CHAPTER 34

GABRIEL

The moment the ground gave way, I knew we were lost.

The creatures’ claws dug deep into my arms and shoulders, their touch like ice, pulling me down into the black mire. Mud surged up around my chest, thick and suffocating, burning in my throat each time I tried to breathe.

Beside me, Catriona screamed, her hands clawing at the air as if she could catch a hold of something—anything. Abriel was thrashing wildly, his tiny body pinned beneath a talon, his cries muffled as the sludge tried to swallow him whole.

Not him.

With a snarl, I wrenched free one arm, ignoring the talons that tore my skin open. I lunged sideways, wrapping my arm around Abriel’s torso, ripping him from the creature’s grip just as the mud surged higher. His small frame pressed into me, trembling, but I held him tighter—so tight I felt his heartbeat hammer against mine.

The creatures screeched, their hollow eyes burning, but I bared my teeth at them. They could drag me to the deepest pit of hell, but I would not let go of this boy.

The mud rose higher, sucking us further into darkness. Breathing grew harder, each gasp choked with grit. The world above faded—the forest, the screams, even the glimmer of light—until all that was left was blackness and the cold weight of the earth pressing down.

I pressed Abriel’s face against my chest to shield him, fighting against the panic crawling into my lungs.

“Hold on, little one,” I rasped, though I doubted he could hear me over the roar of the muck. “I’ve got you. No matter where this hell drags us, I’ve got you.”

---

We hit the ground hard.

The impact rattled my bones, knocking the last of the breath from my chest. Mud splattered everywhere, thick and sour in my mouth. I coughed violently, spitting it out in heaves until my lungs burned raw. Abriel coughed against me too, little hands clawing at my shirt, his small body shaking.

“Easy, boy,” I rasped, wiping muck from his face. My pulse steadied a fraction when I felt the rise and fall of his chest—he was breathing, alive.

I staggered upright, pulling him closer, my eyes scouring the shadows. My wolf surged, ready to lunge, to rip into those pale bastards that dragged us here. But the clearing was empty. No creatures. No screeches. Not even a whisper.

“The fuck,” I muttered under my breath, turning in slow circles.

The forest was wrong—trees twisted like bones, the air damp and heavy, the moon smothered behind veins of cloud. Everything looked drenched in silver and ash.

Abriel’s voice broke the silence, small but steady.

“Where’s… mummy?”

My gut twisted.

Catriona.

I remembered her being dragged down with us, remembered her cries swallowed by the mud. My eyes swept the ground, the trees, every shadow—but she wasn’t there.

Just me. The boy. And endless dark.

“Your mummy’s here,” I said, more to steady him than myself. I shifted him higher in my arms, his curls damp against my chin. “We’ll find her. I promise you, little one—we’ll find her.”

And with that vow burning in my chest, I started forward, picking my way through the uneven, wet earth, every nerve alert. Abriel’s weight anchored me, his warmth against the cold world around us.

Step by step, I carried him deeper into the dark, hunting for Catriona.

Because no matter where the creatures had spat us out—this was not going to be the place I lost her.

The forest pressed in on all sides, thick with shadows, the damp earth squelching beneath my boots. Abriel’s small arms clung to my neck, his breath warm against my collarbone, and I held him tighter, scanning every crooked tree and every flicker of silver light between the clouds.

Then—faint. So faint I thought I imagined it.

A cry.

“Gabriel…”

My chest seized. Catriona. It had to be.

I stopped dead, straining, every muscle coiled. The cry came again, drifting through the trees—soft, weak, muffled by distance but unmistakably hers. My heart hammered in my ribs.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered against Abriel’s curls. The boy didn’t answer, his head tucked against me, but I kept moving, faster now, guided by that sound.

Branches clawed at my arms. Roots snagged at my boots. The cries grew sharper, pulling me deeper. Every time I thought I was close, they shifted, echoing from another direction.

“Fuck,” I hissed, pushing harder, desperate. “Hold on, Catriona. I’m coming.”

But with every step, unease thickened in my gut.

Something wasn’t right.

The cries were too measured—appearing when I faltered, falling silent when I rushed. They threaded through the air like bait dangling on a hook.

Still, I couldn’t stop. Not when her voice was out there. Not when Abriel kept murmuring, “Mummy, mummy,” against my chest.

I broke into a clearing. Moonlight spilled over wet ground, glinting off puddles like broken glass. The cries had gone silent now. No movement, no trace. Just the forest breathing around me.

