Chapter 3
Yet deep behind my breastbone, an impossible impression struck through my nervous system, bypassing my dead nose entirely.
Snow. Crushed cedar.
And beneath the cedar, something dark, ancient, and terrifyingly vast—like lightning striking deep water in the middle of a starless night.
It wasn't entering through my lungs. It was vibrating through my teeth. It was hummed directly into the blood in my veins, demanding an answer that my mute, wolf-less soul could not give.
*Hah... hah...*
I dragged ragged air into my lungs, forcing my fingers away from my throat. My leather gloves were slick with cold sweat.
"Get up," I whispered to myself, the command vicious and sharp. "Get up, Diana."
I squeezed my eyes shut, counting down from five, the way Glenn had taught me when the pain of the training yard became too much to bear.
Five. The cold snow on my boots.
Four. The tension of the bowstring against my spine.
Three. The quarry ahead.
Two. The silver bolt in the quiver.
One.
The phantom heat did not vanish, but it settled into a dull, throbbing ache, like an old fracture predicting rain.
I pushed off the tree trunk, my jaw set so hard my molars groaned.
Whoever Lucian was, whatever unholy power he had pried out of the Sanctum’s reliquary, it was poisoning the very air of this valley. That had to be it. The stolen relic was leaking its divine essence, burning the senses of anyone who drew near. If an empty shell like me could feel its radiation, the rogues traveling with him must be half-blind with the agony of it.
*All the more reason to put an arrow through his skull.*
I broke into a low, predatory lope, keeping to the leeward side of the ridge to stay out of the prevailing wind.
The trail led toward the Devil's Maw—a narrow, sheer-walled chasm that served as the only passage through the granite wall into the Ash Valleys beyond. It was a classic ambush point. If Lucian had left rear-guards, they would be posted on the flanking cliffs, waiting to drop boulders or rain shafts on whoever followed.
I slowed my approach, abandoning the tracks to scramble up the scree-covered slope of the eastern bluff.
My scentlessness was my shield. A sentry could scan the wind until his snout bled; he would never catch a trace of Diana.
I hauled myself up the final ledge, lying flat on my belly against the cold slate, the crossbow already cocked and resting across my forearms. I pulled the leather eye-cup of my brass spyglass to my right eye and scanned the mouth of the gorge below.
Nothing.
No sentries perched in the rocks. No snipers hiding behind the crags.
Instead, fifty yards into the throat of the chasm, the trail simply split.
Three sets of tracks veered east into the scree fields. Four plunged straight down the center toward the frozen creek bed. Another six climbed the treacherous western ridge.
A decoy pattern. A sophisticated one.
I swept the glass across the snowy basin, looking for the telltale sheen of metal or the disturbance of fresh powder.
And then, my lens caught movement.
Not at the bottom of the gorge.
Above it.
On a soaring promontory of black stone that jutted out over the chasm like an executioner’s block, a lone figure stood silhouetted against the pale, leaden sky.
My breath stopped in my throat.
He was not in his beast form, but he was larger than any man had a right to be. Broad-shouldered, draped in a heavy, tattered cloak of wolf-pelt that whipped violently in the mountain gale. Even from three hundred paces, the sheer mass of him was suffocating. He wore no armor—only dark, boiled leather and iron vambraces scarred with decades of combat.
His head was bare. Hair as black as a raven's wing, cut short and ragged, lashed by the wind.
Under his left arm, he carried an object.
It was roughly the size of a breadbox, wrapped in thick oilcloth and bound with heavy leather thongs. But the cloth could not contain what lay inside.
From the seams of the wrapping, a faint, rhythmic pulse of silver vapor leaked into the freezing air. It didn't dissipate with the wind; it clung to him, swirling around his shoulders like a ghost's breath before dissolving into the slate.
*The Reliquary of Dawn.*
My hands tightened on the stock of my crossbow. The range was long—nearly three hundred yards, with an unpredictable crosswind howling through the gap. An impossible shot for an ordinary archer.
For me, it was twenty percent chance of a throat hit, fifty percent of a chest plate impact.
I reached slowly toward my hip, my fingers brushing the cold velvet of the sheath that held the silver quarantine bolt. If I could plant that poison in his shoulder, he wouldn't make it to the other side of the ridge. The chase would end here. I would take the box, leave his carcass for the ravens, and return to the high marble halls of the capital as the savior of the empire.
My fingers closed around the fletching of the silver bolt.
Down on the promontory, the giant suddenly moved.
He didn't run. He didn't drop into a defensive crouch.
He slowly turned his body, facing the sheer cliff where I lay concealed beneath two feet of snow and slate.
My pulse skipped.
*He can't see me.* I was hidden behind a fringe of ice, dressed in white wolf-fur, completely motionless. *He can't smell me.* I had no scent. The wind was blowing down-canyon, away from him, toward the lowlands.
Yet Lucian raised his head.
His eyes were not the cloudy, blood-flecked yellow of a rabid rogue.
Even through the murky glass of my spyglass, across three hundred yards of howling, freezing air, I saw them with terrifying clarity.
They were silver. Not the dull grey of steel, but the blinding, impossible silver of a full moon shining on freshly fallen snow.
And he was looking directly down the barrel of my glass.
Not searching. Not scanning the ridgeline.
*Looking at me.*
The ache beneath my collarbone didn't just thrum—it screamed.
A bolt of white-hot agony lanced through the hollow of my throat, so violent, so fiercely intimate, that an involuntary cry tore from my lips, lost instantly in the roar of the wind. My hands spasmed against the stock of the crossbow.
The rogue Alpha didn't draw a blade. He didn't sound a horn.
He stood on the edge of the abyss, the stolen reliquary held against his ribs, and watched me with a gaze that held no malice, no terror, and no defiance.
It was the look of a man who had been waiting eighteen years for a ghost to find him.
Then, with a movement so fluid and effortless it defied his massive frame, he stepped off the edge of the cliff.
"No!"
I scrambled to my feet, abandoning all pretense of stealth, the crossbow rising to my shoulder.
I reached the lip of the bluff, looking down into the churning mist of the chasm.
The promontory was empty.
Below, where the granite fell three hundred feet into the jagged rocks of the canyon floor, there was no shattered corpse. Only a single, massive wolf-print stamped deep into the snow at the edge of the drop, and the faint, lingering trail of silver vapor drifting north toward the frozen wastes of the Ash Valleys.
