1
I was Artemis, Guardian of the Forbidden Forest and protector of familiars. I was feared. I was ruthless. I’d always been the hunter, yet here I was, fleeing for my life. Hunted.
The forest blurred around me as I ran, my boots slapping the worn path through the forest. Smoke still clung to my lungs, heavy and acrid. My throat burned with every breath, and my eyes stung with tears I refused to shed.
King Oberon believed I was responsible for killing pureblood galeons. Hunters had infiltrated Perga, shot poisoned arrows at me and set fire to my home. And now I was on the run with Ace, Orion and my wolf familiar, Nala, while the galeon murderer was still at large, free to frame me for more deaths.
The forest closed in around me, dense with smoke and shadows. I continued to run with my lungs on fire and every breath dragging ash and fear deeper into my chest.
Ace carried Nala in his arms, her body limp, breathing shallow, her thick fur matted. She hadn’t been wounded, but the smoke had nearly suffocated her before Ace got her out of my burning cabin. Her silver fur, usually sleek and bright, was now dulled by ash. I reached out to touch her, just to feel the rise and fall of her chest. She was still breathing.
Orion flanked me, silent and grim. Neither man had spoken since we fled town. I glanced back. Somewhere behind us, my cabin crackled in the blaze. We hadn’t had time to think. Just fight, kill, and run. Smoke threaded through the forest, chasing us into the heart of the woods, but it was the absence of pursuit that unnerved me more. We’d killed the men who’d come for us. But in my experience, silence meant danger loomed in the shadows.
It wasn’t just the king’s men intent on seeing me dead, after all. A group of rogue hunters had also tried to kill me, but their reasons were more mysterious.
Mysterious as in I had no phaaning clue what I had done to piss them off.
Ace gritted his teeth as he adjusted Nala's weight. She was on the smaller side for a gray wolf, but that didn’t make her light. His arms had to be screaming, but he didn’t slow. Not after we’d escaped and not after we’d learned my own twin brother had connections to the rogue hunters.
Paul was the centre of this.
My brother had snuck me and Ace into the coroner’s office so we could learn more about the immortal galeons turning up dead. When the coroner had arrived unexpectedly, Ace and I hid and Paul swooped in and offered to take the coroner out for a drink. He offered a distraction, a borrowed hour, so Ace and I could escape unnoticed. We weren’t there looking for trouble, after all. We only wanted answers.
But what we found only raised more questions.
Everything about the immortals’ deaths pointed to something impossible. Me.
With the unique iridescent feathers for fletching, the arrows used in the murders were undeniably mine. Worse, the same poison that had nearly destroyed my familiar's bond to me and still left her struggling, had been found on the arrows.
Ace and I barely made it out of the Death House when the guards came crashing down the hall. We thought we’d succeeded. We’d slipped in and out with no one the wiser of our identities. But by the time we returned to Perga, everything had changed.
Queen Titania told us the king suspected me in the murders.
The coroner was dead.
And my brother was missing.
No word. No note. No sign of where Paul had gone or why he hadn’t come back. Just silence, and a growing sense that we’d stepped into something far darker than we’d realized.
We went to his cabin hoping to pick up his trail or at least some clue of what had happened. Only, it wasn’t empty. It was full of stolen goods from Perga’s winter storage and cloth eerily familiar to that used by the rogue hunters. Before we could process what it all meant, we were attacked.
These were the king’s men, not the rogues, but whomever was behind this elaborate plot wasn’t just tying up loose ends. They were hunting us now.
And I was exhausted.
Orion’s stride shortened, his gaze flicking back through the trees. He slowed down, his brows angling down, his eyes squinting. I knew that look. It was his stubborn face.
“No,” I snapped, grabbing his arm. “Don’t even think about it.”
“I have to,” he said, voice low but steady. He shook his arm free from my grasp. He kept jogging beside me, but his pace slowed even more. “If anyone survived that fire, they’ll head for Wast. Someone has to stop that message from getting back to the king.”
“Rye—”
“I’m not letting them catch you, Em. You’re being framed for killing galeons. The king wants your head. You need to run. I don’t.”
I hated that he was right, and I hated the tightening in my chest that came with it.
Ace said nothing, but the muscle in his jaw ticked as he kept pace, still cradling Nala in his arms like she was something precious to him. Maybe she was.