And then I felt it.

The prickle at the back of my neck. The weight of unseen eyes. The air shifted, colder, heavier.

I turned slowly, my wolf bristling under my skin. The trees weren’t empty anymore.

Shadows moved between them. Tall, wrong shapes, gliding without sound. The same creatures—or more of them—I couldn’t tell. But their hollow eyes glowed faintly in the dark, watching me, watching Abriel.

The boy stirred, sensing it too, his small hands gripping my shirt tighter.

“We’re not alone,” I muttered, my voice low, steady. My grip on him tightened, every nerve screaming to fight, to protect.

And the forest around us whispered back, as though it agreed.

The shadows thickened until they pressed like walls around me. Their hollow eyes glowed faintly, their bodies gliding just out of reach, circling. My wolf paced inside me, restless, ready to rip, but my arms locked tighter around Abriel. I couldn’t risk him in the middle of a fight I didn’t understand.

Then I saw her.

Catriona.

My breath hitched—she was there, a little ways ahead, her body pinned against a tree as though the bark itself had swallowed her whole. Her head lolled to the side, hair matted with mud, unconscious.

“Catriona!” I surged forward, but the forest itself seemed to thicken, branches knotting into a cage around her.

Then—her voice.

“Gabriel…”

But it was wrong. Too hollow. Too sharp.

The sound came from behind me, then to my left, then everywhere at once. Each creature that circled me opened its jagged mouth, and her voice poured out in unison.

“Gabriel.”

My stomach turned.

“What the fuck are you things?” I growled under my breath, my eyes darting between them, trying to hold each flicker of movement.

Were they sent by the old man? Another game in his endless torment? Or had we just stumbled into something worse—something ancient that didn’t give a damn about our war, only about feeding?

Abriel stirred against me, his small voice trembling.

“Mummy…?”

I pressed him closer to my chest, my eyes fixed on the tree where she hung.

“We’ll get her,” I whispered to him, to myself. “I’ll get her out.”

But the creatures’ chorus rose, her voice twisting into a mockery.

“Gabriel… come closer. Gabriel… save me.”

And all the while, their pale shapes inched nearer, their glowing eyes locking onto the boy in my arms.

They weren’t circling me.

They wanted the boy.

My wolf snarled beneath my skin, the old animal pacing like a caged thing. Every fiber of me wanted to tear into those pale horrors, rip them limb from limb. But the boy was curled against my chest — warm, too small, trusting — and the thought of shifting full, claws and teeth loose, with Abriel in my arms tightened something cold around my throat. How do you fight monsters without turning the child you hold into collateral?

I weighed it twice and three times in the space of one breath. Hesitation is dangerous. Hesitation is costly. Still, I could not throw him away.

Abriel, as if sensing the war warring in my bones, lifted his head. His lashes fluttered, and his little face turned toward Catriona. Then his pupils ballooned, black rims swallowing the brown, and the air around Catriona began to shimmer, a tremor like heat where nothing warm existed. I felt it along my skin: a thin, bright membrane knitting itself around her, cold and humming.

A whisper crawled from my lips. “Are you the one doing that? Are you protecting her?”

He nodded to me slowly. Then, with an urgency that had teeth, he motioned I put him down.

I stared into the creatures’ hollow eyes. They were already centering on us, hungry and patient. The boy pushed again, insistence blooming in his tiny shoulders. He wanted to move toward his mother.

I hate that I did it. I set him down. My feet were planted, my chest a shield stretched between him and the coming teeth. He took two small steps, then one more, and slipped into the shimmer as if walking through smoke. The world seemed to hold its breath.

For a second — a staggeringly brief window — the pale things recoiled. A pulse of force must have come from the light around Catriona, because one of the creatures lunged and was flung backward like a rag, slamming into a tree and leaving a smear I did not want to look at. The others hissed in fury.

A grin split me then — wolfish, ugly, a hunger-feeling of rightness. “Perfect,” I growled aloud. “Now allow me to break your fleshless, ash-skin asses.”

I shifted in my wolf form.

Heat and feral speed flooded me. I bounded forward, a black shadow sliding over wet leaves, every sense sharpened into knives. The world compressed to the smell of damp dirt, the metallic tang of the creatures’ breath.

