CHAPTER 1 LAINSZ
The forest was starting to piss me off. I snapped my jaws at a tree as its branch reached out to rake through my fur. I’d been patrolling for an hour, and so far the paths had been empty, the forest quiet except for the wind and the whispering. The endless nagging of the trees, trying to put me off my work.
I took patrolling seriously. It was life or death. If leeches found their way through the protections around our cottage—the closest guard post to the academy, the line we secretly held against those monsters, two miles closer than the post they knew about—they could reach the packlands beyond ours. They’d decimate families, kill innocents and children, and leave homes burning.