Chapter 22 - Arthur
Arthur hit the north ridge already half feral.
Broken wards, burned earth, the stink of hybrid rot and fire, the trail was a wound up the mountainside. The bond tugged in his chest, weak but there.
Alive, the bond said.
Alive. Hurt. Fading.
Not good enough.
They crested the last rise, and the trees fell away into a shallow bowl scooped out of the mountain. At the far edge, the black mouth of an old mine gaped in the rock. In the center, snow had melted to scorched earth and cracked stone, an ugly black crescent where fire had already eaten.
Dani’s fire.
Hybrids churned through the hollow, some twisted and hulking, some almost human with gold-bright eyes and too-long limbs.
In front of the mine entrance, a cluster of witches was corralled into a rough line, burnt and bloody, but on their feet.
Dani stood at the front, shoulders squared, hair a wild tangle, heat shimmering faintly around her hands, Edith braced at her side.
Fenred paced before them, human-shaped, eyes molten, barking orders at the hybrids that pushed the witches toward the mine.
Arthur’s teeth bared.
“We go now,” he said.
Dominic’s nod was sharp. Rory rolled his shoulders. Leonid was already smiling like this was his favorite game. Wolves shifted around him in a ripple of fur and bone.
Arthur let his wolf rise.
Bones broke and re-knit, muscles twisting, skin splitting to fur. Then he was on four paws, claws biting into snow. He threw his head back and howled.
Volkhov answered in a dark, iron roar. Severney’s pale voices bellowed from the flanks. Volnoye screamed like something feral let off the leash.
They poured down into the bowl like an avalanche.
Hybrids shrieked and surged to meet them.
The first hit Arthur full in the chest, claws raking his side. He caught its throat and ripped, hot foul blood flooding his mouth. He spat it out and hurled himself at the next.
Around him, chaos exploded.
Dominic, a huge dark wolf, slammed two hybrids aside in one charge. Leonid, golden-bright, carved a path with his claws. Severney flickered at the edges, hamstringing anything that turned.
Arthur kept one focus. the witches.
Dani.
At the first clash, she tore her bound hands apart. The rope charred and snapped. A wave of fire flared low and fast, catching three hybrids mid-lunge and sending them screaming back.
Pride and fear hit him in the same beat.
One hybrid broke past Volkhov’s line, arrowing straight for the witches. Arthur swerved, slammed into it side-on, and drove it into a half-burned stump. Bone crunched; viscera spilled hot across his paws.
“Left!” Chase yelled.
Arthur spun—
Too slow.
A larger hybrid hit him from the side, shoulders as broad as Dominic’s, eyes an ugly gold. They went down in a tangle, teeth and claws, snow stained red beneath them. It smelled horribly familiar, sweat and gun oil and Nordan barracks, twisted into something wrong.
Rage gave him strength. The hybrid’s jaws locked on his shoulder; pain flashed white. The bond flared, Dani’s alarm knifing through him.
He roared, heaved with his hind legs, and kicked the hybrid off. It crashed into two of its own.
More poured from the mine. For every monster they dropped, more scrambled over the bodies. Wolves started to flag. Witches stumbled, spells fraying.
It wouldn’t be enough.
Lunarion, he thought, not so much a prayer as a snarl. If you’re going to help, now would be excellent.
Something answered.
Cold surged through him like a river of ice, starting deep in his chest and racing along every nerve. His muscles locked. His vision blurred.
His bones…shifted.
Not the familiar shift. This was worse. As if invisible hands grabbed either end of him and pulled.
His front legs buckled. He hit the ground hard, snow exploding around him. Pain ripped down his spine; his ribs cracked, then stretched, his skin straining to contain him. His skull felt too tight, pressure building until he thought it would split.
A scream tore out of him, half-wolf, half something larger.
Dani’s panic hit through the bond, sharp and terrified.
He couldn’t answer. Could barely breathe.