The first collision was brutal. Talons met fur and muscle; they were quick and wrong in their angles, fingers too long, joints that bent where they should not. I answered in a flurry — a shoulder into a ribcage, fangs buried in shoulder tendon, a swing of a foreleg that crunched something like brittle wood. One went down with a hiss.

Then one of them lashed upward. Something hard and cold — a bone-tipped limb, or an exoskeletal spike — slammed into my thigh. It did not merely graze; it punctured. Pain exploded bright and immediate, a white flare that knocked me half sideways. I stumbled, claws scraping at the loam, and for a breath my world narrowed to the hot, stinging line of that wound. The animal heat that should have kept me upright faltered.

They smelled weakness. Others cascaded in, a swarm of grey-white bodies, and one found purchase in my lower back — a stabbing, twisting strike that drove the air from my lungs and sent another ribbon of hot pain along my spine. For a moment the forest spun like a bad dream. My paws slid; the ground underfoot felt rubbery and unreal.

But anger is a potent medicine. I shook the blurriness off like water and launched myself up through it — through the pain, through the ringing. Teeth found ribs, claws ripped at sinew and old-mended places. I heaved one creature off me and flung it; another I pinned and tore, driving it away with a snarl that was half warning, half promise. The world tasted of iron and wet earth.

Still they came. For every one I felled, two more took its place. Their numbers were a tide; their strikes were unholy and coordinated, like a single mind composed into many mouths. Each new impact found a place already raw: an elbow, the side of my thigh, the flank where the first spike had gone deep. My breath came in ragged, hot pulls. Pain compounded. My vision shimmered at the edges with afterimages of claw-prints and blood.

I could feel myself losing rhythm — the slick sixteen-beat cadence of battle breaking down into flat, stumbling beats. Adrenaline roared, but my body is not immune to damage. The pain in my thigh was a constant hammer. The strike to my back gnawed at me like a worm. Vertigo flickered; the world tilted.

Everything narrowed to a single, impossible focus: protect the boy and catriona. I pushed myself like a damn fool, hurling every scrap of ferocity I had. I yanked a creature into a tree and drove my shoulder through it; I spun and snapped at necks, hurling bodies aside. I felt bone and claw and ground give way under the force of my fury.

And yet, even as I fought, as my claws painted streaks across the leaves and as the creatures screamed and fell, a second, creeping thing crept over me: the old, cold emptiness that comes when pain outstrips will. My limbs grew leaden in places where they had been quick; sounds dulled at the edges; the neat map of the forest smeared. I could no longer track three or four attackers at once. Their numbers blurred into a single, pressing pressure.

I staggered. The world slotted into slow motion: one more paw swept past me, and I tasted dirt and iron and a muffled, impossible calm. My vision gray-ed at the periphery. My mouth went dry. For the first time in my life, half of me — the human half, the thinking half — felt detached, a passenger watching the wolf's muscles keep struggling even as the brain dimmed.

I forced a snarl, a last, raw sound. I drove my teeth into a throat, pulled, and it slumped. For an incredulous second I thought I'd won a breath. Then a wave of cold rolled through me like a hand closing my ribs, and the world dipped.

Pain, then a widening coolness, then the sense of falling out of myself.

I couldn't feel myself properly anymore. My limbs moved, but not with the cunning they always had. The fight continued because muscle remembers; fury keeps the body moving when thought fails. But something else — something old and deliberate — was beginning to crawl into the places my reason had kept.

Even as I shook off one last attacker and sent it reeling, the edges of my mind blurred with an influence that felt not like pain but like a presence that wanted me to stop struggling and listen.

The fight blurred into a haze of blood, claws, and burning pain. My body no longer felt like mine; it was raw instinct dragging me forward, a wolf powered by fury when muscle and bone begged to collapse. Each step was heavier, each strike slower, until even the creatures’ snarls sounded distant.

Then the blackness came.

It crept at the edges of my vision, seeping inward like ink in water. My limbs dulled, my breaths rattled. I swayed, the world spinning in broken fragments of silver moon and twisted trees.

Just before it swallowed me whole, a light broke through the dark.

I forced my eyes open.

Abriel.

The boy stood only a few steps away, no longer trembling, no longer hiding. His little hand stretched toward me, fingers open, reaching. Around him shimmered a glow — soft but steady, like starlight wrapped in skin.

“Mummy’s safe,” he whispered, his voice not just his own but layered with something older, stronger. “Now you.”

The blackness gripped me harder, dragging me under, but that light — his light — was the last thing I saw.

And then nothing.