“Bite me.”
“Later,” he shot back, reckless grin flashing as he skidded past—and she would have hexed him for that if three more wolves hadn’t paced closer, eyes burning, jaws parting in silent howls. One tried again; the line hissed brighter. The beast wavered, tore apart like smoke in the wind, and reformed outside the ring.
“Hold,” Maude said, breathless, more to herself than to him. “Just hold.”
They waited. The mist thinned by a measure, the air relaxing its grip on her lungs. The wolves’ eyes guttered to embers and then—finally—faded. The last of them bled back into fog and was gone. Silence fell so quickly it rang.
Wesley guided his horse back toward her. His grip on the reins was white-knuckled.
“Don’t get comfortable,” she said, pulse still banging at her ribs. “Those weren’t wanderers—they were scouts. The Peaks always send scouts.”
“Of course they do,” he said dryly.
She urged Pickles forward. The salt circle would lose its charge in minutes. They needed distance. They needed high ground, rock to break the mist’s hold. She scanned ahead, mapping the rise between twisted pines and black spruce.
They didn’t make it far.
Wind sighed through the canopy with no leaves to justify the sound. The moss at their horses’ feet shivered. A curling motion began at the edges of the world, so subtle at first that Maude thought it was just her vision adjusting to the gloom. Then it thickened, coalescing into a river of fog flowing downhill to meet them.
“Move,” she snapped. “Now.”
Wesley didn’t ask a single foolish question. He dug his heels inward; his bay surged. Pickles lunged after him. They pounded up the slope, the ground slick with a skin of wet needles. Mist wheeled at their sides and swept forward to cut them off. Three wolves formed ahead in the span of a heartbeat, more solid than the scouts, sinew of fog twined tight over lanes of emptiness, the suggestion of ribs. An alpha pushed its head through the air, muzzle sharpened out of nothing, and bared spectral teeth.
“Right!” Wesley called.
“Left!” she countered at the same time.
They split again on instinct, a living pair of parentheses around the threat. Maude yanked her horse hard and spat a quick ward, flicking two iron shavings from the vial in her palm. The shavings burned with a dim red spark where they landed. One wolf swiped a paw over them and lost half its foreleg for a second; it reformed with a shuddering ripple, slowed.
Wesley’s bay bunched its haunches and leapt a fallen tree. Fora breath he hung in the air with the animal, coat flaring, and Maude had a stupid, ill-timed thought:Beautiful. The moment broke, and the mist crashed against the bark, spilling in a hiss around his horse’s legs.
“Don’t let it wrap the fetlocks!” she yelled. “It leaches heat first.”
“How comforting,” he called back. He slammed his boots to ground on the far side, reined in, and—saints—tore free the iron buckle from his saddlebags. He dragged it along the earth in a half-circle, sparks biting from stone, the line smoking where iron met soil.
“Clever,” Maude muttered, and didn’t hate him for a full second.
Her side was worse. The alpha tracked her, reading intention like a book. Pickles’s ears flattened; the horse surged, sure-footed and furious. They crested a lip of land—and the ground dropped away. A sinkhole masked by debris yawned under the horse’s forefeet.
Pickles threw himself sideways in a move that would have sent a lesser rider flying. Maude clung with knees and breath and every ugly fear she owned. The horse found purchase, skidding, and she felt the hole’s cold breath on her ankle. The alpha took the chance and lunged.
She didn’t think. She flung a hand and spoke a word Bailey never let her use unless it was truly bad. Power cracked in the air like a snapped bone. The wolf’s muzzle struck an invisible pane and split apart, reforming with a wet sound on the far side. Its eyes burned brighter.
“Here!” Wesley’s voice—too close, too fast.
He barreled in, swinging out of the saddle before the bay had even stopped. Hitting the ground in a low crouch, he yanked the salt pouch straight off her hip, caught it in one smooth motion, and slashed a white line across the mouth of the sinkhole. Then he planted himself squarely between Maude and the alpha.
“Move, Wesley!” she snapped. “It’ll?—”
The alpha struck the new line; the salt flared. The thing’s head blew wide in soundless fury, then re-knit, slower this time. She used the beat. Pickles scrambled up enough to step away from the hole. Maude swung a leg over and dropped to the ground, ankle shrieking. She didn’t listen.
“Give me the iron shavings,” Wesley said, not looking at her, palm open.
She tipped a measured heap into his hand. He flung them low, wide, shallow. They landed like a scattering of dark stars across the moss. The mist thickened there, unhappy with the field of bite.
The alpha paced, testing for a gap. The fog at their backs bunched into another wolf, and another, flank to flank, hemming them to the lip of earth. Above, the canopy shivered like it had remembered wind.
“We hold here,” Maude said. “Anchor. Fire if you can.”
