A howl split the woods behind me.
"I smell her," a rough voice called through the trees.
I pressed my back to a rotting pine and wrapped a strip torn from my dress around my bleeding forearm. Three pairs of green eyes moved between the trunks. They had found me less than an hour after sunset.
The largest rogue stepped into a shaft of moonlight. His fur was matted with mud, one ear torn nearly in half.
"Alpha Lucas sent us a fine gift."
My stomach tightened. "He sent you?"
The rogue grinned, showing yellow teeth. "He opened the border. That was invitation enough."
So Lucas had not simply banished me. He had made sure the wolves on this side knew I was coming.
I forced myself to stand straight. "Do you always live on another Alpha's scraps?"
A snarl rolled through the brush.
"Careful, human."
"Wolfless," another rogue called from my right. "I can smell it. No wolf. No pack. No one coming to save her."
They were right about the last part.
That did not mean I had to make the killing easy.
I had spent ten years gathering medicinal plants in the southern woods. Lucas thought that work beneath a future Luna, which was why he had never noticed how well I knew the ground. I knew where the limestone shelf broke beneath the moss. I knew which gullies flooded after winter storms. I knew the dead willow grove hid a sinkhole deep enough to swallow an elk.
I pushed away from the tree and ran.
Heavy paws struck the earth behind me.
"Flank her!"
Branches whipped my bare arms. My human lungs burned quickly without a wolf's strength to share the work, but panic would get me killed faster than exhaustion.
I listened instead.
One to the left. One to the right. The leader behind.
Exactly what I needed.
I veered toward the willow grove.
"She is slowing!" the right flanker shouted.
"I want a leg," the other laughed.
"You can fight over the bones when I am done," their leader said.
I reached the fallen cedar that marked the edge of the sinkhole and jumped. My boots landed on the narrow strip of exposed bedrock beyond it.
The two flankers followed without looking.
The moss collapsed under their weight.
Both wolves vanished to the chest in black mud.
One shifted halfway to human form, clawing at roots that ripped free in his hands. "Pull me out!"
The other sank to his ribs. "What is this?"
"Old peat bog," I said, backing across the stone. "The more you fight it, the faster you sink."
"Bitch!"
"That is not a rescue word."
I turned to run again.
A shadow dropped from the branches above me.
The leader's claws ripped across my back before I could duck. Pain exploded from my shoulder blades to my waist. The impact threw me forward onto slick stone.
He shifted into a broad, scarred man as he stalked after me.
"Clever little thing."
I kicked at his knee. He caught my ankle.
"Lucas should have kept you."
"He has terrible judgment."
I twisted, driving my other heel into his mouth. He swore and released me.
I scrambled backward.
The ground disappeared beneath my hand.
Cliff.
Mist boiled in the gorge below, thick enough to hide the bottom.
The rogue saw my hesitation and smiled.
"Forbidden valley. Even pack scouts stay away from it."
My mother's voice came back with brutal clarity.
Never step into the valley, Elena.
Never let your blood touch that ground.
I had been twelve when she whispered the warning from her deathbed. Her fingertips had been red when she traced the crescent across my cheek. I had thought fever made her afraid.
Now the rogue charged.
I had no choice.
I jumped sideways for a thorn vine hanging over the edge. My hand closed around it. Thorns cut into my palm as my body swung against the cliff face. My left shoulder wrenched with a sickening pop.
I screamed.
The rogue leaped after me and caught the same vine below my boots.
His weight tore fibers loose from the rock.
"We fall together," he growled.
"Not my plan."
I kicked his face. He bit at my ankle and missed.
The vine groaned.
Far below, something metallic scraped through the fog.
Clink.
Drag.
The rogue went still.
His pupils widened. "No."
"What?"
Clink.
Drag.
"Cut me loose," he whispered.
I stared down at him. "You were trying to eat me thirty seconds ago."
"You do not understand what lives down there."
The vine split another inch.
He clawed upward, suddenly desperate. "Pull me up!"
"You are heavier than I am."
"Then we are both dead."
The final fibers snapped.
We dropped through the mist.
The impact came in pieces: stone against my ribs, my skull striking frozen ground, the rogue's body hitting somewhere to my right with a wet crack.
For several seconds I could not breathe.
When air finally entered my lungs, it felt like glass.
The rogue lay twisted over a boulder. His neck bent wrong, but one hand still moved.
My own blood spread beneath me, bright against the frost.
Ancient grooves in the stone caught the red and carried it away in branching lines.
My mother's warning returned.
Never let your blood touch that soil.
"Stop," I whispered, dragging myself with my good arm.
The blood kept flowing.
The carved lines began to glow.
Pressure rolled through the gorge, so dense it forced my cheek to the ground. This was not a normal Alpha aura. It felt older, heavier, as if the mountain itself had decided to breathe.
Clink.
Drag.
The sound came closer.
The surviving rogue started to whimper.
"It woke up."
I lifted my head toward the fog.
Two red eyes opened inside it.
A deep voice rumbled through the stone.
"You smell like her."
I swallowed blood. "Stay back."
The chain scraped once more.
"You bled on my floor," the voice said. "You broke the seal."
A silhouette rose out of the mist, twice the height of any wolf I had ever seen, dragging an iron chain thick enough to anchor a fortress gate.
