The Obsidian Wolf's Sacred Mate (Hotshot Wolves #6)

1 Reed

The jump light strobed red across the cabin.

It was dawn on a late September day, the brutal, tinder-dry peak of fire season in Northern California, but tonight my hotshot crew wasn’t dropping into a crown fire.

Somewhere in the California desert, monsters I had never met were preparing to open my mate’s veins and drain the gold out of her marrow, and I was sitting in a shaking metal box in the sky.

Twenty goddamn years of carrying a ghost, of mourning a woman I thought I’d killed.

Avaline.

I had carved her name into my soul with claws of guilt while walking around pretending to be half a man. The grief had been my armor, my punishment, my heavy, suffocating truth.

But it was a lie. She was alive. Breathing. Caged in the dark while I sat on my alpha throne in the light.

You buried her. My wolf hadn’t stopped howling. You lit a watchfire and spoke her name to the moon and you buried a woman who was breathing.

Shut up. I squeezed my eyes shut, digging my blunt fingernails into the scarred flesh of my forearm. We didn’t know.

The burn scars ran down both arms, raised and pale. Wolves heal. We forget in our flesh what we can’t forget anywhere else. But the solstice magic that had torn her out of my hands had written itself into me deeper than healing reached.

I had spent two decades pretending I didn’t rub them raw every time the grief came up my throat.

She was alive. She had been alive the whole time.

We should have felt her. The beast slammed his bulk against the inner walls of my skull, claws raking the boundary between man and monster. We had her scent on our mouth. We had her taste on our tongue. You let them tell you she was ash!

I pressed the scar until the pain gave me somewhere to stand.

“Kenji.” I adjusted my headset. “Comms.”

Kenji didn’t look up from the panel strapped to his thigh.

“Primary’s channel four, encrypted. Secondary’s the Lodestone relay through Maren’s people—it’s not a radio, it’s chalk, so if I go quiet on four, everybody watch the witch.

” He tapped two fingers against his temple.

“Ranges are garbage inside the Verdant Order’s ward-dome. Assume you’re deaf below the roofline.”

“Copy. Del. Safety zone.”

Del turned from the far bench, mustache flattened under his oxygen mask, and gave me a grin—the one that said he’d follow me into a crown fire and complain about the walk.

“Secondary rally’s two clicks south, behind the ridgeline, past the old service road.

Lookouts posted the second we’re down. Escape route’s the wash on the east flank.

It’ll be dry this time of year, so it runs like a highway.

” The grin held. “LCES is tight, boss. You built it tight. Stop checking it.”

I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. LCES was the only religion I trusted anymore—Lookouts, Communications, Escape routes, Safety zones—the catechism that had kept my pack alive across a hundred fires, and I recited it now because it was the only prayer I had left that had ever been answered.

There was no safety zone for what I’d come to do. There was no escape route from this.

Across the cabin, Bowie had gone gray under his mask.

The kid was twenty-three and the strongest sawyer I’d ever crewed.

Right now he was pressed into the bulkhead like it might let him through, his knuckles white.

Hayes had one hand flat against the fuselage wall, reading the storm inside it.

Hollis’ lips were moving in a silent fireline charm—and I felt the pressure of their magic, felt the ancestral ties of the Founding Alpha connecting me to their spirits like a physical weight.

Rein it in.

Not the wolf that time. The wolf wanted the opposite.

That was the man, what little of him was left.

You’re crushing them.

I couldn’t rein it in. That was the truth of it, and it shamed me.

For years I’d kept this leash short enough that the crew forgot what was on the end of it—the slow-moving Superintendent, the man who spent one word where other alphas spent a hundred.

The mountain that never so much as trembled.

I’d earned that stillness. I’d bled for it.

And tonight it was coming apart in my chest like a burning slope going to slide.

“Boss is loud tonight,” Mac muttered, not quite low enough. He was strapping down a breaching charge with sour competence who still complained about every job. “Somebody put Brann on the next bird.”

“Brann’s home holding a mate.” Cal checked his carabiners, his big steady dad-voice dropping the temperature in the cabin. “Same as the rest of the lucky ones.”

“I’m just saying.” Mac cinched the strap. “Sovereign could stand on this and it’d feel like a Tuesday. This…” he tipped his chin at me without looking. “This feels like the whole ridge is about to come down.”

