Chapter 23
The wives had followed me out of the crypt.
Eight of us now walked into the Hollowbone night, the moon trembling behind the clouds as if she feared what she’d unleashed.
Our bare feet left no prints in the frost. Our breath steamed in the cold air, not from the temperature but from heat that could not die.
Kael stood at my side, but his hand never touched me. His eyes, though… they never left my body. Or theirs.
We reached the ridge where the Hollowbone Valley stretched wide below my pack’s territory, my prison, my battlefield.
The queens moved around me in a crescent. Their eyes glowed in colors the moon had no name for: crimson, emerald, gold, obsidian. Their voices were velvet over steel.
“You’ve woken us up to war,” Maelira, the Red Moon Queen, said. But war is not fo
