Chapter 7
Heath’s eyes rolled back for a terrifying heartbeat, the whites showing, before he fought his way back to consciousness through sheer, bloody-minded Alpha will. When his gaze locked onto hers, the amber was clouded with blood vessels that had burst from sheer pressure. Blood—bright, arterial red—began to trickle from his left nostril, dripping down his upper lip and into the stubble of his chin.
“An eater of stars,” he whispered, his voice nothing more than a ruined rasp. “An Umbral Maw that was chained when the first packs crossed the ice shelf. It doesn't sleep, Wrenley. It waits. It feeds on the ley-line marrow of the mountains. And for seven years... I have been the only thing stuffing wool into its mouth.”
Another horn blast sounded, closer this time. Inside the bailey.
Then came the savage, synchronized howls of two hundred Council enforcers—bloodthirsty, trained predators baying for an easy kill.
“Garyth knows,” Wrenley whispered, the horror solidifying in her gut like a stone. “He knows the eclipse is coming. He knows you’re weak.”
She looked up toward the high clerestory windows.
Above the crumbling stone battlements, the sky was bruised a deep, unnatural violet. The full moon, which should have poured brilliant silver across the snow, was being devoured. A creeping, pitch-black crescent had already swallowed half the lunar disc, leaving behind a bloody, rusted corona that cast sickening crimson light across the hall.
The celestial eclipse.
Every legend she had heard as an orphaned pup in the northern border camps flooded her mind. When the moon was eclipsed, the wild magic of the earth churned like a stormy sea. Shifter wards thinned to tissue paper. The blood of the royal Lycan lines ran sluggish, stripped of their lunar blessing.
Garyth had timed this down to the very minute.
He hadn't sent Wrenley three weeks ago by chance. He had tracked her speed through the blizzards, calculated the exact hour she would infiltrate the keep, and followed behind her vanguard like a jackal shadowing an eagle.
“He didn't send me to assassinate a tyrant,” Wrenley said, her voice trembling with rising fury. “He sent me to be the tripwire. To make sure you were engaged, distracted, or wounded when he breached the outer wall.”
“He sent you because he wanted a scapegoat with rogue blood,” Heath answered. Every syllable seemed to cost him an ocean of blood. His chest heaved against his ribs, shallow and rattling. “If the valley dies... if the seal breaks... the Northern Council can claim they tried to save Dunmore from a lunatic Alpha and his cutthroat assassin. He walks away as the tragic survivor. He claims the vacant territory. He rules the ashes.”
*BANG.*
The massive iron portcullis at the northern entrance groaned.
A blinding flare of white alchemical fire bloomed against the metal bars. The ancient wards that Heath had sustained for seven years flickered, sputtering like dying candles, before letting out a high-pitched, crystalline shriek that made Wrenley wince.
The iron teeth embedded in the granite sill began to bend, glowing red under the assault of council war-magics.
“Wrenley.”
Heath’s voice was suddenly calm. The frantic, strained edge had vanished, replaced by an Alpha’s terrifying, absolute resolve.
She turned back to him.
He was leaning forward against the terrible drag of the obsidian chains, his amber eyes burning into hers with a golden fire so pure it stole the breath from her throat.
“The dais has a subterranean flue behind the altar,” he said, his words measured, deliberate. “It was built as an exhaust for the furnace during the winter sieges. It drops into the eastern ravines, past the outer perimeter of the curtain wall. If you run now—if you drop your heavy leather and shift into your wolf—you can clear the gorge before Garyth surrounds the cliffs.”
Wrenley stared at him, stunned. “And leave you?”
“I cannot leave,” Heath said. His lips curved into a bitter, heartbreaking smile. “I am tied to the foundation, Wrenley. If I break these spikes, the floor goes with me. But you... you are not chained. You owe this keep nothing. You owe me nothing.”
“I am your fated mate!” she cried, the words bursting from her chest with the raw, uncontrollable ferocity of her beast.
The hall seemed to echo with the admission.
Heath flinched as if she had struck him. His jaw worked, his throat bobbing as he swallowed down the agony tearing through his core.
“And that is why you must go,” he growled, the Alpha command vibrating beneath his rough voice, pleading and commanding all at once. “Do you think I want to watch you be torn apart by Garyth’s hounds? Do you think I could bear the scent of your blood on these stones? If you die here, my wolf will break the seal just to murder them, and the whole world will drown in the Maw’s throat!”
“Then let it drown!” Wrenley shouted back, stepping up onto the dais until her boots were inches from his knees. Tears burned behind her eyes, hot and angry, but she refused to let them fall. “I spent eight years running through the snow, Heath! Eight years sleeping with one eye open, eating scraps, bowing to fat Council elders who looked at me like I was vermin! I finally find the other half of my soul—and you think I’m going to scurry down a hole like a frightened rat?”
“Wrenley, please—”
*CRASH.*
The sound of shattering iron was deafening.
The central portcullis blew inward, torn off its stone runners by an explosive blast of alchemical force. The two-ton iron gate crashed onto the granite floor, sliding twenty yards in a spray of sparks and pulverized rock.
Through the yawning, smoke-filled gap of the northern archway poured the vanguard of the High Alpha Council.
They wore polished silver cuirasses stamped with the three-headed wolf, their heavy broadswords drawn and gleaming under the bloody light of the eclipsed moon. Fifty fully armored enforcers fanned out in a disciplined, lethal semi-circle, their boots marching in thundering cadence across the hall.
Behind them walked Grand Prelate Garyth.
He did not look like a warrior who had fought his way through a siege.
He was clad in opulent robes of white fox fur and embroidered velvet, his graying hair coiffed with aristocratic precision. A massive, glowing rune stone of pale amber hung against his chest from a heavy platinum chain—the master ward-key of Dunmore.
At his flanks walked four massive Lycan berserkers, their eyes glazed with battle-trance, their jaws dripping with foam, their claws already extended in partial shift.
Garyth stopped twenty paces from the foot of the dais. He sniffed the air delicately, a handkerchief pressed to his nose against the stench of sulfur and sweat, before a wide, theatrical smile split his florid face.
“Ah,” Garyth purred, his voice ringing through the vaulted cavern with smooth, practiced theatrics. “The noble rogue. And the sleeping beast.”
Wrenley didn't move. She stood on the dais, positioned half a step in front of Heath, her daggers held low and steady, her inner wolf snarling with a hatred so violent it made her gums throb against her fangs.
“Garyth,” she spat.
“You’re late, little assassin,” Garyth said, his eyes glittering with cold calculation as he surveyed the scene. He looked at the drawn blades in her hands, then at the blood on Heath’s jaw, and finally down at the four massive obsidian spikes pinning the Alpha to his seat. “I expected to find the Tyrant’s head in a burlap sack upon the courtyard steps an hour ago. Did your nerve fail you? Or did the monster’s silver tongue buy your stray loyalty?”
