Once back at the bear camp, the plan is for Barrett to “toss” me back into the prison trailer, shouting at me for being “useless.” That way, he thinks, I’ll be able to rejoin the prisoners as one of their friends, and talk about the ancestral cave’s location with Jasper and Zach.It would be a stupid plan if it was real. There’s no way that wolf shifters would just welcome back someone who had abandoned them like that, let alone let slip important information around them.But Barrett doesn’t seem like the sharpest fang on the jawbone, so to speak, and since I’ve presented myself as a helpless, lost, weak little girl, he isn’t paying much attention to my machinations. He does, annoyingly, seem to take a bit too much pleasure in tossing me back into the trailer. I fall on the ground, skinning my knees and collapsing on the hard metal of the floor.“Ayala!”Jasper is by my side as soon as the door shuts behind Barrett. “What happened? Are you okay?”“I’m fine,” I mumble
Sure enough, someone brings us plates of dinner. I share mine with the rest of the group, knowing that they didn’t have a chance to take a break from this awful prison trailer like I did.Jasper refuses to let me give him any of his dinner, though, pushing the portion back toward me. His eyes are filled with love, and concern, and a twinge of fear. The sun goes down. Barrett will want to complete the executions tonight, if possible.One of the guards opens the door and orders me out. I stand outside in the freezing cold while Barrett saunters up to me wearing a thick fur coat.“Well, girlie? What did you get for me?”“I’m close,” I tell him. “Really close. One of the Whismore boys even thinks I have a crush on him.”“Close,” Barrett repeats. “Does that mean you still don’t know where that grave is?”I shake my head. “I’m trying, but you know, if you push someone too hard to tell you something, they get suspicious.”“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Bar
I watch out the window as the stars rise in the sky and dust clouds billow from the trucks and all terrain vehicles all heading toward the location I’ve given them.The spot where Barrett thinks he’ll be able to finally eliminate the Whismore family line. The spot where he intends to kill my beloved Jasper. The spot where, if my plan has worked, my San Diego pack will be lying in wait to ambush the bear clan and rescue me. I can hardly breathe.Barrett pulls up at the spot, the rocky ridge I gave as a landmark rising high above us into the dark Montana sky.He jumps heavily to the ground, then comes around to help me down out of the truck. I’ve played myself up as a weak, helpless, lost little girl, so I have to keep playing along for a while so he continues to trust me.I see Jasper, Zach, and Orsina all being roughly led to stand near the ridge. Their hands are bound behind their backs. Their eyes follow the bear clan members who are carrying armfuls of explosives
With my wolf eyes, better adjusted to the darkness, I finally see it. The San Diego pack, all in wolf form, their fur a rainbow of greys and browns, is racing up the mountain toward us.They’ve arrived just in time.I join them, adding the pounding of my paws to the sound of them descending on the bear clan.My first order of business is to free Jasper, biting through the ropes around his arms with my sharp teeth. Then Orsina and Zach are freed, joining us in the battle.It’s a brutal and difficult battle. Bears are strong, difficult to take down, and vicious in their own way. Wolves are faster, though, and we outnumber them. The San Diego pack hasn’t been struggling under a generational curse that’s been slowly killing them off, so we have nearly twice as many members as Barrett’s bear clan.I see one of the younger members of the bear clan, a male who seemed rather obsessed with Orsina, chasing her down. I pounce on him, biting down with my strong jaws and giving Orsin
“Let’s talk about this,” Sarah says, approaching the bear clan’s Alpha slowly. “I think we can figure something out.”“What do you mean?” Barrett asks.“A truce,” Nash says. “No one here wants this mountain to blow up. It would destroy your clan and your home as well as that of the wolf pack.”“I have no choice,” Barrett says. “It has to happen. If some of us die, then their sacrifice was necessary to rescue our clan.”“Rescue your clan from what?” Sarah asks. Her voice is gentle but firm, the same tone she uses to talk to Stella and Samuel when the two children are squabbling or misbehaving. “From whatever destruction those wolves have been bringing down on us since long before I was born!” Barrett shouts.“That sounds really hard,” Sarah says. “I bet it feels like your clan has been cursed.”“We have! It’s a curse! And the only way to end it is to finally destroy them!” Barrett points accusingly at Jasper and Zach, now huddled together behind the San Diego pack.
No one in the San Diego pack was able to talk Greyson out of his insistence that he ought to be the one to carry out the potentially fatal rescue mission. He says a grim goodbye to Nash and leaves to creep up the side of the ridge where he can sit, unnoticed by the bear clan, until and unless he needs to leap into action and sacrifice himself for the rest of the pack.As for me, I’m determined to make Greyson’s sacrifice unnecessary. He won’t need to come down on Barrett and try to wrestle the detonator away from him if I can just convince the bear clan’s Alpha to listen to us.We decide that I should be the one to try and talk to him. He trusts me, or at least he knows me, after our time together. I’m not exactly the sorceress that Layla is, but I am her Star Twin. Plus, I know all about the carving and its inscription, and the blessing and curse that form its two sides. “I’m coming with you,” Orsina insists. I open my mouth to protest, but she just takes me by the hand and
One member of the bear clan steps, skinny and ruddy faced, steps forward. “Could the wolf girl read the poem again?”Barrett hands the carving back to me with a commanding grunt. I obey, reading the inscription slowly, clearly, and loudly.“Yeah, I know some of those lines,” the bear says.“Where from?” Barrett asks.“My mom used to sing a song like that,” he tells us. “But it wasn’t about a blood feud or a curse or anything like that. It was longer, and kind of different.”“Different how?” Barrett sounds like he’s getting impatient now, and I don’t exactly blame him.The tall bear clan member looks nervous, twisting his hands together. “I’m not sure if it means anything, or what it means…”“Damn it, Rocky, just tell us what the song said!”“It was a love song,” Rocky says. “About a great love. She used to say it was about the two mountains, a girl and a boy, but there are lines in the song about wolves and bears. It’s all romantic, lots of kisses and longing lo
“WHAT!?” Barrett’s eyes look like they’re going to burst out of his skull. “Zach and I are in love,” Orsina says with a wide grin. “And we are going to be mated.”“No, no, no no no no no.” Barrett crosses his arms and shakes his head. “I’m on board to make a truce with the wolves, and see if this blessing thing is real, but I draw the line at a member of my own clan becoming mates with one of them.”“But that’s how we end this thing once and for all,” Orsina pleads.“This has gone too far. I won’t have it.” Barrett reaches out to take Orsina by the arm and pull her back toward him. “We’ll let your new wolf friends go, but we bears are going back to our camp site to talk this over.”“No!” Orsina yanks her arm back from Barrett and stands beside Zach. “I’m not leaving him.”“Well I’m not allowing this,” Barrett says. “Just because you kids found some cool rock down by the stream doesn’t mean we’re going to change how we do things after hundreds of years.”“But doing