Chapter 10
Ten
The Peaks did not hurry to greet them.
They loomed on the horizon, jagged and spectral, their crowns pale with snow despite the season. The closer the road bent toward them, the quieter the world became. Birds abandoned the branches. Even the air thinned, edged with a steely tang that tasted like old coins.
Maude rode in silence, her chin tugged low against the rising chill. Her focus stayed on the path. On the way the shadows deepened in the underbrush, stretching into strange, too-long shapes.
Bailey had taken her this way once. Years ago, before his hair had gone entirely silver, before her sarcasm had hardened into a weapon.
He’d pointed out the signs—the way moss clung heavier on one side of the trees, how the wind carried wrong in the hollows.
Places where magic lay thin as parchment, easy to rip.
The Duskmire had always been hungry.
Now she felt its hunger pressing against her skin.
Ahead, Wesley rode straight-backed, easy, one hand loose on the reins. She hated that he hadn’t cracked a joke for miles. The absence of his usual chatter left her unsettled.
Idiot, she reminded herself. Not a bastard.
Idiot was safer. Bastards could wound. Idiots you could dismiss.
Still, when his head tilted slightly, sunlight catching on the line of his jaw, she felt something traitorous stir in her chest. Not attraction, she told herself firmly. Just nerves. Just the strangeness of being here, of not being alone.
Pickles snorted, and Maude muttered, “Traitor,” under her breath.
The road dwindled to little more than deer tracks, trees knit close together, branches clawing across the sky to blot out the last of the light.
The horses stepped carefully, their hoofbeats muffled by packed needles.
The Duskmire Peaks didn’t welcome strangers.
That was Bailey’s first lesson, and Maude felt it keenly now.
“Charming place for a stroll,” Wesley murmured at last, his voice pitched low.
“Don’t get cocky—it’s not impressed with you either.”
He glanced over, and there it was—the twitch of his mouth, that smirk she’d been waiting for. But it didn’t land the way it usually did. It looked like armor, not amusement.
They pressed deeper until the first sign emerged from the mist. It rose pale from the earth, tendrils coiling around tree trunks like restless spirits. And then it moved. Fast.
A shape coalesced in the fog, lupine, with eyes like lantern coals. Another followed. Wolves, their bodies half air, half shadow, their teeth bared and glinting wet though nothing solid moored them.
Maude’s hand flew to the pouch at her belt. “Spectral beasts,” she hissed. “Don’t let them surround us.”
Wesley’s horse danced nervously under him, but his hands stayed steady. “Tell me what to do.”
The words did something unhelpful to her chest. The immediate trust.
“Salt,” she said, digging in her satchel. She tossed him a small pouch. “Circle wide. They can’t cross it.”
They split without another word, riding opposite arcs through the ferns and damp bracken.
Maude leaned, scattering a pale ribbon that hissed where it touched the ground.
The mist wolves stalked sideways, testing for gaps.
One lunged and struck the white line. The impact rippled the fog that made its chest, then recoiled as if shocked.
It snarled, a sound like breath dragged over glass.
“Left!” Wesley called.
She adjusted, closing the loop between a jut of stone and a fallen birch. He mirrored her on the right, salt streaming steady from his fist. Then he wheeled his horse inside the incomplete circle and cut hard left.
Two wolves overshot, momentum carrying them straight into the not-quite-visible mesh. They hit the ring and howled—an awful, splitting sound—as their forms fizzed against the salt like fat on a griddle.
Wesley glanced at her—hair wild, eyes burning green, salt flashing from her hand like lightning in a storm. His mouth curved, breath ragged. “Pretty.”
“Bite me.”
“Later,” he shot back, reckless grin flashing as he skidded past—and she would have hexed him for that if three more wolves hadn’t paced closer, eyes burning, jaws parting in silent howls.
One tried again; the line hissed brighter.
The beast wavered, tore apart like smoke in the wind, and reformed outside the ring.
“Hold,” Maude said, breathless, more to herself than to him. “Just hold.”
They waited. The mist thinned by a measure, the air relaxing its grip on her lungs. The wolves’ eyes guttered to embers and then—finally—faded. The last of them bled back into fog and was gone. Silence fell so quickly it rang.
Wesley guided his horse back toward her. His grip on the reins was white-knuckled.
“Don’t get comfortable,” she said, pulse still banging at her ribs. “Those weren’t wanderers—they were scouts. The Peaks always send scouts.”
“Of course they do,” he said dryly.
