words still rang in the clearing, like the man who sells you petrol, and the air felt thinner for it. Wolves shifted, uneasy. Witches murmured, magic prickling.
Arthur’s gaze kept dragging sideways anyway.
To her.
Dani stood a little ahead of the Salem line, shoulders square, cloak pulled tight. The wind kept catching at her hair, dragging curls loose so the whole riot of red moved like flame. Her mouth was set, eyes narrowed, the green of them sharp as glass against the snow.
She looked like she’d carved herself out of this mountain, all grit and stubbornness and the bare, reckless act of just being there in the middle of all these wolves who’d once rather have seen her gone.
His.
The bond hummed, pleased.
Not his.
Not really. Not yet. She stood with the coven, not at his side. And he was the one who’d driven her there.
Arthur forced his eyes back to the circle. He could feel Chase’s sideways look like a nudge in his ribs.
Focus.
Dominic cleared his throat, dragging everyone’s attention back.
“All right,” the Volkhov Alpha said, “We can’t afford to panic. We need a plan.”
Arthur rolled his shoulders, forcing his voice steady. “We strengthen our borders,” he said, “Double patrols. Trip the wards back from the obvious paths. If these things want to pass as human, fine. We make sure any human, or shifter, within three miles of our lines gets scanned by magic.”
Few nods from Volkhov, Severney, and even Nordan. Basic. Solid.
Leonid made a faint, bored noise.
“You want to hide behind your fences, Ice Bear?” he drawled. “Didn’t you hear Rory’s pet? They could already have infiltrated Skymist. They could already be right here.”
Dominic’s wolves bristled, Fenred growled low.
Arthur kept his voice flat. “What other choice do we have?” he said, “This town is ours to protect.”
“What’s ours to protect,” Leonid echoed, “right. The bay. Your pretty little town. Your mate.” His gaze flicked to Dani, then back.
“You think they’ll stop at your posts? Your borders span hundreds of miles, and you can’t be everywhere at once.
We should be out there hunting them, not waiting to see who they eat first.”
Alex nodded, predictably. “For once, Volnoye has the right of it,” he said, “we didn’t beat them last time by sitting in circles and talking. We went to Voskresen, and we took their heads off.”
A pleased murmur went through Volnoye and some of the more hot-blooded wolves. Dominic’s lot shifted, restless.
Arthur’s wolf pressed forward, wanting the simplicity of that. Find the enemy. Rip them apart. No ward puzzles, no politics. Just blood on snow and a problem solved.
Except it hadn’t been solved. That was the point.
Rory’s voice cut across the rumble, calm as falling snow.
“And yet,” he said, “here they are again.”
Leonid’s smile thinned.
“We can’t win a war we don’t understand,” Rory said, “we’ve been treating hybrids like rabid dogs. Hit fast, hit hard, hope there weren’t more behind the next ridge. It worked until it didn’t. Until they adapted.” He nodded to Kiara. “As you’ve just heard.”
Lavinia spoke up, tone cool, “We agree. Witches can’t counter what we can’t see. If their magic’s being masked, we need a look at how they’ve managed it. That means—”
“Capturing one,” Dominic finished.
His gaze met Arthur’s. Steady and patient, with an undercurrent of challenge.
Arthur clenched his jaw.
“You want to bring one into our territory on purpose?” he asked.
“On our terms,” Dominic said, “bound. Contained. With every witch and wolf we trust standing between it and our people.”
“You want us to rely on witchcraft to hold the thing that’s being driven by witchcraft,” Alex said. “How is that not insanity?”
A murmur of agreement from his corner. Even some of Nordan shifted, uneasy. Arthur felt their eyes on him, on his witch’s bite on his neck.
Dani stayed quiet. He forced himself not to look at her.
“It’s not my first choice,” Dominic said bluntly. “I’d rather put a bullet in every hybrid skull on sight. But if these things can walk into normal camps and smile at witches without tripping a ward, we’re blind. If we keep swinging in the dark, we’ll kill more of our own than them.”
The vampire tilted his head. “For once, I agree with the wolves who think,” he said. “My prince will want information. Anatomy. Behavior. Whatever spell-work is woven into them. Live prisoners tell much better stories than dead ones.”
The way he spoke made Arthur’s skin crawl.
He dragged his focus back to the argument because if he didn’t, it would go the way every argument like this always went.
Nowhere.
He still couldn’t stop his gaze from flicking back to Dani.
She stood with her arms folded, jaw tight, watching their leaders snarling at one another. When Lavinia nodded at Dominic’s words, Dani did too, small but clear.
Of course, she sided with capture. With understanding. She was a witch. They liked taking things apart. Learning from them.
His gut twisted. Affection and unease tangled together.
He’d expected, stupidly, that mating her would settle something in him. That Lunarion’s blessing would hit, and suddenly he’d know what to do with all this, the old hate, the new want, the sheer terror of how much he had to lose now.
Instead, nothing. Not even his gift.
No sudden surge of strength. No vision. No whisper of a god in his ear. Just his same stubborn wolf, his same instincts, stretched between two truths he hated: they needed magic more than ever…and magic still scared the hell out of him.
The power had taken Dominic a while. It had been weeks before it awakened. Maybe that was it.
Or maybe he just wasn’t meant to have one.
“Arthur.” Dominic’s voice snapped him back.
Every eye swung to him. Great.
He cleared his throat. “We’re not bringing a hybrid into the middle of the valley,” he said.
“Not near the compound. Not near the human town. If we capture one, it gets caged at the edge. Old mine, maybe. Layer it with every ward the covens can spare, and every gun we own pointed at its head. One slip, we kill it.”
“You’re assuming we can take one alive,” Leonid said, “you’ve clearly never fought one of the new batch.”
“We have,” Rory said quietly. “It almost took my arm off. We still bound it. Held it for an hour.”
“And then?” Arthur asked.
Kiara’s expression flickered. “And then it ripped its own throat out rather than be questioned,” she said, “so next time, we go in with contingencies.”
Lovely.
The debate went on. Alex arguing for violence. Witches insisting on containment. Leonid mocking every sign of caution. Nomads and vampires trying to carve out a neutral middle meant they’d commit as little as possible until they saw which way the wind blew.
Arthur heard his own voice offering compromises, patrol patterns, ward lines, and trap locations. He even made it through a whole exchange with Dani, where she answered a question about sigil ranges without looking at him, and he pretended that it didn’t land like a blade.
He could do this. Juggle this. Juggle her.
He could not, apparently, control the rest of the world.
The cry came from above.
High on the slope, sharp enough to slice the meeting clean in two.
Every wolf in the basin snapped to attention. Arthur’s head jerked up, heart slamming, wolf lunging for the surface.
Another shout. This time, he caught words.
“Incoming!”
The wind shifted.
He smelled it before he saw them.
Wrong.
Not just wolf, not just witch, not just rot. All of it and none of it. The same stomach-turning blend he’d scented on ripped corpses at Voskresen.
Hybrids.
Lots of them.
Chase swore beside him. Dominic’s head swung toward the tree line. Leonid’s grin flashed, bright and savage.
“Well,” the Volnoye Alpha said, voice almost cheerful, “looks like the enemy doesn’t care about your agenda.”
Shapes broke over the rise above them, dark against the snow, moving too fast, too smooth. A whole pack, pouring down the mountain.
Straight toward the meeting ground.