A moment ago, the scent of peaches had wafted faintly toward me only from the Bellwether alpha. But now, a reek of rotten fruit arose from the sand beneath me, from the air around me. The cloying sweetness clogging my nasal passages with each inhale. It was everywhere; it was everything.
In other words, the patch of desert we four had intruded upon, safe in the knowledge it was owned by no alpha, was outpack no longer. And the wolves who surrounded us bore the exact same scent.
They howled, the entire Bellwether pack in perfect harmony. We were trespassers they intended to cast out of their newly claimed territory. Or perhaps they’d tie us up against other cacti, correcting Hailey’s interruption of their leader’s demand by ripping more blood magic out of our flesh.
Did the fragment of poetry I’d heard mean the Bellwethers now owned only part of the outpack? Did it matter when we were on the part they currently owned?
I was lupine again and arrowing toward Orion before that thought had fully materialized. It was either that or wait for him to come to me as I knew he would, and we couldn’t afford any delay.
Orion and I met halfway, swiveling as a unit to find our younger pack mates fleeing toward us also. Ari and Hailey had disentangled themselves without further assistance, had known as soon as we did that escape was now our top priority.
A priority that we’d need help in order to achieve. I reached for the electricity that had begged to be utilized earlier. But with this territory claimed, we were no longer inside the outpack. The sand beneath our feet was mere sand. There were no longer untapped energy reserves ready and willing to speed our footsteps as we ran for our lives.
Even without that assistance, at first it seemed like we might escape. The heart of the peach-rot scent did fade behind us as we left the site of Blade’s sacrifice. But the air remained unbearably fruity as we sprinted four abreast back the way we’d come.
Meanwhile, a wall of pursuing wolves remained within easy view each time I wasted energy to turn my head and peer backwards. They weren’t quite close enough for us to feel the heat of their breath on our heels, but they weren’t far enough away for us to hope to evade them either. Our only chance was to reach the edge of the outpack and hope their bloodthirstiness would fade once we were no longer trespassing.
A goal that proved impossible as we crested the rise Orion and I had recently stood atop. Now, facing south and looking in the direction from which we’d come, the view should have been a seemingly endless expanse of desert. Dark, uninhabited. Easy to lose ourselves in.
Instead, lights rippled across the sand like clouds of fireflies rolling away from us. If I wasn’t much mistaken, this was a visual representation of the power of blood magic claiming territory for the Bellwethers. Each lit area marked outpack that was no longer outpack, the edge of that claiming moving far faster than wolf feet could ever hope to run.
Despite that fact, Orion, Ari, Hailey, and I didn’t pause. We kept pursuing the receding line of safety.
But my heart sank. We’d never make it to neutral territory before the Bellwether pack took us down.
Chapter 9
We ran for what seemed like hours, drawing slightly ahead of the Bellwethers only because they let our lead elongate. They knew we were exceeding our bodies’ limitations, that eventually we’d crumple and they could catch up at their leisure.
Or, rather, they knew that I was pushing past my limits. In front of me, Orion, Ari, and Hailey looked like they could lope along forever. And while I’d considered myself in good shape before this, I’d also been living among humans until the beginning of the summer. Daily exercise back in my old life nearly always took place on two legs.
Now, my pads ached from slamming into hard sand. My right front paw, in particular, twinged each time I put weight on it.
Was it a coincidence that the leg in question equated to the human arm still marked with matebrand ink? I assumed so until I noticed Orion limping on the opposite front leg, the one that corresponded to his own residual mate mark.
Then the twinge in my paw extended upward and grew into the same sort of ache that had preceded the loss of a tendril of tattoo a day and a half ago. My breathing, already ragged, cut off entirely as a shard of torment iced my bones.
Pain grew. Exploded. No, this wasn’t the same as what I’d experienced while reciting desert poetry to Hailey. This was worse. Much worse.
I stumbled and would have fallen if Orion’s shoulder hadn’t caught me. His steady presence kept me upright and moving forward, but he wasn’t much better off than I was. Even through our fur, I could feel his skin rippling with spasms that matched my own spasms. His panting was far faster than I would have expected from the pace of our run.
We were losing ink—I knew that without having to part fur and peer at skin to check on it. We were losing much more than a mere tendril, a reminder that the time before the prophesied deadline was drawing short.
We couldn’t afford to let pain slow us down, however, not with the Bellwethers still pursuing. So I righted myself and did what I’d been trained to do. I forced my mind to focus on something other than pain, to set my body at a distance so I could carry on.
The outpack’s new fragment of poetry provided just enough puzzle to keep my feet moving through ice and ache. “Once close as kin, secrets kept, blood not hearts entwine…”
That first line suggested that sister matebrand didn’t refer to a replacement connection waiting to form between myself and Orion. It sounded much more like a new matebrand marking the skin of a sister.
Not Celeste, though. Despite the current wall between us, our hearts were and had always been entwined.
And we weren’t related by blood either. I was certain of that since Celeste had discovered data about our parents at the same time she’d learned she was a genetic werewolf.
In the notes hidden within Julius’s study, she and I had been represented by our first names while three of our parents had been marked by scientific codes of letters and numbers. Our mothers were X3 and X7 and my father was Y1, which I took to mean that all three were werewolves stolen from their packs and forced to breed in captivity. Only Celeste’s father was granted the honor of a first and last name—Julius LeBlanc.
The important part was that none of the coded or uncoded names matched, meaning Celeste wasn’t my blood sister. Instead, we were just what I’d always assumed—sisters of the heart.
Now I wished I could go back and pore over that data in search of someone who might be related to me genetically. Lacking that opportunity, I ran through every possibility I could think of instead.
Vega was my only known blood relative, and she was clearly my aunt instead of my sister. I also knew that my mother and father had been killed by the Council soon after I was born.
Which left only one possibility—my sister was older than me, had been conceived by one or both of my parents before I was forced upon them in a Council lab.
Finding that older sister had to be my top priority. Because the final words the outpack had given us—“Compelled by”—suggested my blood sister needed help…
Not that I was in a space to help anyone other than myself at the moment. Even helping myself appeared less and less likely. Because while I was still lost in thought, my foot slipped into a yawning emptiness on my left. I scrabbled sideways, managing to regain my balance. But in the process, a pebble spun out into the darkness, one that fell so far I couldn’t hear it strike bottom.
The width of the crevasse that loomed darkly beside us was nearly as extreme as its depth. At least seventy feet—far too wide to leap across. Still, despite the dangerous dimensions of canyon, it presented an opportunity. Because the aroma wafting over from the other side lacked the peach-rot scent of the ground beneath us. If we could find a way over…
I assessed the situation, finding that Ari and Hailey had dropped back to run behind me while I wasn’t paying attention. Our pursuers were still within sight, albeit lagging yet further than when last I’d checked. Meanwhile, in the lead, Orion sped toward a jagged outcrop sticking straight up out of the earth at the edge of the crevasse. The rock was tremendous, obscuring our view of the crack behind it while also blocking our path forward.
Orion veered around the crag, but he didn’t turn right again to continue along the crevasse on the other side. Instead…he strode straight off the edge of the earth, not even trying to backpedal before dropping into darkness.
He hadn’t gathered his haunches and sprung. Had instead slowed slightly as if gauging his location then stepped forward as calmly as if empty air wasn’t beneath him.
He knew what he was doing. So I didn’t hesitate. I followed.
Above me, as I dropped, I could hear Ari and Hailey following our lead.
