The Wolfless Vow

Chapter 2 The Hunt

Veyra ran.

The tunnel collapsed behind her in a roar of stone and dust, the shockwave slamming into her back and throwing her forward. She hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up with her arms still wrapped around the bundle in her shirt.

The cub—Korven—let out a dry cough from somewhere against her chest.

"Your landing technique needs work."

She didn't answer. She was too busy scrambling to her feet, lungs burning, ears straining past the ringing for the sound of pursuit. The sirens were still wailing from the direction of the clan compound, layered and urgent, a full alert. Not a drill. They'd never sounded a full alert in her lifetime.

She'd broken something. She'd set something free. And they were going to kill her for it.

"Left," said the voice in her head.

Veyra's feet faltered. "What?"

"Left. Unless you want to run straight into the War Guards who are already circling around from the east. Your clan isn't stupid—they know the terrain. If you go right, you'll hit the river gorge. Dead end. Left takes you into the deep forest. Marginally better odds."

She stared down at the cub. Its golden eyes were half-lidded, its voice laced with the same drowsy sarcasm as before, like it was giving her directions to a market instead of escape routes from a manhunt.

"How do you know where they are?"

"I can hear them." It said it simply, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. "Your ears are useless. Keep moving."

She ran left.

The forest swallowed her.

The Bloodmoon Clan's territory sat at the edge of a vast woodland that stretched for miles in every direction. Veyra had never been allowed past the clan's borders—wolfless weren't trusted to wander—but she'd spent enough nights staring at the treeline from her sleeping mat to memorize its shape. The trees were old here, thick-trunked and tangled with undergrowth, their canopies dense enough to block out the afternoon sun.

She crashed through them without grace, branches whipping at her face, thorns tearing at her arms. The cub in her arms bounced against her chest with every step, and she could feel its shallow breaths against her collarbone.

"We need to stop," she gasped.

"We need to keep moving."

"I can't breathe."

"Then breathe faster."

She wanted to argue, but she didn't have the air. She stumbled over a root, caught herself on a trunk, and kept going. Behind her, the sirens had faded—either she'd put enough distance between herself and the compound, or the trees were muffling the sound. She didn't know which. She didn't trust either.

After what felt like an eternity, she broke through into a small clearing—a pocket of open ground ringed by moss-covered boulders, with a fallen log at its center. Her legs gave out. She collapsed onto the log, chest heaving, and finally, finally, loosened her grip on the bundle in her arms.

Korven tumbled out onto her lap.

He looked even smaller in the daylight. His fur was the color of tarnished gold, patchy and dull, and the scales along his back were cracked at the edges. His tiny horns—barely nubs—seemed more decorative than functional. He lay on her lap like a scrap of discarded fabric, breathing in shallow, uneven pulls.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then he opened his eyes.

"Your heartbeat sounds like a dying rabbit."

Veyra let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. She didn't know which. She was shaking, she realized—her hands, her legs, her entire body was trembling with adrenaline and shock and something that felt dangerously close to fear.

"I just—" She stopped. Swallowed. "I just broke into a sealed tomb, stole a thousand-year-old spirit, and triggered a clan-wide alert. In the span of ten minutes."

"Eleven," Korven corrected. "But who's counting."

She looked down at him. He looked back up at her.

"You're not," she said slowly, "what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"I don't know. Something bigger. Scarier. Less..." She trailed off, searching for a word.

"Less what?"

"Less pathetic."

Korven's eyes narrowed. A flicker of something—offense, amusement, she couldn't tell—passed through them.

"I'm a thousand-year-old sealed spirit trapped in the body of a cub that can barely hold its own weight," he said flatly. "If I weren't pathetic, I'd be doing something other than lying on a wolfless's lap."

She flinched at the word. Wolfless.

He noticed.

"Does that bother you? Being called that?"

"It's what I am."

"It's what they call you." His voice was matter-of-fact. "Doesn't mean it's what you are."

She didn't know how to respond to that. She'd been called wolfless for so long that she'd stopped thinking of it as an insult—it was just a fact, like the color of her hair or the shape of her scarred hands. The lowest rank in the Bloodmoon Clan. The girl who couldn't shift. The one who didn't count.

"What do I call you?" she asked instead.

"Korven."

"Korven." She tested the name. It felt old in her mouth, heavy. "What are you?"

"A spirit. An ancient wolf. A nightmare your clan's elders pray never wakes up." He said it casually, like he was listing hobbies. "Pick whichever you like."

"Which one's true?"

"All of them."

She studied him. He was so small, so fragile-looking, that it was hard to believe he was anything other than an ordinary—if strangely scaled—cub. But his eyes gave him away. There was something in them that didn't belong in anything young. Something that had seen too much.

"Why were you sealed?"

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "That's a story for another day."

"Today seems like a good day for stories. We're being hunted by my entire clan. I think I deserve to know what I'm dying for."

"You're not dying today."

"How do you know?"

He met her eyes. "Because I said so."

She stared at him. He stared back. And for a reason she couldn't explain, she believed him.

