Viper stepped between them and angled his chin at Ward. “Give him the damn book.”
Ward looked at each of them in turn—men who’d charged into a dying mountain, men who stood like they’d seen war and loss and bled for both. Then his gaze settled on Trace, eyes black andwild, lips pulled back from teeth that didn’t look entirely human anymore, and he handed over the journal.
Trace didn’t thank him. He dropped to one knee by the final glyph, flipping the pages with bloody fingers, scanning each line with laser precision. As he read, his lips moved in silence. No one spoke. Even the mountain seemed to hold its breath. Then he whispered the lines aloud, his voice low and reverent.
“Behold, son of Cumhaill, true king.
Under starlight blood, beneath the heart of the sun.
We bind your power to the bones of the earth
With the wind’s voice and the tears of stone.
Let your breath be silenced by root and flame.
Let your name be forgotten beneath shadowed time.
Let no song find your ears nor light your path.
There is no path home.
Unless you turn back upon your own heels.”
The chamber pulsed, and above them, the roar of the pyroclastic flow intensified. The pressure in the room built to a razor edge, like the entire mountain was pressing inward, trying to fold them into its stone heart. But Trace wasn’t finished. He turned to the page where Sutherland had added the latest glyph translations at the bottom.
“Let no breath stir within the bones of kings.
Let no door open ‘til oaths are sung in blood.
From the hand of hound and brother born of war and the druid with the blood of Tuatha Dé Danann.”
Trace stood and cast his gaze over his mate. He squeezed his hands shut, and when he opened them again, his palm was bleeding freely. The blood dripped down his wrist and spattered across his forearm. Slowly, he pressed his hand against the glyph beside the seam in the wall, and the sound of a hunting horn blasted through the chamber.
Fuck me, did the stone respond?
A hum rose beneath their feet, and the glyph shimmered. Its lines glowing gold, then shifting into a pulsing amber. The crack in the wall expanded, and for a moment, Viper thought the mountain itself was going to split in two.
Then Trace whispered something no one understood—old and aching—and smeared his blood across the glyph in a wide, deliberate arc, and the walls sang in answer. There was no other way to describe it. The air around them vibrated with resonance like a choir of stones mourning the loss of time. The barrier pulsed once more, then the entire wall dissolved into nothing but light and heat. A blinding flare erupted from the seam, driving them all back. The light burned as bright as a thousand suns. When it cleared, the chamber beyond was revealed.
Ward screamed, and Viper whipped around, his weapon raised, ready to save him from whatever caused that terror-filled noise. He narrowed his eyes in confusion as he noticed Ward looking past him.
Shit. It’s behind me.
CHAPTER SIX
Ward’s screamtore itself loose from the cage of his chest before he could stop it. He wasn’t the screaming type. He’d held a fractured leg in the Andes, kept it together through active gunfire outside a dig in Kurdistan. Stood toe-to-toe with Egyptian bureaucrats so corrupt they made the mob look like Boy Scouts. But this—this wasn’t something a PhD in archaeology or linguistics prepared him for.
The man in front of him—Trace, they’d called him—hadbecomea wolf. Not in some spiritual, metaphorical, shapeshifter-lore-on-a-scroll kind of way. No. This was as real as on freaking TV. One second, there was a man dressed in a military uniform carrying big ass guns standing in front of the glyphs, and the next, thick black fur rippled down his arms, his limbs snapped and folded inward with bone-deep cracks, and where a man had stood, a massive wolf, too big for any known species, shook out his fur.
That’s not possible. That’s not possible.
His brain kept chanting it like a fucking rosary.
That’s not?—
He stumbled backward until his boot caught on a jagged outcrop and he went down hard, his Indy-pack smacking against stone as he landed. His breath caught in his throat, panic threatening to break through his ribs. “No. No, no, no,” he whispered, unable to tear his eyes away. Viper didn’t look alarmed. None of them looked afraid. Why were they not losing their minds?
They knew.
