Ryan
“She’s not here, Ryan,” Mercy hisses as I run through the village. She’s hot on my heels, grabbing my fur to try to pull me to a stop but I’m not in my right mind.
It’s been five hours since I last saw Aviva. Andrew and I have been scouring the forest and plains for any sign of her, but I lost her scent, and my desperate attempts to mind-link with her have come up empty and silent.
I shift into my human form the second I cross into the pack house and immediately crash into one of the tables, tripping over the bench and landing on my side with a crunch. I’ve been in my wolf form since last night. Exhaustion sings through my bones as my vision spins. I hear Andrew similarly falling to the ground with a choked groan before hurried footsteps reach the pack house. Someone throws a blanket over me with a scoff, followed by Mercy’s sharp, soprano voice ripping through the air as she starts shouting orders to the others in the room.
“Get them clothes and water, right NOW!” she shrieks, and the other footsteps hurry back out of the pack house.
I turn my head, fighting to catch my breath, and watch as she kneels beside Andrew, turning his face from side to side as he goes limp with fatigue.
“Mercy,” I croak, my mouth and throat dry and raw.
Mercy rises with a sigh and turns to me, her hands tucked in the pockets of a worn olive-colored apron. Dark circles line her under eyes and her normally perfect braided dark hair is falling in tangled sheets over her shoulders. “Jacob isn’t here.”
My eyes close against my will. I can feel the last echoes of my wolf power flickering before extinguishing. I need a charge. Food, water, and sleep. Hours upon hours of it, but we don’t have that kind of time.
I feel Mercy laying a hand on the blanket covering my body, her fingers light on my chest. “Our warriors have been watching the rogues move in from the north and northwest for several days now. Hunters were the first to spot them, then we got the same reports from your pack. More rogues, moving in from the northern Deadlands.” I blink up at her, her profile a blur. “The patriarch of Teskha sent scouts to us yesterday with reports of over twenty rogues heading east. An entire pack of them. We sent warriors to intercept them, but night fell, and there was a battle…” She inhales sharply, shaking her head. “We lost ten of our best warriors.”
“Where is Jacob?” My voice sounds like someone punched me repeatedly in the throat.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been able to connect with him over the mind-link.” Her face fades and I notice the pink blush staining her cheeks and the way the tips of her ears go bright red. I assume they haven’t been hand-fast yet, not with Aviva present, so if they can normally mind-link, Jacob marked her. That’s a conversation for another time.
“So they’re both missing.” It’s not a question. My blood simmers at the thought of my wife and my best friend out in the forest hunting rogues at best, dead at the worst. The latter is becoming more and more likely the longer I go without hearing from either of them.
“Night won’t fall for another few hours,” Mercy says with a shallow breath. “We have time to find them, but you need to rest.”
“I’m aware.” Guilt rages through my body as I let my eyes flutter closed again. I listen to new footsteps entering the pack house, the smell of roasted meat and the heavy, bitter home brew Endova is known for whispering through the air and mingling with new voices, new bodies in the room.
I sense Mercy’s departure, her soft, floral scent replaced by new smells, new hands on my body. Someone tilts my head up so I can drink water. Someone replaces the water with something else, whiskey so young it burns my throat and jolts me back to awareness. I’m not sure how much time has passed by this point, but now I’m sitting with my back braced on the overturned bench, facing Andrew, while ripping into a turkey leg like I haven’t eaten in days. Andrew’s a hot mess. His blond hair sticks up at all angles as his eyes remain glassy and locked on the floor between his knees, still wearing nothing but a blanket covering his body.
There’s a commotion outside. Male voices drift in, carrying word of rogues being taken down near the border of Endova and Navvan. It’s an active, bloody battle.
But there hasn’t been a single sighting of Navvan warriors or even civilians, which is a bad sign. Suddenly, Navvan is no longer the threat, and based on the conversation taking place just outside the doors to the pack house, the elders and warriors are making plans to reach the Navvan village to help defend the people there.
Because the rogues are headed right for it.
“At least a hundred,” one of the warriors says, his voice muffled by the closed door. “But the Teshkan warriors we intercepted said they counted another sixty moving north east toward Navvan.”
A hundred and sixty rogues. Impossible.
I look at Andrew and find him looking right at me, listening just as keenly to the conversation outside the door. ‘This is bad,’ he says into my mind.
‘This is war,’ I reply gravely.
Ryatt warned me about rogues in the Deadlands. Even if someone turns into a rogue in Moonrise, or the Roguelands, or even as far east as Tarsian, they come here for whatever reason. Something about this place draws them in.
Part of our agreement about me coming here to carve out my own place in the world was to help Ryatt eliminate the rogue problem. Neither of us could have predicted there were this many.
“Hellhounds, at least four of them…”
I hold Andrew’s gaze as the conversation continues, but then the door opens so silently I would have missed it had it not been for the tiny, pale fingers clutching the door. For a split second, Aviva was here. Then Shoshannah turns to me, her red curls and dark eyes so similar to my mate’s that my heart stops, then breaks.
