6 Sloane
I had my good hand in a fistful of roots and my bad one against granite with a comms unit in hand, smeared red blood on the stone. I dragged myself up another two feet of near-vertical dark.
I thumbed the comms unit I’d borrowed from Finn again.
Static. A wall of it.
“Nothing.” I got the word out on a scrape of air. “Still nothing. It’s—it’s the Saint, it’s sitting on every band—”
“Don’t stop.” Finn’s voice came from just below and behind me, low, even, a man not remotely out of breath, and goddess, I hated him a little for that. “Keep climbing.”
“Your alpha needs to know.” I hauled up over a lip of stone and my knee found a root and I kept going. “I warned them Scorched Earth was a trap three days ago, but the transport list—if he doesn’t get the real coordinates the dormants will be gone, they’ll all be husks—”
“What warning?” The steady, infuriating calm he’d been carrying fractured. “What trap, Sloane? I wasn’t with the pack. I’ve been running for days. Tell me what you sent him.”
I dragged myself up another yard of steep granite, my bad hand screaming as it brushed the rock. The fever-heat radiating off my own skin made the night air feel like ice.
“Someone in the Conclave knew the Ridgeline Hotshots had hit the Order retreat, and decided to lay a trap. They named the operation Scorched Earth, but I found out it was bait. I sent a message to keep your pack from taking the bait and walking into an ambush. But your pack doesn’t know about Severance. ”
Below me, the scrape of his boots stopped. The silence that rushed in to fill the space was heavy.
I gripped the root tighter. “Finn?”
“Severance?” The word sounded like gravel in his throat.
“They’re gathering the dormants.” I pulled myself over another ledge, my chest heaving.
“They’re moving a bunch of them soon—somewhere—the final location is locked behind a warded partition on the drive.
The Verdant Order’s Inner Circle, with complicity from the highest offices of the Conclave Council, plan to sever the dormants from their wolves for good. ”
“I don’t understand. I thought they wanted the aurum latens. Wouldn’t this ruin the harvest?”
“They believe Severance will produce something even more powerful. I need to let my network know. And we’ll need all the help we can get. Your pack. Any other packs your alpha can get to help. And we need to crack open the drive to get that final location.”
“If they’re gathering dormants.” The rumble of his wolf bled through the human words. “Then the coordinates don’t matter. The Fireline Pack will find them anyway.”
“How would they know where to go?” The poison in my blood sang a shrill, awful note. “The transport locations were air-gapped. You saw me, I literally had to rip the drive out of the Praetor’s desk.”
“He has a map.” Finn was climbing again, his pace faster, closing the distance between us until I could feel the radiant, impossible heat of him against the backs of my knees.
“One of us is… Vanished Court. Santos. He’s got a map and with his bloodline magic he can track every dormant on the continent.
If the Verdant Order or the Conclave is gathering them into a central location for this Severance project... ”
“Then the clusters on this map will begin to converge.” The horrifying math assembled itself in my head. I stopped climbing. I turned my head, trying to see him in the dark, my breath tearing in and out of my throat. “Wait. Wait. A map of every dormant?”
“Yes. Climb.”
“Finn.” My mind was spinning, the fever and the terror twisting together until I couldn’t tell which was trying to kill me faster. “How did you find me?”
The silence from the dark below was loud.
“I traced a paper copy of Santos’ map.” The defense in his tone was brittle.
“I charted the empty spaces. The dead zones. There wasn’t a dormant within a hundred miles of the High Praetor.
I thought I had time. I thought I was staying exactly where you couldn’t be. ”
“The High Praetor’s house was clean.” A hysterical laugh tore out of my throat. “I would never have been here if I hadn’t found out about Severance.”
“I know.” The agony in those two words carried a crushing weight.
“So think about it.” I grabbed the collar of my shirt with my good hand, trying to pull air into my burning lungs. “Santos can map dormants. The Conclave and the Order—do they know who Santos is? What his blood magic can do?”
I heard Finn’s breath hitch. “Yeah. We slaughtered one of their outposts and used the map to find the retreat. Yeah. I bet they do. Sloane—”
“If they know he can map dormants, and they know your pack has him...” I squeezed my eyes shut, the dizzying, awful truth sliding into place.
“Then they know your alpha is watching the map. They’re not just gathering the dormant women for Severance, Finn.
