THE BRIDE OFFERED TO WOLVES

The Blood Hunters

Kael cleared the room himself.

Guards. Healers. The advisors who'd crowded in after the arrow, all of them ushered out until only four of us remained. Kael. Me. Nessa, still pale by the wall. And the Oracle, unconscious on the chaise where they'd laid her, her breathing shallow but steady.

Then he crossed to the door and locked it. Not gestured for a guard to do it. Locked it himself, the bolt sliding home with a sound that felt final, heavier than a simple latch had any right to sound.

"You don't trust your own guards," I said.

"I trust very few people."

"Do you trust me?"

A pause, longer than I wanted it to be.

"No."

It hurt more than I expected it to, a small clean cut I hadn't braced for. But there was something underneath the hurt too, something almost like relief. He hadn't lied to soften it. In a palace full of people who smiled at me and meant nothing by it, an honest no felt like the closest thing to respect I'd been offered since I crossed the border.

"Then why lock the door with me still inside it?"

"Because whatever's hunting you doesn't care whether I trust you. It only cares whether you're alive." He finally looked at me directly, and whatever careful distance he usually kept behind his eyes had slipped, just slightly, just enough that I saw something rawer underneath it. "I'm going to tell you the truth now. All of it, as much as I know."

I sat down, because I understood, somehow, that I would want to be sitting for whatever came next.

"Long before either of our kingdoms existed in their current form," Kael said, "the Moon Goddess chose one bloodline to guard something. Not a kingdom. Not treasure. A secret, old enough that even the oldest texts only speak of it in fragments."

"What kind of secret?"

"I don't know. That's the truth. Whatever it was, it mattered enough that an entire order was built solely to make certain that bloodline never survived long enough to remember what it was guarding."

"The Blood Hunters."

He nodded once. "For centuries they've hunted anyone carrying f*******n bloodlines or forgotten Moon marks. Not wolves who broke laws. Not criminals. Entire families, erased before their children were old enough to understand what they carried. The bloodline the Goddess chose was believed extinct hundreds of years ago. Everyone believed it. I believed it, until tonight."

"And the mark on my wrist…"

"Matches descriptions in records most wolves have never been permitted to read. Records I only know exist because my father showed me once, before he died, and told me never to speak of them again."

"Why would he show you at all, if it was meant to stay buried?"

"Because an Alpha is meant to recognize the mark if he ever sees it. Not to understand it. Only to know what it means when it appears." His hands had curled slightly at his sides, the first sign I'd seen of anything close to unease from him. "I never expected to need that knowledge. Certainly not standing across from the woman I'd married for the sake of a treaty."

I felt the room tilt slightly, the way it had at the altar, though this time nothing glowed and nothing burned.

"I've lived my entire life as an ordinary princess," I said. "A disappointing one, if you asked most of the court. Overlooked. Unremarkable. My father barely looked at me twice before he needed something to sign away. That was the entire shape of my life until three days ago."

"You were never ordinary."

"Then why didn't anyone tell me? My father. My tutors. Someone, at some point, should have known what I was carrying if it's written in records old enough that a king would warn his own son never to speak of them."

Kael said nothing. I watched him search for an answer and come up empty, and for once I didn't think it was because he was hiding something. I think he genuinely didn't know.

"Maybe they didn't know either," I said, more to myself than to him. "Maybe whatever this is, it was buried so well that even my own family lost it."

"That's possible."

"It's a strange kind of comfort. Finding out the people who should have protected me weren't lying. They simply never knew there was anything worth telling."

"If what you're saying is true," I said slowly, "then every faction in your world will come looking for me. Some to control what I carry. Others to make sure I never live long enough to understand it."

"Yes."

"And you locked me in a palace instead of sending me somewhere I could disappear."

"A locked palace is easier to defend than an open road." His jaw tightened. "I know how that sounds."

"It sounds like you've already decided I'm staying."

He didn't answer that either. But he didn't look away from me while he didn't answer it, and that told me more than words would have.

Somewhere beyond these walls, I imagined the Head Elder receiving word of the lockdown, and I imagined, though I had no way to know it, the small satisfaction that must have crossed his face. A locked palace kept danger out. It also meant I had nowhere left to run, if the danger he intended for me came from inside these walls instead of beyond them. I wondered whether he already knew what Kael had just told me, whether the Elders had known the truth of the mark long before the Oracle ever collapsed at the altar, and whether their fear had never been of a curse at all, but of exactly what I might turn out to be.

Near sunset, the Oracle woke.

Her eyes opened all at once, no slow return to consciousness, simply awake, and her hand shot out to close around my wrist before either of us could react. Her grip was far stronger than a woman that frail should have carried.

She looked directly into my eyes, and for a moment neither of us breathed.

"They erased your name."

I froze. "What?"

"They erased your family. Every record. Every trace. I didn't understand until I saw the mark myself, but now I do, and it's worse than any of us believed."

Kael stepped forward. "What are you talking about?"

The Oracle's entire body had begun to shake, her grip on my wrist trembling along with the rest of her, and her eyes darted toward the door as though something might already be listening on the other side of it.

"They lied to all of us. For a hundred years, they let us believe the bloodline died out on its own. It didn't. Someone made certain of it, and buried the truth so deep that even the histories forgot to be suspicious. If I could only…"

The explosion cut her off.

The whole palace shuddered, stone groaning somewhere deep beneath us, and the windows along the far wall shattered inward in a spray of glass that sent Nessa diving to shield the Oracle with her own body. Alarm horns began sounding across the fortress, low and urgent, wolf howls rising to answer them from somewhere out in the dark.

The door burst open. A guard, wild-eyed, blood already streaked across one side of his face.

"Alpha!"

Kael was already moving. "Report."

"They're here!"

"Who?"

The guard's face had gone the color of ash.

"The Blood Hunters."

Kael drew his sword before the guard finished speaking, the sound of steel clearing its sheath the only steady thing in a room that had gone chaotic around us. Nessa had pulled the Oracle upright, both of them pressed against the wall farthest from the broken windows. Smoke had begun drifting in through the shattered glass, faint but acrid, carrying with it the sound of fighting somewhere below, howls and steel and voices shouting orders I couldn't make out.

I stood frozen in the middle of it, useless, unarmed, the only person in that room who had no idea how to fight whatever was coming.

I expected him to order me to stay behind, to lock the door again and leave guards to die defending a room I couldn't leave. That was what every version of this story I'd ever imagined would have him do. It was, I realized, exactly what he had done the very first time danger found me in this palace.

Instead he crossed the room to me.

He took my hand, his grip firm enough that I felt it through the panic climbing up my throat, and looked into my eyes with an intensity that stripped away every careful distance he'd kept between us since the day I arrived.

"If they find you before I do," he said, "they won't leave anyone alive.”