They moved with the jerky wrongness of puppets controlled by someone who'd never seen a wolf walk. Lurching. Dragging. Joints bending backwards and forwards in the same stride.
And they smelled like death. Like meat left to rot in summer heat, like blood gone black with age, like something that should have stayed buried clawing its way back to the surface.
Alaric snarled. A sound so deep it vibrated in my chest, resonated in my bones. A challenge and a warning and a promise of violence all wrapped in one.
The corrupted wolves answered. A chorus of sounds that weren't howls, weren't screams, weren't anything that belonged in any world that made sense. The noise crawled into my ears and nested there, making my vision blur, making my knees want to buckle.
Five of them. Six. More emerging from the shadows with every passing second.
Run, Alaric's eyes said when they flicked to me.Run now while you still can.
But my feet wouldn't move. Some combination of terror and stubbornness had rooted me to the frozen ground, and all I could do was reach for the silver blade at my belt and pray I remembered how to use it.
The first corrupted wolf lunged.
Alaric met it mid-air. A collision of bodies that sent them both tumbling across dead grass, snapping jaws and raking claws and blood that sprayed black instead of red. Alaric was faster. Stronger. He tore the thing's throat out with one savage twist, and it dissolved into shadow and rot before its body hit the ground.
But there were more. Always more.
Three came at him simultaneously, coordinated in a way that said something intelligent was directing them. He caught one, but the other two slammed into his flank, jaws closing on his shoulder, his hip, tearing through fur and muscle with teeth that left wounds smoking like acid burns.
Alaric howled. Pain and defiance and the stubborn refusal to die that seemed written into every wolf's bones.
I moved without thinking.
The silver blade cleared its sheath as the fourth corrupted wolf turned toward me. Its eyes fixed on my throat, my chest, the places where blood ran closest to the surface. It lunged, and I brought the blade up, felt the impact jar through my arms as it impaled itself on silver.
It screamed. A sound no living thing should make.
Two more emerged from the tree line.
Alaric was still fighting. Three corrupted wolves circling him now, taking turns darting in to bite and retreat. His beautiful dark fur was soaked with black blood and his own red. One of his back legs was dragging, torn nearly to the bone. But he kept fighting. Kept killing. Kept buying me time to run.
I didn't run.
The fifth corrupted wolf wasn't aiming for me.
It was aiming for Alaric.
He was down. I hadn't seen it happen, too focused on the blade in my hands and the thing dissolving in front of me, but somewhere in the chaos one of them had gotten past his guard.He was on his knees, blood pouring from a wound in his side, trying to get up and failing. His wolf was fading, fur receding in patches, the shift breaking apart under the weight of too much damage.
The wolf lunged for his throat.
I moved without thinking.
My body slammed into Alaric's, knocked him sideways, put myself between him and the thing that wanted to kill him. Jaws meant for his neck closed on my leg instead. Claws raked through denim into muscle, and I went down hard. Pain exploded white-hot through my calf. Blood soaked through torn fabric, spreading across frozen ground in patterns that looked almost ritual.
“Michael!” Alaric's voice, ragged with horror. “What the fuck are you?—”
The wolf released my leg. Drew back. And I saw the others emerging from the tree line. Four more. Five. All of them focused on us now, on the blood spreading beneath me, on the wounded wolf trying to drag himself upright and the stupid human who'd just made himself the easier target.
They circled. Patient. Hungry. Taking their time because they knew we couldn't run. Couldn't fight. Could only wait for the end.
I closed my eyes.
And something spoke.
Child of the old blood.