The sun was starting to slant westward when Veyra finally forced herself to move. Her legs were stiff, her arms were scratched raw, and her head was pounding with the kind of headache that came from too much adrenaline and not enough water.

She needed water. She needed food. She needed a plan.

She had none of the above.

"There's a stream about half a mile east," Korven said from inside her shirt, where she'd tucked him after he'd complained about the cold.

"How do you know?"

"Same way I knew about the War Guards. I can sense things. Smell them. Hear them. It's not a difficult concept."

"You could have led with that instead of making me run blindly through the forest."

"You didn't ask."

She wanted to argue, but she didn't have the energy. She adjusted her direction and pushed through the undergrowth, following his muttered directions. Left at the fallen oak. Right past the mossy rock. Down the slope, careful of the roots.

The stream was small but clear, cutting through a narrow gully shaded by overhanging ferns. She knelt at the edge and cupped water to her mouth, drinking until her throat stopped burning. Then she splashed water on her face, washing away the dust and blood and dried tears she hadn't realized she'd shed.

She looked at her reflection.

A stranger looked back.

She didn't know what she'd expected to see. A mark, maybe. A sign of the thing that had happened in that tunnel. But she looked the same as she always had—dark hair plastered to her forehead, gray eyes too pale for a wolf-blooded, a face that was too thin and too tired for seventeen.

The only difference was the faint, almost invisible glow at the base of her throat.

She touched it. The skin was warm, warmer than the rest of her, and she could feel a faint pulse beneath her fingers—like a second heartbeat, beating in time with her own.

"What is this?" she asked.

"The mark of the blood pact." Korven's voice drifted from her collar, where he'd poked his head out to watch. "It means the bond is active. We're tied now, for better or worse."

"Can it be undone?"

"No."

She should have been scared. She should have regretted it. But all she felt was a strange, quiet relief—like she'd been carrying something alone for so long, and now, for the first time, she wasn't.

She looked at the cub in her collar. His golden eyes were watching her with an unreadable expression.

"You're stuck with me," she said.

"I'm stuck with a wolfless who can't run, can't fight, and can't stop talking to herself." He sighed, a dramatic exhale that made his tiny body deflate. "The universe has a terrible sense of humor."

She almost smiled.

Almost.

The sound reached her before she saw it.

Footsteps. Multiple. Coming from the direction she'd come from, moving with the practiced silence of trained hunters. She went still, her heart slamming against her ribs, and slid backward into the shadow of the ferns.

Korven's voice was barely a whisper in her mind.

"Three. Two hundred yards. Closing."

She pressed herself against the gully wall, holding her breath, her hand clamped over Korven's mouth without thinking. He didn't struggle. He just watched her with those golden eyes, patient and alert.

The footsteps grew closer.

A voice—one she recognized—cut through the forest quiet.

"She can't have gone far. She's a wolfless. She's useless on her own."

Vesper.

Veyra's blood went cold.

"Spread out. Check the stream. If she's there, bring her back alive. The Alpha wants to know what she stole."

The footsteps split. One set headed directly toward the gully.

Veyra's mind raced. She couldn't outrun three trained War Guards. She couldn't fight them. She was trapped in a narrow gully with nowhere to hide and a target on her back.

She looked down at Korven.

"Can you do anything?" she whispered.

He was silent for a long moment. Then he closed his eyes, and she felt something shift in her chest—a pull, like a thread being drawn tight. A warmth spread from the mark on her throat, down her spine, into her limbs.

Korven's voice came to her, strained.

"Not much. But enough."

The footsteps were ten feet away.

And then the mist rolled in.

It came from nowhere—thick, white, cold, swallowing the gully in seconds. The War Guard cursed, visibility dropping to zero. She heard him stumble, heard him call out to the others, heard the confusion in his voice.

Veyra didn't wait for instructions. She moved.

She slipped past the guard in the mist, silent as a shadow, and climbed out of the gully on the far side. The forest swallowed her again, the mist thinning behind her as she ran.

She didn't stop running until the sun had set and the moon had risen, silver and cold, through the gaps in the canopy.

She found shelter in the hollow of a fallen tree, its roots torn from the earth and forming a natural cave. It was small, damp, and smelled of rotting wood, but it was hidden. It would have to do.

She crawled inside, pulled her knees to her chest, and finally let herself breathe.

Korven was quiet. He'd curled up in the hollow of her lap, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. The mist had taken something out of him—she could tell. He looked smaller than before, the scales along his back even duller.

"Thank you," she said.

He opened one eye.

"Don't thank me. That was pathetic. I used to be able to freeze entire armies in fog. Now I can cover a single gully for thirty seconds."

"It was enough."

He closed his eye. "Don't get used to it. I'm not your personal escape tool."

She didn't answer. She leaned her head back against the wood and looked up at the sliver of sky visible through the roots.

The moon was rising. Full. Silver.

And for the first time in her life, Veyra saw it not as a symbol of everything she couldn't be—but as a witness.

She was still alive.

She was still running.

And she was not alone.