Chapter 27 - Freya #4
Two Denraider enforcers lunged for her, trying to recapture their escaped prisoner. Rage replaced terror in my chest, pure and devastating.
“Nobody touches our family,” Rowan snarled.
My magic surged, and my lightning erupted with the strength of all my mates behind it, striking them both down before they could touch her.
My lightning jumped from their falling bodies, flickering harmlessly over Valkyrie as if in greeting.
The two alphas dropped, their bodies smoking from the Odinswolf power that had torn through them.
But instead of running toward our lines, instead of seeking the safety that was so close, Valkyrie did something that made my chest swell with fierce pride.
She turned toward Mavis.
Dragging her bound hands under her feet, she managed to get them in front of her. The ropes had darkened with her blood, but she ignored it. Lightning crackled from her fingertips, and the iron chains binding the old alpha’s wrists shattered into pieces.
As she freed him, she leaned close and whispered something urgent in his ear. Mavis nodded once, his weathered face grim with understanding. Whatever she’d told him, he accepted it with the stoic courage of a wolf who’d already sacrificed everything.
They both shifted. Sensing the tides were rising, Lydell did the same.
“This is for every wolf you’ve enslaved,” Mavis snarled out, projecting for all to hear, before launching himself at Lydell with decades of suppressed rage.
They collided in a tangle of claws and fangs. Lydell was larger, stronger, more dominant — everything Denraider valued in a leader. But Mavis fought with the desperate fury of a wolf who had nothing left to lose and everything to avenge.
Our allied forces pressed closer, but I couldn’t tear my attention away from the battle on the outcropping. This was justice decades in the making. The slave facing his master. The conquered striking back at the conqueror.
They bit and tore at each other with fierce growls and snarls, as our forces took out his enforcers and sycophants one by one.
At one point, Mavis leaped at Lydell, but the pack alpha ducked beneath him, biting and clawing at Mavis’s underbelly as he soared overhead.
As soon as Mavis landed, his head whipped around, and he threw himself bodily at Lydell yet again, connecting this time.
His weight pinned Lydell down as his fangs found Lydell’s throat.
Even as Mavis bled out his life’s blood onto the pack alpha, his jaws ensured the killing blow.
Lydell struggled out from under him, but his movements were sluggish, weakened by the massive wound Mavis had torn in his throat.
Both were bleeding, both dying.
“This pack dies with you,” Mavis gasped, his alpha voice carrying. “And the conquered will be free at last.”
Lydell’s jaw opened and closed as though he, too, wanted to speak his final words. But as their pooling blood mixed, his snout dropped, his tongue lolling out.
The shifter who’d called Rowan worthless, who’d built an empire on conquest and cruelty, was dead. And so was the alpha who’d died fighting for freedom, his sacrifice buying liberty for thousands.
Both wolves stopped moving, their blood mixed on the ancient stone.
Rowan’s complex blend of grief and satisfaction rose; justice had been served, but not by his hand. Someone else had struck the killing blow.
“Why aren’t they still fighting? Shouldn’t one of his enforcers take over?” I asked through the pack mind, confusion cutting through my relief as I watched Denraider wolves throughout the battlefield suddenly stop fighting.
“Mavis killed Lydell, so the pack alpha power would go to him,” Gage explained through our bonds, his tactical mind already processing the implications. “But Mavis is dead too.”
“And without an heir,” Heath added grimly. “Mavis wasn’t expecting to rule, so he wouldn’t have named a successor.”
“And Lydell’s named heir is dead up there next to him,” Rowan remembered.
“So what does that mean?” I pressed, watching as some Denraider wolves began laying down their weapons or baring their throats in submission to the nearest alpha. Others fled the battlefield.
“Chaos,” Zak replied.
“Without a clear line of succession, the pack bond shatters. Denraider just became a thousand individual wolves with no alpha to bind them together. They’re leaderless until they can agree on new leadership.”
“That could take months,” Flint added.
Through the pack mind, I felt our allied fighters accepting surrenders and securing prisoners. Many Denraider wolves seemed almost relieved. Others looked lost, uncertain how to function without an alpha’s commands driving their every action.
But as I searched the chaos for any sign of my sister’s white hair, my blood turned to ice.
Valkyrie was gone.
“Where is she?” I demanded, my voice cracking with renewed panic. “I saw her free Mavis, but then—”
“There!” Tor’s urgent shout cut through my spiraling thoughts.
Through Dream’s keen eyes, I saw them the Denraider loyalists who’d held the rear goat trail retreating to the west. Two of them hauled a white wolf between them, fresh rope cinched tight across her chest and neck.
The rope went taut as Valkyrie resisted, and she skidded across the ground when they dragged her forward anyway.
They’d taken her. In the chaos of Lydell’s death and Mavis’s sacrifice, a handful of Denraider’s most loyal followers had grabbed my sister and fled rather than surrender to our forces.
“If they can agree on a leader between them…” Flint warned.
“No!” I screamed, both aloud and through the pack mind.
The shared consciousness surged forward as one, every allied fighter turning toward the fleeing Denraider wolves. Instinct screamed at me to loose them, to turn the entire alliance into a hunting pack and run Valkyrie’s captors into the ground.
I forced the impulse down. Denraider wolves still snarled in our midst, some baring their throats in surrender, some fleeing, others too shocked by Lydell’s death to know what to do.
Our people were grappling them to the ground, disarming them, binding their hands.
If we all broke formation now, if we turned our backs on prisoners and wounded to chase a handful of kidnappers…
“I can’t just leave you,” I pushed through the pack mind, the thought laced with guilt and panic. Images of Valkyrie being dragged away spilled with my words. “I have to get her back, but I won’t abandon you.”
Confidence flowed back at me like a tide.
“Go,” Astrid’s mental voice rumbled, full of battle-drunk satisfaction. “We’ve got the prisoners. Ony and I can finish this from here.”
“We’ll hold the line while you go after them,” Artemis promised.
“If there was a single chance my littermate might still live,” Thatcher’s voice wavered. “I would go after him in a heartbeat.”
Only then did I recall that Luka had executed Thatcher’s beta littermate in an effort to keep Thatcher in check. He understood better than anyone how important this was to me.
Hugo and Idori gave me their leave as well. “Our walls still stand. Our wolves will guard our packs’ elders, children, and the Denraider prisoners alike.”
Even Gabriel’s presence pressed in. “We’ll handle any of their dominant wolves who won’t surrender. You go on.”
“Then I’m sorry, but the pack mind might fall,” I warned.
“No worries, we’ll just do it the old-fashioned way,” Thatcher laughed.
“Get out of here,” Astrid insisted, and I sent them my gratitude.
The worst of the fighting was over. They could finish this.
I’d found my sister. I’d seen her alive and strong and selfless, choosing to free another rather than save herself. I’d watched her wield Odinswolf magic, proof of her lineage.
And now she was disappearing into the wildlands, still a prisoner, still beyond my reach.
But I wasn’t going to lose her. I refused.
“I’m with you,” Rowan growled, and together, we raced across the battlefield.