Dominic didn’t hesitate. He sprang forward, black fur a blur, meeting the creature mid-lunge. His teeth sank deep into its neck, tasting blood and bile. It writhed, shrieking. He threw it down, crushed its throat under his paws, and turned to the next.
“Now!”
Chapter 24 - Layla
The first thing Layla heard was the howling.
Not the wind, though that too screamed through the peaks, but wolves. Dozens of them. The sound echoed between the cliffs, raw and broken, the kind of noise that carried death in it.
Snow swirled thick around her as she crested the final ridge, Julian panting beneath her. The world dropped away below, a wide, jagged expanse of white and shadow, cut through with blood.
The fight was already happening.
Wolves and hybrids clashed across the mountainside in a frenzy of movement, fur and claws, fangs and steel. She could see the Nordan warriors in their pale coats, their forms barely visible against the snow, and the Volkhov wolves, darker, heavier, cutting through the monsters in brutal, coordinated strikes. But there were too many. For every hybrid that fell, three more surged forward, spilling out of an entrance into the mountain.
Layla froze. Her lungs burned, her legs growing weak.
This was her vision.
The storm, the wolves, the blood. She’d seen it all, only now it was real, close enough to taste the iron tang of it in the air. Her fingers went numb around the strap of her satchel.
Julian snarled, pacing backwards and forwards on the ridge.
“Go,” she yelled, pulling at his fur, “keep going!”
His answering snarl signaled his refusal.
“Fine,” she said, launching herself off his back, landing in the snow with a thud.
He started back, eyes wide, before they narrowed. In the space of a breath, he shifted, rising from snow, skin pale enough to disappear into the porcelain flurry.
“You can’t go down there,” he shouted over the storm, “you’ll be ripped to shreds!”
Layla glanced up the mountain. “If I don’t, they’ll all be buried.”
Julian growled, pacing backwards and forwards, his eyes tracking the battle below. “If they even last that long,” he said, a note of desperation in his voice. “They’re getting slaughtered.”
The words struck like a blow.
Layla looked back down the slope. She could see Arthur’s wolves pushing forward in a desperate flank, trying to hold the line near the mine entrance. The hybrids moved like a tide, grotesque shapes leaping from the rocks, their movements jerky, unnatural.
And then she saw it, a flash of dark in the chaos.
Dominic.
He was in the thick of it, cutting through monsters with savage precision. His movements were beautiful in a brutal, terrifying way, fluid, relentless, like the fight was an extension of his will. His coat was matted with blood, some his own, some not, and the snow steamed where it hit his skin.
Her heart lurched.
“Dominic,” she whispered.
She hesitated for a single heartbeat, fear clawing at her. She was no fighter. She couldn’t shift. She shouldn’t even behere. But the thought of standing still, of watching him die, was worse.
Layla tore free from Julian’s grip and ran.
The slope was steep, the snow slick, but she didn’t care. She half-slid, half-fell down the ridge, her boots slipping, her breath coming fast. Shouts rose from below, the snarl of wolves, the shrieks of dying things.
She stumbled, caught herself, and kept running.