His claws gouged trenches in the frozen earth as his frame expanded, hindquarters thickening, shoulders broadening past anything remotely wolf. Muscles bunched and knotted, reknitting over new bone. For one hideous heartbeat, he thought he’d broken, gone hybrid.
Then everything snapped into place.
The agony dimmed to a deep, pounding ache. The world rushed back.
He was standing.
The ground seemed further away. Everything else, hybrids, wolves, and the mine entrance, looked smaller. He glanced down.
His front paws were massive, heavy, fur thicker over them, claws curved like hooks. When he shifted his weight, the earth thudded under him.
Hybrids froze.
The nearest stared up at him, gold eyes wide with a predator’s instinctive knowledge that it was no longer at the top of the food chain.
He couldn’t see himself, but he felt the shape of his body, spine longer, barrel deeper, shoulders and haunches stacked with ridiculous muscle. His muzzle is broader, jaw heavier. He was twice as large as before.
Not wolf.
Something closer to a bear.
Ice Bear, his pack had called him for years, laughing.
Lunarion, he thought, a little wild. You bastard.
He took a step.
The hybrid bolted.
Arthur swiped without really putting his weight behind it. His paw caught the hybrid mid-back. Its spine snapped with an audible crack.
Silence rippled outward for a moment. Wolves and hybrids alike stared.
“Well,” Leonid said faintly from somewhere off to his right, “that’s…new.”
Arthur didn’t give anyone time to gawk.
He moved.
His stride ate the ground in heavy lunges. A hybrid flung itself at his flank; it bounced off like a dog hitting a truck. Claws scored his fur and barely scratched. He seized it in his jaws, teeth sinking straight through bone, and shook until its neck broke.
He plowed into the thickest knot of hybrids like a boulder through saplings.
One paw smashed two down at once, ribs collapsing under the blow. He stamped another into the snow and put all his weight on it until it stopped screaming. Hybrids tried to climb him, and he shook his shoulders and sent them flying.
Behind him, wolves rallied, their shock turning to something fiercer, wild joy threading through their fear.
“Ice Bear!” Chase whooped, breathless and half-hysterical, “Fucking brilliant!”
Arthur didn’t look back.
Dani.
He found her in the chaos. She’d dropped when he screamed, but she was up again now, swaying a little, eyes bright, hair wild.
She looked at him and didn’t flinch.
Her mouth curved, fierce and satisfied. “About time!” she yelled, and flung out a hand.
Fire answered.
Not the great tearing wall from before. This was a controlled burn, ribbons of flame weaving between wolves and vampires, licking at hybrid legs, driving them inward, away from the witches and toward Arthur’s waiting claws.
They fell into step as if they’d practiced it.
Dani burned gaps, and he charged through them. A hybrid lunged for her blind side, and Arthur barreled in and broke its back. Flame washed over his fur and slid off, more heat than pain. He cleared space; she filled it with more fire.
Witch and monster-wolf, fire and ice, fighting in tandem.
Fenred finally moved.
He’d watched his creatures die from the fringe, saving himself. Now his eyes burned brighter; his shape warped, bones lengthening, mouth stretching too wide, hands twisting into claws.
He blurred.
One heartbeat, he was at the edge of the hollow, shrieking orders. The next thing he was in front of Dani, his hand closing around her throat, dragging her up onto her toes.
Arthur roared.
Sound shook the air, his own ears ringing. He thundered toward them, but there were bodies everywhere, hybrids, wolves, witches ducking, vampires snarling. Too many moving pieces.
Fenred bared his teeth in Dani’s face. “He came,” he rasped, voice distorted. “Good little alpha.”
Dani’s fingers scrabbled at his wrist, sparks sputtering uselessly. She’d burned herself near dry.
Arthur smashed a hybrid aside, trampled another, flung a third. Snow and blood sprayed. Leonid swore as Arthur’s bulk barely missed him.
Fenred hauled Dani in front of him, claws dimpling the skin at her throat. “One more step,” he snarled, “and I rip her apart.”
