The Wolf Beneath

Chapter 5 – Through the Veil

Leah Carter’s Point of View

The fire in Briggs' hearth had long since died to embers, but the weight of his words still burned hot behind my ribs like swallowed coals. The Wolf Realm. The Alpha. A cure in the form of blood freely given, and a choice I could no longer avoid, no matter how desperately I wanted to pretend that safer options existed.

I rode the memory of that moment home, boots crunching over frosted earth as the morning mist clung to my skin like cold fingers. When I stepped through the cottage door, everything felt different. Emma’s drawings still littered the table, her wolf doll still tucked into the cushion of her tiny bed, but the air was heavier, like even the house understood something had changed.

I found Caleb sleeping, or something close to it, his chest rising and falling in ragged intervals. His fever had returned with a vengeance, and the dark veins beneath his skin looked angrier than before, stretching up his neck like creeping vines.

I pressed a cool cloth to his forehead, whispering soft things I didn’t really believe. He stirred but didn’t wake. Part of me wondered if he was caught between worlds already, drifting through the edges of humanity and whatever waited on the other side.

That night, while the wind screamed through the shutters and the woods seemed to pace just outside, I packed a satchel with everything I thought I might need: herbs, tinctures, a spare shawl, the old dagger I kept beneath my mattress. Not enough to face an Alpha. Not enough to survive another realm. But it was all I had.

The next morning, I kissed Emma’s forehead as she slept, her curls soft as rabbit’s fur beneath my lips. Her drawings were getting stranger, shapes that twisted and bled across the parchment, always with eyes. Watching.

“You’re going somewhere,” a small voice said behind me. I turned to find her awake, eyes wide and solemn.

“Just for a little while,” I lied.

“You’re going to find the golden-eyed man.” She said.

I froze. “How do you know that?”

She didn’t answer. Just held out her wolf doll. “For luck.”

Tears welled up in my eyes, but I nodded and took it.

Before leaving Silver Hollow, I took Emma by the hand and led her up the winding path toward the hills, where a small stone cottage curled around a thicket of elder trees. The door creaked open before I could knock.

Old Mother Ruth stood in the threshold, wrapped in layers of embroidered wool and smelling of rosemary and smoke. Her silver hair was braided with tiny bones and dried lavender.

“Leah Carter,” she said, smiling with lips stained from wildberry tea. “I was wondering when you’d come.”

I didn’t ask how she knew. I didn’t have the strength.

“I need you to keep her safe,” I said.

Mother Ruth knelt before Emma, brushing a curl from her face. “You’ve got powerful dreams, little one. I’ll keep them anchored while your mother does what she must.”

Emma leaned in and whispered something in the old woman’s ear that made her eyebrows rise, but she said nothing aloud. Just took her hand and led her inside.

I watched the door close behind them and turned away before the tears could fall.

By midmorning, I stood at the edge of town, cloaked in wool and doubt, waiting for Briggs. He appeared from the mist as if summoned, dragging a satchel of his own. It clinked with the sounds of glass and bone.

“Ready?” he asked, like we were going berry-picking.

“No.” I answered honestly.

He grunted. “Good. Only fools are.”

He led me eastward, down paths few still used, toward the old riverbed choked with moss and roots. We walked in silence, save for the occasional warning: “Mind the stones,” or “Don’t step in that.”

Eventually, we reached a glade where the trees grew in tight, unnatural spirals, their branches interlocked like clasped fingers. The air shimmered here, as if heat rose from a hidden fire, though the ground remained cold.

“This is it,” Briggs said, removing a pouch from his coat. “The Veil. Thinnest place left.”

He scattered herbs in a circle around us, sage, wolfsbane, dried yarrow. Then he reached into his satchel and pulled out a tiny glass jar of gray ash.

“This will mask your scent,” he said, smearing a streak across my brow. “Enough to pass the border. Maybe.”

“Maybe?” I asked.

“It’s the best I’ve got.” He replied. A pulse trembled through the glade. The trees seemed to breathe.

“Step through when I say. No hesitation. No second thoughts.”

I nodded, heart pounding like a war drum.

He muttered words in a language I didn’t recognize, old and thick like tree bark. The air hummed. The space between two trees rippled like a pond disturbed by a stone.

“Now.”

I stepped forward, the world shifted, the air turned dense, syrupy, charged with something that smelled of wet soil and old blood. The trees were taller here, impossibly so, their trunks wider than the walls of my cottage, their bark pulsing faintly with light. Every leaf, every root, every breeze felt alive, aware.

The Wolf Realm wasn't just beautiful, it was ancient beyond human comprehension, heavy with memories and power accumulated over countless centuries. The very air hummed with stories I couldn't understand, with the weight of events that had shaped this place into something that existed according to its own rules.

I stood frozen beneath the impossible canopy, overwhelmed by the sheer otherness of everything around me. This wasn't simply another place, it was another way of being, where the boundaries between life and death, between hunter and prey, between human and beast, held different meanings entirely.

The sky overhead glowed with colors that had no names, shifting between deep purple and silver-green like the inside of an abalone shell. Strange birds called from heights I couldn't see, their voices carrying notes that seemed to bypass my ears and resonate directly in my bones.

After what felt like hours but might have been minutes, I forced myself to move. My legs trembled with each step, but I pushed deeper into the alien forest, following what might have been a path or might simply have been the way the undergrowth naturally parted. The route twisted and curved in ways that defied logic, sometimes doubling back on itself, sometimes leading uphill and downhill simultaneously in violations of physics that made my head spin.

My fingers brushed against ferns as I passed, and they curled toward my skin like they recognized something familiar in my scent. Flowers turned to track my movement, their petals opening and closing in patterns that looked almost like communication.

Then I felt it, a shift in the wind that carried new scents and the weight of watching eyes.

Movement in my peripheral vision made me turn, and my breath caught in my throat.

They surrounded me in seconds, a perfect circle of muscle and menace. None spoke. But weapons gleamed from beneath their cloaks, blades carved from bone, polished wood bows, arrows fletched with feathers black as pitch.

I didn’t run. There was no point. My breath clouded in front of me as one stepped forward, taller than the others, a spear leveled toward my heart.

He growled something in a guttural tongue. Another raised a blade. They were going to attack. I reached for the wolf doll in my satchel like it was a totem, something to cling to in death.

Then a voice cut through the air, deep and commanding. “Stand down.”

Every figure froze. A man stepped through the trees, tall and powerful, wrapped in a cloak of midnight fur. His golden eyes burned like twin suns. Every sentinel dropped to one knee.

Kael had arrived…….