She urged Pickles forward. The salt circle would lose its charge in minutes. They needed distance. They needed high ground, rock to break the mist’s hold. She scanned ahead, mapping the rise between twisted pines and black spruce.
They didn’t make it far.
Wind sighed through the canopy with no leaves to justify the sound.
The moss at their horses’ feet shivered.
A curling motion began at the edges of the world, so subtle at first that Maude thought it was just her vision adjusting to the gloom.
Then it thickened, coalescing into a river of fog flowing downhill to meet them.
“Move,” she snapped. “Now.”
Wesley didn’t ask a single foolish question.
He dug his heels inward; his bay surged.
Pickles lunged after him. They pounded up the slope, the ground slick with a skin of wet needles.
Mist wheeled at their sides and swept forward to cut them off.
Three wolves formed ahead in the span of a heartbeat, more solid than the scouts, sinew of fog twined tight over lanes of emptiness, the suggestion of ribs.
An alpha pushed its head through the air, muzzle sharpened out of nothing, and bared spectral teeth.
“Right!” Wesley called.
“Left!” she countered at the same time.
They split again on instinct, a living pair of parentheses around the threat.
Maude yanked her horse hard and spat a quick ward, flicking two iron shavings from the vial in her palm.
The shavings burned with a dim red spark where they landed.
One wolf swiped a paw over them and lost half its foreleg for a second; it reformed with a shuddering ripple, slowed.
Wesley’s bay bunched its haunches and leapt a fallen tree. For a breath he hung in the air with the animal, coat flaring, and Maude had a stupid, ill-timed thought: Beautiful. The moment broke, and the mist crashed against the bark, spilling in a hiss around his horse’s legs.
“Don’t let it wrap the fetlocks!” she yelled. “It leaches heat first.”
“How comforting,” he called back. He slammed his boots to ground on the far side, reined in, and—saints—tore free the iron buckle from his saddlebags. He dragged it along the earth in a half-circle, sparks biting from stone, the line smoking where iron met soil.
“Clever,” Maude muttered, and didn’t hate him for a full second.
Her side was worse. The alpha tracked her, reading intention like a book. Pickles’s ears flattened; the horse surged, sure-footed and furious. They crested a lip of land—and the ground dropped away. A sinkhole masked by debris yawned under the horse’s forefeet.
Pickles threw himself sideways in a move that would have sent a lesser rider flying. Maude clung with knees and breath and every ugly fear she owned. The horse found purchase, skidding, and she felt the hole’s cold breath on her ankle. The alpha took the chance and lunged.
She didn’t think. She flung a hand and spoke a word Bailey never let her use unless it was truly bad. Power cracked in the air like a snapped bone. The wolf’s muzzle struck an invisible pane and split apart, reforming with a wet sound on the far side. Its eyes burned brighter.
“Here!” Wesley’s voice—too close, too fast.
He barreled in, swinging out of the saddle before the bay had even stopped.
Hitting the ground in a low crouch, he yanked the salt pouch straight off her hip, caught it in one smooth motion, and slashed a white line across the mouth of the sinkhole.
Then he planted himself squarely between Maude and the alpha.
“Move, Wesley!” she snapped. “It’ll—”
The alpha struck the new line; the salt flared. The thing’s head blew wide in soundless fury, then re-knit, slower this time. She used the beat. Pickles scrambled up enough to step away from the hole. Maude swung a leg over and dropped to the ground, ankle shrieking. She didn’t listen.
“Give me the iron shavings,” Wesley said, not looking at her, palm open.
She tipped a measured heap into his hand. He flung them low, wide, shallow. They landed like a scattering of dark stars across the moss. The mist thickened there, unhappy with the field of bite.
The alpha paced, testing for a gap. The fog at their backs bunched into another wolf, and another, flank to flank, hemming them to the lip of earth. Above, the canopy shivered like it had remembered wind.
“We hold here,” Maude said. “Anchor. Fire if you can.”
He didn’t argue. He glanced once at the slope, measuring. “You have anything fast?”
“Not elegant,” she said, already digging. “But fast, yes.”
She pulled a squat jar from her satchel, wax-sealed and smudged with soot. She cracked the seal with a thumbnail, whispered a string of ugly little syllables, and slammed the jar down. Flames crawled out like a curious animal, then roared. The wolves recoiled with a hiss.
Wesley had flint out and a bundle of twigs gathered in seconds. He fed the jar’s blaze, coaxing it along the iron-salted arc he’d scratched, turning the firewall into scalloped teeth. The air heated so fast, Maude’s face stung.
The wolves shifted tactics.