Arthur dug his claws in, stopping so fast his joints screamed. His heart slammed against his ribs hard enough to hurt.
The battlefield stuttered.
“Let her go,” Dominic said, human again now, bare-chested, blood-slicked, eyes murder-cold. “You die quick.”
Fenred laughed, jagged and breathless. “I die either way,” he said. “But I can take a witch with me.”
Arthur could barely see anything except the line of Fenred’s arm, the fragile column of Dani’s throat, her eyes on his.
Through the bond, a flare that wasn’t fear, exactly. Fierce. Steady.
He moved.
Not straight at them.
Sideways.
Arthur lunged for the rock shoulder of the mine instead, claws biting into frozen stone. His new weight dragged him half up the face in a spray of shattered rock.
For one stunned heartbeat, everyone simply stared.
Then he kicked off.
He dropped like a felled tree.
Not on Dani.
On Fenred’s legs.
Bone crunched like dry twigs. Fenred screamed, grip snapping open. Dani dropped, rolling instinctively. Fire burst from her hands on reflex, searing up Fenred’s arms and across his face. Flesh blistered; he howled, thrashing, one leg a ruined mess beneath Arthur’s bulk.
Arthur shifted his weight, slamming his massive forepaw across Fenred’s hips, pinning him. Hybrids lunged to help their master; wolves hit them from the sides, Dominic a dark blur, Leonid laughing like a madman, Rory’s wolves pale flashes of teeth.
“Alive!” Lavinia shouted hoarsely from the witches’ line. “We need him alive!”
Arthur heard the snarl Leonid bit back at that. Felt Dominic’s urge to tear Fenred’s head off like a physical thing.
He didn’t give them the chance.
He slid his paw up, crushing Fenred’s arms to his sides, and lowered his head until his jaws closed around the bastard’s throat.
Not biting.
Yet.
Fenred panted wetly, eyes wild, lips peeling back from his teeth. Smoke curled from the burns along his jaw. “Do it,” he spat, voice bubbling through blood. “Kill me. You think it matters? We’ll make more.”
Arthur squeezed, just enough to cut his breath, not enough to crush.
“You die,” he rumbled around Fenred’s neck, low and lethal, “when I say.”
Hybrids still standing shrieked and broke, some bolting into the trees, some trying to scramble back into the mine. Severney and Volnoye peeled off in pursuit, Leonid hunting after a fleeing pair, expression rapt.
Rory’s voice cut through the din. “Let them run! We have what we came for!”
Wolves closed in around Fenred’s pinned form, wary of Arthur’s claws and teeth.
Chains came out, iron, wolfsbane-soaked. Chase and Theodore worked fast, hands shaking with adrenaline, looping them around Fenred’s wrists, his one good ankle, his chest. One coil settled snug just behind Arthur’s teeth.
“Got him,” Chase panted. “You can…probably stop crushing his pelvis now.”
Arthur huffed, a sound half growl, half exhausted laugh, and eased a fraction of his weight off Fenred’s torn legs without lifting his paw from the hybrid’s chest or his jaws from his throat.
Fenred wheezed, bound and broken, and finally, blessedly, contained.
Around them, the last of the hybrids fell. Wolves dragged bodies into heaps. Witches who could stand moved among their own, healing where they could, closing eyes where they couldn’t.
Dani limped into Arthur’s line of sight.
Soot streaked her skin, burns mottled her arms. Her hair was a wild halo, her voice shredded, but she was upright. Alive. The bond hummed between them, battered and bright.
Her gaze traveled from his massive shoulders down to his paws, then up to his jaws at Fenred’s throat.
Her mouth quirked, tired and fierce. “Nice upgrade,” she rasped.
Relief hit him so hard his legs almost gave out.
He tightened his grip on Fenred instead.
Ice Bear, he thought, with something that might one day be grim amusement. Fine.
He could be whatever the hell Lunarion wanted.
So long as Dani was standing.