He wasn’t wrong. Brann was the only wolf who’d ever been able to stand inside my aura and push back—our Sovereign, my second, now our king. The one steady hand that could grip the back of my neck and make the mountain breathe.

But Brann was hundreds of miles north with his arms full of the future.

“Shut up,” I snapped, the words ripping out of my throat with a gravelly snarl that wasn’t entirely human.

My canines pressed against my lower lip, sharp and desperate.

The pressure in the cabin spiked, rolling off me in a suffocating wave that made Bowie choke on his own breath and Hollis slam back against the bulkhead.

“Just shut the fuck up. You think you know what this feels like, Mac? You don’t. ”

They went silent. They had to. They were my pack, and the leash I held them on was slick with the blood of my own failure.

Twenty-nine minutes.

The alpha control I’d prided myself on for two decades was a paper dam against a flood of absolute, unhinged fury. The rage felt hot and clean, a blinding white clarity that should have told me I wasn’t thinking straight.

The cargo engines howled, a low metallic vibration that rattled the panel rivets and shook my knees.

I closed my eyes, trying to lock my wolf behind the iron checklists of my Incident Command protocol.

The smell of aviation fuel, sweat, and the cold recycled oxygen of the masks vanished, cut through by a sensory intrusion so sharp it made my canines ache.

I closed my eyes and the summer came up out of the dark—unbidden, uninvited, a door I’d nailed shut swinging open on its own.

Wild honeysuckle and rain from a summer storm.

The whole farm smelled of it that June, so sweet it made your teeth ache, and she’d sat in the long grass with her back against the fence rail.

Nineteen years old, a dormant wolf shifter from the Scribe bloodline, on holiday with her parents, and she’d said she was useless without her wolf—and I had been determined to show her different.

She was night-blooming honeysuckle.

Heavy, thick, and sweet enough to taste on the back of my tongue.

And with it, the dry, sun-baked scent of split cedar fence posts and warm summer dust. It smelled impossibly fresh, as if a June dusk had just been pumped through the aircraft’s pressurized vents. I drew a second breath, my lungs burning for it, but the air was already flat and synthetic again.

Find her, my wolf demanded, pacing tight circles against my ribs, his fangs bared in the black of my mind. Stop breathing metal. Breed the fire into the line and tear the sky open. She is down there!

I closed my eyes, letting my head drop back against the vibrating bulkhead, and I reached for the scent. I let the leash go on my wolf entirely, directing the animal down into the dark, searching for the old fated-mate tether we’d half-struck under the solstice moon twenty years ago.

Avaline.

I pushed my consciousness down the frayed connection. It was like searching for a hair-thin wire of copper in a pitch-black room while a gale-force wind howled through it.

Follow the heat, the wolf growled, throwing his shoulder into the spiritual draft. We burned the bridge twenty years ago, but the foundation is stone. Drive through it!

I had spent two decades trying to force my way onto this exact path back into the Dreamscape.

In the first years after the farm burned, when the ash was still fresh on my boots and the packs had closed their ranks to keep out the Warden inquisitors, I had spent every single full moon on my knees in the dirt, trying to reach her down the mate tether.

I would hike past an active fireline into the black, silent woods of the high Sierra. I’d sit on a granite boulder under the cold white light of the moon, close my eyes, and build the Farm in the dark of my own mind.

I’d render every fence post, every cottonwood, the purple dusk sky, the smell of the honeysuckle.

I’d make it so real I could feel the dust between my toes.

And then I would stand in the Dreamscape and scream her name into the void until my throat bled, begging for any sign that her wolf was listening on the other end of the line.

I’d wait for a ripple in the water, a single leaf falling out of season, a phantom scent—anything to tell me her soul still existed.

But there had been only empty grass.

A graveyard of my own making.

Year after year of silence until I’d stopped trying.

I had told myself that the silence was proof she was dead, that the bond had snapped, and that continuing to search was just a coward’s way of refusing to carry the guilt.

I had warded the dream-farm in my own head, locked the gate, and walked away.

But she was alive. The line wasn’t dead. It was just warded on the other side.

I’m coming, I sent down the tether, throwing my Founding aura into the Dreamscape. Avaline, I’m coming.

“Boss?” Bowie’s voice sounded miles away, thin and warped by the engine drone. “Del, look at him. His hands are locking up. He’s not breathing.”

Mac stepped back. “Reed? Come on, man—”

I ignored them. I pushed harder, forcing my spirit down the link, desperate to breach the space where she was held.