“Long live the alpha.”
My eyes snap closed as I ready myself for the stab of his bite.
AN UNEXPECTED REPRIEVE
I wait for the pain of fangs stabbing into my flesh. But it doesn’t come. Hesitantly, I open one eye, then another. The beast of a wolf who was about to chomp my head off is stumbling backward, a feathered dart sticking out of his neck.
He trips on his own feet and topples onto his side. He’s out cold.
Instantly, I hobble back onto my feet, and Jasper, tossing off his latest attacker, leaps to my side.
“Are you okay?”he asks.
“Yeah, I’m . . . what happened?”
Just as I say that a new wave of wolves comes streaming down the forest slope. I lift my nose to catch their scent. I open my mind to try and identify them. Not a single unifying detail stands out. They’re ...
“Rogues!”
Rogue wolves in their hundreds—no, thousands—stream past us, taking out what’s left of the Axis Pack wolves in our clearing and thundering through the woods in the direction of camp. You can tell they’re rogues from their different sizes, varying ages, the coloring of their coats. Unlike the almost uniform Axis wolves, this isn’t a sleek army, it’s—it’s a movement.
“I thought you said they weren’t coming?”Jasper asks.
“They weren’t.”
Two female wolves, moving a little slower than the others, clop down the hill toward us, one with what looks like a bamboo pipe tied around her neck.
“Mal? Agatha?”I ask, locking on to their consciousnesses.
Mal’s wolf is quite large, with a mix of scraggly gray and brown fur. Agatha’s is smaller, with a long frizzy autumn-red coat. They stop in front of us and Mal nods her head in greeting.
“Blood Wolf,”she says.“And the young alpha.”
Agatha almost knocks her sideways trying to get in on the conversation.“Looks like we arrived just in time.”
“We—we thought you weren’t coming?”I say, completely bewildered.
Mal lifts her muzzle and shakes it out before saying,“You were right, Blood Wolf. This fight is ours as well. We couldn’t let these Axis wolves come to power.”
Agatha nudges her with her shoulder.“Took a little convincing though.”Her wolf winks at me.
“Not long after you left us, I sent out the Big Howl. I hope we haven’t arrived too late.”
“Just in the nick of time,”I say,stunned to the point of breathlessness, not that I need breath to speak via mind-link.“Thank you.”
Jasper steps to my side, his fur brushing against mine.
“Jasper says thanks as well.”
“Where should we direct our people?”Mal asks.
“The Axis Pack is heading east to the campsite, that’s where Alpha Jericho is.”
Mal tilts her whole head to the side, eyeing me strangely, but I don’t have time to think about why.
“That’s where we need to go,”I finish saying.
“I’ll tell the rogues.”
