Dev was shouting from his log, trying to stand on his broken leg, his face contorted with pain and fury. "Put them down! Let them—" His leg gave out and he went down hard, crying out as the broken bone shifted. None of the wolves even glanced at him.
Nathan was still on his back in wolf form. Still submitted. Still shaking.
I drove my head backward as hard as I could, felt the satisfying crunch of the red-haired man's nose against the back of my skull. Pain burst through my own head, stars exploding across my vision, but his grip loosened for just a fraction of a second.
Then something hit us like a freight train.
Awolf, huge and dark and moving so fast I barely registered it before we went down in a tangle of limbs. I hit the ground hard,the impact driving the air from my lungs, and my thigh exploded in white-hot agony as I rolled away on pure instinct.
When I looked up, the wolf was standing over me.
He was massive—bigger even than the alpha, with thick grey-brown fur and eyes the color of amber. His lips were pulled back from his teeth in a snarl that made my bones vibrate. Protecting me.
More wolves poured into the clearing, all moving with the same coordinated precision as the first pack. And behind them, something even bigger.
Abear.
A cave bear, massive and utterly terrifying, with a roar that shook the ground beneath me thundered down the slope towards us. The alpha's wolves scattered, falling back toward their leader. The alpha himself had shifted again, hackles raised, but he was outnumbered now and he knew it.
The dark wolf above me didn't move. Didn't even glance back at me. He just stood there, growling, every line of his body radiating lethal threat. I pressed my hand against my thigh, feeling warm blood seep through the bandage, and tried to breathe through the pain.
I couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Couldn't do anything but stare up at the wolf standing over me and wonder if I'd just been rescued or captured by a more dominant shifter. The standoff stretched. The alpha's wolves were growling, the new pack was growling back, and the tension in the air felt thick enough to choke on. The original alpha, growled, then with a sharp bark to his pack, they slinked away among the rocks and out of the valley.
I lay on the frozen ground, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth, and stared up at the massive wolf still standing over me. His growl had faded to a low rumble in his chest, but he hadn't moved. Hadn't stepped away. His body wasa wall of heat and muscle between me and the direction the other pack had vanished, and I could see the tension in every line of him—ears forward, tail rigid, weight balanced on his front paws, ready to explode into violence at the slightest provocation.
He was enormous. Even from this angle—flat on my back, looking up at the underside of his jaw—I could tell he dwarfed the alpha who'd just retreated. His fur was thick and dark, grey-brown with lighter streaks along his flanks, and his eyes...
Those amber eyes flicked down to me and my breath caught in my chest.
CHAPTER 7
DASKA
The scream cut through the storm like a flint blade through flesh.
I was halfway down the ravine when I heard it—high and sharp and terrified, the kind of sound that punched straight through your chest and grabbed hold of your heart. My bear surged inside me, responding to that fear with an instinct older than thought. I shifted before I'd consciously decided to, my body expanding and reshaping as I crashed through the underbrush. Rivik was already moving, a dark grey blur ahead of me, but I was heavier and with more momentum I was unstoppable once I got going. The river roared somewhere ahead, swollen and angry, and the wind carried the scent of blood and wolves and something else. Something sweet that urged my bear spirit to move faster.
That scent. I'd caught it before, faint, elusive, carried on the storm wind like a ghost. But now it was stronger, threaded withcopper and fear, and my bear locked onto it with a focus that bordered on obsession.
We burst through the tree line and into chaos.
I took in the scene in fragments. A camp, or what had been one, scattered across the riverbank like debris from a wreck. Strange shelters torn to shreds, objects I didn't recognize strewn across the mud. And wolves. Karik's wolves, four of them, circling like the cowards they were. One had a female wolf pinned by the scruff, another, the stocky one I recognized as Brenn, was laughing at something, blood running freely down his forearm.
And then I saw her.
A woman. Small, soft-built, struggling in the grip of the red-haired wolf I knew as Tarek. She was fighting him with everything she had, kicking, twisting, slamming her head back into his face, and even through the roar of the storm and the chaos of the attack, I heard the crack of cartilage giving way under the back of her skull.
Something detonated inside my chest.
Not anger. Not the battle fury I knew so well. This was different. Deeper. A primal, consuming need that erupted from somewhere beneath my ribs and spread through my entire body like wild fire, vast and absolute and utterly beyond my control.
Blood soaked through makeshift bandages on her thigh, her face was scratched and dirt-streaked, and her hair, damp waves in shades of warm brown and honey, fell in a tangled mess around her shoulders.
She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
Not because she was perfect. She wasn't. She was compact and sturdy-looking, built for endurance rather than elegance, her body all natural curves and practical strength. Her face was open and expressive, freckled from sun exposure, wind-reddenedacross her cheeks and nose. She looked exhausted and terrified and in pain.
But there was something about her that reached inside my chest andpulled.
