She had no chance to answer. She had no chance to breathe.
“On someone who should be dead,” Lucien had said, and the words were still sinking into her like stones into a well when the forest at the edge of the meadow exploded.
They poured out of the trees in a black tide, wolves in masks of pale bone, a dozen, two dozen, silent as smoke, running low and fast across the frosted grass toward the ring of kneeling pack. Their masks caught the firelight and grinned. Somewhere a woman screamed. Somewhere a child began to wail.
And the pack could not rise. Kael’s dominance still lay across the meadow like a stone slab, pinning four hundred wolves to the earth, and the masked things ran toward them with a speed and certainty that said they had known, exactly, that it would.
“Kael!” Ariana scre
