The Council didn't arrive by carriage.
They arrived as wolves.
We were in the courtyard at noon, the white word WAR still fenced off and smoking faintly, when the gates - which had been melted by the Priest - shuddered as twelve wolves the size of horses walked through, in full Alpha form, unshifted, unashamed.
Behind them came their Betas, their armies, hundreds of wolves that made the Academy walls look small. Gold fur, green eyes, stone-grey, river-blue. The whole continent had come.
And at the front, leading them all, was a wolf I knew.
Ash-grey, scarred over one eye, with a limp in his left hind leg from a hunting trap twenty years ago.
Darius Vane.
He hadn't been freed. He was dragged by a chain around his neck, held by a woman who could only be his sister - my aunt I'd never