She closes the door and moves swiftly into the center of the room, dropping clothes in front of Andrew, then in front of me. But she crouches in front of me with her tiny child-sized bow on her back, her dark whiskey-brown eyes bright and sharp. “I need to show you something.”
Her tone sends goosebumps whispering over my skin. I can’t do more than nod as she walks across the room and turns to face a shadowed corner while Andrew and I dress.
I feel faint but better than before as we follow the little girl out of the pack house. It’s almost sunset. The sky is fading from bright, cloudless blue to violet as we skirt through the village a few paces behind Shoshannah, who walks with her shoulders squared and her neck high and tight just like Aviva.
So much like Aviva. Where the fuck is she? The bond between us is still there. I can feel her, but she’s far away. She’s alive. For now. Any anger I feel toward her vanishes when I remember how her eyes glowed before she disappeared into the dark forest.
Powers. My mate has powers. Whatever she’s doing out there, well, she better be learning how to use them.
We reach the forest a few minutes later. We follow Shoshannah up the creek until we reach the ruins. Shoshannah reaches the entrance and crawls inside. Andrew glances at me before following. But I’m stuck outside, my eyes locked on the remains of the archway. I imagine Aviva standing there, her arrow locked and honed on my skull while the moon rises behind her, just like that night several weeks ago.
“You better still be alive,” I whisper through our bond and follow them inside.
The ceiling is so low I have to bend at the waist to fit. Andrew is crouched a few feet away, looking through the shadows at the knick-knacks scattered throughout.
“Aviva thinks this place used to be a temple,” Shosh says quietly. She’s looking for something, that’s clear, as she runs her fingers over the stones and pulls crystals and blade tips from clefts in the rock. “The entrance to one. I used to help her dig, but we gave up a few years ago. She thought there might be stairs leading down into the ground, like the forest covered the temple up long ago.”
“What did you want to show us?”
“I just didn’t want anyone to hear,” she says, turning to face us. “Aviva told me I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone.”
“Tell anyone what?” Andrew asks.
She lowers herself to her knees, gripping the crystals in her tiny fists. “She used to tell me stories to help me fall asleep after Mama died. About the Firestone cities in the Deadlands, and the magical forges where magic was made.”
Unease settles heavy in my chest as I kneel, resting my hands on my knees.
“There was one story I liked the most, though she wasn’t supposed to be telling me these tales anyway, but I’d beg and beg for it and….” Her eyes glaze with a distant memory. “I promised not to tell, but somethings wrong, isn’t it? Mercy won’t tell me anything. I’m supposed to be in the house right now.”
“Can we hear the story?” Andrew asks softly, smiling at her. Andrew’s always been good with kids. All I can think about right now is that this child is the kid-version of my missing wife, and my heart is actively shattering as she purses her lips just like Aviva does, tilts her head in the same way, and smiles while biting her lip.
“The Book of Whispers was said to have been hidden here, in the Deadlands, when the Firestone cities fell. The Firestone witches scattered the templars of their Goddess, the Moon Goddess, so the old gods couldn’t find them and use the book to unleash things even worse than the curse they released when they opened the Baetyl. The Goddess and her daughter vanished, and Eastonia fell into the dark times, and the book remained here, hidden away in an ancient temple.”
Something clicks into place in my head. The Diadem of Starlight, with the Diamond of Faith as part of the Diadem, were found in Crescent Falls. The Firestone Mask is now under Ella’s control. The Blade of Time…that was the knife Gabriel used to torture Sarah as a child and then used to try to kill Sydney and is now in Sarah’s control. The Shadow Sword belongs to Ryatt and Kenna.
My family is tied to this somehow. Like these pieces of history belong to us, for whatever reason.
“Is The Book of Whispers here?” I ask, motioning to the ruins all around us.
Shoshannah shakes her head. “Aviva told me it’s in the temple in Navvan. It’s buried there, and their village was built around it. They’re meant to protect it….” She trails off, hugging her knees to her chest. “In one of the stories, the book was used to cast a spell on a pack as punishment by the old gods for failing to worship them. They were turned into soulless creatures who would spend eternity trying to find their way back to their human forms again, forced to do the bidding of the one who cast the spell.”
“Rogues,” Andrew whispers to himself.
“Someone used The Book of Whispers, didn’t they?” I ask, and Shosh turns teary eyes to mine.
She nods.
“Is Aviva going after the book?” Why hadn’t she told me, let alone my family, about this when we were in Moonrise? I bite down the confusion and betrayal starting to simmer in my blood, hating the idea that she kept this from me.
“No. She’s looking for her bow.”
Her bow? “She has her bow with her.”
“The one that’s meant for her,” she says with a trembling voice.
The fucking Gilded Bow. I close my eyes, shaking my head. “Andrew, we need to go to Navvan, now.”