The Queen They Left For Dead

Chapter 6: What Followed Her

Mira grabbed a blade off the wall without slowing down and was already moving into the trees before I'd fully processed the howl.

"Stay behind me," she said.

I didn't argue. Whatever had made that sound, it hadn't sounded like a warning. It had sounded like something being stopped mid-scream.

We found the scout's body first. A wolf, gray, throat torn open, still warm. Mira crouched beside it for exactly three seconds before something moved in the trees to our left, fast, low, circling.

"Behind me," Mira said again, sharper.

It came out of the dark before either of us could react properly , not a wolf. Bigger than that, wrong in a way I didn't have a word for yet, its shape shifting at the edges like it hadn't fully decided what it wanted to look like, patches of something that might have been fur and might have been shadow moving independently of the rest of it.

Mira put herself between it and me without hesitation.

"Run," she said.

"I'm not…"

The thing lunged. Mira met it with the blade, faster than I'd have believed possible from her, and it shrieked , A sound like nothing I'd ever heard, half animal, half something else entirely and scrambled back into the trees, favoring one side.

"It's hurt. It won't stay gone long," Mira said, breathing hard, not taking her eyes off the treeline. "Selene. Now."

Heat surged up my arms before I told it to. My hands weren't hands anymore, not fully claws again, longer this time, sharper, and something else too, a pressure building behind my eyes like the air itself was waiting on me to decide something.

The thing came back out of the dark, faster this time, aimed straight at Mira's exposed side.

I didn't think. I moved.

I got between them, claws up, and the impact when it hit me knocked the air clean out of my lungs, sent us both sprawling into the dirt. Its weight pinned me down, something like teeth snapping close to my throat, and the pressure behind my eyes broke loose all at once.

The ground under both of us cracked open in a jagged line, not an earthquake, something narrower, deliberate, like the earth itself had reached up on command I hadn't consciously given. The thing shrieked again and scrambled off me, off-balance, and Mira's blade came down hard across its back before it could recover.

It went still.

For a moment none of us moved. My chest heaved, claws still out, that pressure behind my eyes fading slow, leaving me light-headed and shaking.

Then footsteps, fast, from the direction of the border.

Kane came through the trees at a dead run, already shifted back to human, and stopped hard when he saw the scene ,the dead scout, the thing bleeding out in the dirt, me on the ground with claws instead of hands and the earth cracked open in a line running straight toward where I lay.

His eyes went from the ground, to the creature, to me.

"What," he said, very carefully, like each word cost him something, "are you."

I opened my mouth to answer and found I didn't have one. Not one he'd believe, not one I fully believed myself yet.

Mira stepped in before I had to try.

"Not now," she said, already moving to my side, pulling me up by the arm. "Whatever sent that thing knows exactly where we are. We don't have time to explain ourselves to you standing in the open."

"One of my scouts is dead."

"And we're the reason he isn't the only one," Mira said. "You want answers, Kane Ashworth, you're going to have to decide fast whether you want them badly enough to actually help, or whether you'd rather stand here demanding them while whatever sent that creature finishes the job."

Kane's eyes stayed on me a moment longer, something unreadable moving behind them, not just suspicion now. Something closer to recognition, like whatever his wolf had noticed at the river had just gotten a great deal harder to ignore.

"My camp," he said finally, turning. "Now. Both of you."

He didn't wait to see if we followed.

I looked down at my own hands, claws retracting slowly, the cracked earth beneath me still settling, and thought that whatever answers Mira had been planning to give me slowly, one careful piece at a time, had just run out of time to arrive that way.