They’re moving them on purpose to create massive, undeniable clusters on that map.
They’ll sever the dormants’ wolves and draw your pack into an ambush anyway. ”
“And Reed will think he’s walking into a rescue mission.” The low, dangerous sound of his wolf echoed off the granite.
“We have to get a signal out.” I jammed my thumb down on the comms button again, holding it until the plastic bit into my skin.
The hiss of the Saint’s interference poured out of the tiny speaker, drowning the sound of the wind, drowning everything.
“Come on. Come on, you piece of garbage, connect.”
“It won’t cut through the jamming.” His hand—large, impossibly warm, vibrating with a barely contained violence—brushed the rock an inch from my boot.
He didn’t touch me. But the proximity was a fire that burned away the cold creeping up from the valley below.
“We have to get higher,” Finn said. “There’s a fire lookout tower on the ridge. We ward it, we lock the Saint out, and we broadcast from the top.”
“My body is trying to tear itself in half.” The fever spiked so hard my vision went white at the edges.
“And we’ll take care of that too.” The fire in his voice sent warmth pooling low in my belly. “I’m sorry, Sloane. I worked my damned hardest not to let this happen. Not to do this to you. But—”
“There’s no turning back from it,” I whispered.
“There’s only going through it,” he said, his voice softening. “I’ll carry you. I will put you on my back and I will climb this mountain with you, but we are not dying here, and we are not letting my pack burn.”
I looked at the impossible vertical dark above us. I looked at the black, freezing valley below, where the frost was rising, patient and murderous.
I knew he was right. And more than that, my rising wolf longed to feel his hands on me.
My mate. Our souls forged for this.
But I couldn’t give in. Not yet.
“You touch me, the bond snaps, and I cook from the inside out.” I gripped the rock tighter, my bad hand leaving a smeared print on the stone. “I’m climbing. Just don’t let me fall.”
“Never.” He didn’t look away.
So I went up.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about a body eating itself.
It doesn’t hurt in one place. It would be a mercy if it hurt in one place—you could brace for it, you could wall it off.
This came from everywhere at once. The suppressant still choking through my veins from the last dose, cold and thick and murderous, and underneath it my wolf, awakening, howling for her mate, clawing at the poison from the inside.
The two of them met somewhere under my breastbone like a fire, and my body was the ground they fought on.
And every step he took behind me poured gasoline on it.
His scent came up the slope on the cold—wind off a high ridge, wet river stone, moss gone soft after rain—and it hit the fever like a struck match, and both my wrists lit.
The Ash Oath. Fourteen years old, chalk on my fingers, a vow I’d sworn in a Hearthward basement, and it had never once in all my thirty-two years done what it was now doing on this mountain.
My foot skated on granite.
I went sideways and I felt the air move behind me as he lunged, felt his whole body commit to the catch before his mind could veto it, and I threw myself the other way.
Hard. Into the rock. My shoulder took it and my bad hand took it and I bit down on the sound.
“Don’t.” It came out as a snarl I didn’t recognize. “Don’t catch me. Do not.”
His hands were already back at his sides. I could hear it in the silence he left—the terrible discipline of it, the space where a normal man would’ve grabbed my arm and steadied me and moved on with his night.
“I know,” he said. Quiet. Wrecked under the quiet. “I know. Keep moving.”
The worst part is that a piece of me wanted him to do it anyway.
Wanted to fall and be caught. Wanted his hands on me more than I have ever wanted anything, more than I wanted the war to end, more than I wanted my wolf, and that want was a beacon of its own, screaming down the mountain right alongside the Heat.
I pushed off the rock and climbed.
The tower came up out of the dark like something that had been waiting for me.
Stone base, squat and square, thick granite blocks, and above it the timber cab of an old fire lookout, glass cloudy but still intact, the whole thing hunched on the ridge crest.
Behind and below us, down in the valley we’d climbed out of, the cold was climbing too.
I didn’t have to look. I could feel it on the back of my neck, that pressure with a mind behind it, creeping up the slope at a pace that was in no hurry because it knew exactly how to follow our trail. The bond magic. My Heat.
The Verdant Order called the magical signature of it a Beacon.
“Stone.” I got a hand on the door. “It’s stone—that’s—we can ward stone, granite will hold my Lodestone sigil, timber wouldn’t but this will—”