Eric’s feet were sore and his soul felt weary, but his heart burned with determination. He volunteered to take the night watch despite his fatigue.
“You should be sleeping,” Ramsay’s voice came over his shoulder.
The auburn-haired man came up beside him on the rocky ledge and peered over the valley with him.
“I don’t think I could sleep even if I tried,” Eric muttered.
“Want me to knock you over the head with a rock? That’ll put you to sleep real good.”
Eric let out a snort of laughter. “No thanks. The last thing I need right now is a concussion.”
Ramsay grinned. “Suit yourself.”
From this angle they could barely see the gryphon’s keep, a marble labyrinth built into the mountain itself, but Eric looked up anyway. He tried to study the enemy territory as much as he could before they had to storm it.
“Thinking about our impending doom?” Ramsay asked.
“That’s not funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be.”
The two men fell quiet, both thinking about one thing only--their mate, Matheson, locked up somewhere in the gryphon’s keep. Both of them had no idea what he must be suffering.
“Eric, you know I love you and think you’re a good as hell pack leader,” Ramsay began quietly.
Eric braced himself for whatever was coming next. “But?”
“I don’t know if our little army is strong enough to defeat enough gryphons to save Matheson.”
Ramsay had voiced the secret fear that Eric had been harboring since Matheson was abducted, but hearing it out loud was even more painful.
He turned around to look at the group they had amassed. It was a little army indeed. A small band of wolves comprised of Matheson’s parents, Lilian and Mitchell, and the parents of Ramsay and Colton; Crystal, of course; and a handful of guards from each respective pack.
Eric tried not to feel disheartened, even though a horrible voice in the back of his mind kept screaming at him that he was leading all these people to their demise.
He couldn’t blame the others for not coming. A pregnant omega was worth protecting, they agreed, but not if it meant marching into the territory of a freakishly powerful enemy on unknown lands. Even the mountain itself was a hazard--a wolf couldn’t fly like a gryphon if their paws slipped from the rocks.
“It will be enough.”
Eric and Ramsay turned to face Colton, who had snuck up behind them with a serious frown. His eyes were hard as ice.
“You can’t know that, Colt,” Ramsay said gently.
But Colton refused to back down. “It will be. It has to be.” A growl rose in his throat. “I’m not letting Matheson be a slave for the rest of his life if there’s anything I can do about it.”
It was the most he’d spoken since their conversation with Noro before the gryphon left a few days prior.
“All of us feel the same way,” Eric told him. “We’re only trying to be realistic.”
Colton shook his head in almost childish defiance. “I don’t care. I don’t want to think of failure as an option at all.”
Eric was about to reply when a sudden noise drew his attention. They all turned sharply towards the rocky ledge leading towards their camp. In this unknown place, anything was a potential threat, and all three men were seconds away from shifting to attack first and ask questions later.
But the person whose face crested the slope made them pause.
“Madame?” Ramsay asked, startled.
“It’sThe Madame,” she grunted, hoisting her firearm back over her shoulder.
