The two waves split clean.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lucas
The first guards at the fence go down before they’ve unslung their rifles.
Then, the compound sees us.
A horn somewhere inside. Shouts. The watchtower bell. Men pour out of the central building and the outbuildings at a dead run, their clothes already coming off, the change rolling through them as they hit the dirt in shifted form, claws ripping into open ground.
They’re fast. Too fast.
I take the first one at the fence in a tackle, my jaws on his throat, and the impact alone tells me what I’m dealing with. He’s dense. Heavier than his frame. His ribs hold under my weight where a normal wolf’s would have splintered. I shred them anyway and drop him, pivoting for the next one before his blood has hit the dirt.
But the next one is on me before I see him.
He hits me from the side, a gray body with shoulders too wide for his height, and we go down hard against a metal fencepost. Pain sears through me. I get my back paws under himand rake upward. He doesn’t fall. The bastard twists, his teeth find my flank, and I have to break his grip with a roll that takes us both into the dirt before I can get back to my feet.
I kill him, but only barely.
Around me, my men are taking heavier casualties than they should be in the first thirty seconds of an assault. A Silvercrest wolf goes down under two of the enemy’s. Another is being driven backward by a brown blur. Darius’s line at the south is coming up against the same ferocity. I can hear his roar from across the compound.
These wolves are not normal.
We knew they wouldn’t be. Intelligence said “enhanced.” “Stronger” was what we trained for, not whatever this is.
I push forward into the press.
Two more come at me instantly. I take the first one low, dropping under his lunge to crush his foreleg in my jaws, but the second hits my shoulder with enough force to drive me a full foot into the ground. I roll, get my teeth in his neck, and hold until the meat gives.
The compound has emptied; no more wolves stream out of the buildings. I can see across the expanse of the yard now: fighters everywhere, my men working in pairs to bring each enhanced wolf down because alone, they can’t do it. Bodies litter the dirt. Most of them ours.
A Silvercrest wolf hiding near the north wall lifts his head and gives me the signal. As the perimeter fight rages on, the north wall is unguarded.
I lift my head and howl. The sound carries clean over the yard. Two notes. Long, then short. My signal to Sienna.
I don’t look toward the outcropping. Can’t. But I feel her in the bond—alert, moving, the pulse of her registering the sound through the link—and I know she has already started down the slope with Lydia, Violet, and ten soldiers behind them.
I turn back to the fight. Out of the blue, the fray in front of me parts.
A wolf walks through it.
He’s bigger than the others. Older. Gray at the muzzle, dark across the back, scarred along one flank from something that happened to him a long time ago. He moves through his own fighters, and they step aside for him without being told. One of them, mid-lunge at one of my men, breaks off entirely to clear his path. The yard belongs to him.
I’ve killed enough men in my life to know what authority looks like.
He comes to a stop ten yards from me. Then, he shifts.
A man stands where the wolf was. Tall, broad through the chest, sixty if he’s a day. White at the temples, beard trimmed close, eyes a pale gray that reflect the early morning light. He doesn’t bother with clothes. He has shifted in front of soldiers his whole life, and his bearing shows it.
The fighting around us slows as his own men watch him. They watch him with something I don’t understand at first and then, in the next breath, understand completely. Not loyalty. Deeper than that. They’ll die for him without thinking.
I shift back, standing up in the dirt with blood on my chest from the last wolf I killed. I’m panting. My ribs are bruised from the second hit at the fence.
The man inclines his head to one side. “Alpha Steele.”
“Who are you?”
