001

AUTHOR POV

  The blood wasn’t gone when Kael Blackthorn slipped past the body.

  “You’re becoming sloppy,” he told the man shaking against the wall of the alley. “Three weeks to track down one rogue, and you just allowed him to cut your arm open?”

  The wolf cowered properly this time, pressing his bleeding shoulder to the brick. “Alpha, I....”

  “Don’t.” Kael’s voice shattered the night air like winter steel. “The next wolf who offers me excuses instead of results will come to him.”

  He didn’t peer at the corpse again. Didn’t have to — he’d felt the snap of bone in his fingers, heard the final gurgle as the rogue’s throat broke. Justice, swift and absolute. The Blackthorn way for three centuries.

  Beneath it lay the city of Ironhaven, with its industrial centre spraying smoke into the star-ravaged sky. From here on high, Kael could easily see all of it: the humans’ districts where they scurried around like ants, the wolf territories carved to neat grids, the neutral areas where his word lay law. He ruled by blood and from fear.

  “Alpha.” Marcus emerged at his shoulder and there was shining gray hair on the old wolf's head in the moonlight. “The Council requests your presence.”

  “They ask, or they demand?”

  Marcus’s silence said everything.

  Kael worked his jaw, the beast beneath his skin stirring restlessly. Twenty-seven years old, already sick of politics, tired of the dance between doing whatever needed to be done and what the old wolves wouldn’t allow. But the Blackthorn prophecy resided tight around his neck like a chain forged in hellfire, chains that had to be acknowledged before they could be broken.

  “Tell them dawn,” he finally told them. “I’ll attend them at dawn.”

  “They won’t like waiting.”

  “They don’t like breathing either, yet they persist.”

  Marcus’s grimace broke into what might have been a smile, something of a grin on that weathered face. “Your father would have”

  “My father is dead.” Kael turned and suddenly his coat shook in the wind, snapping. “The dead do not have opinions.”

  But they get prophecies, don’t they? It was a thought that arrived uninvited, bitter as poison. The Blackthorn curse, spoken by a dying witch on her dying breath: When blood meets moonlight, when the hunter finds the hunted, when fire walks among wolvesthen will the last Blackthorn fall.

  He had been thirteen when his father brought him to that basement, had made him watch the witch burn. Thirteen when he realized power had a price, and that price was always paid in blood. His blood. His future. His soul.

  “Alpha.” Marcus gave a warning now. “Your eyes.”

  Kael blinked, but the gold faded away from him. The wolf wanted out—always wanted out—but especially now, as though the prophecy felt thick on his tongue like old copper.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not. You’re hunting phantom threats and killing real wolves. The pack grows restless.”

  “The pack grows soft.” Kael’s hands gripped at his sides in fists. “Three attacks in as many months. Rogues testing the borders we’ve held for generations. And you want me to what? Negotiate?”

  “I want you to remember you’re more than the prophecy’s puppet.”

  That word held something like a blade between them. Marcus had been his father’s Beta; he had held Kael’s hand upon his first change; he had remained silent while the witch cursed them all. He had earned the right to speak truths that others might die for saying.

  But truth didn’t change the weight of crown and curse.

  “Send word to the border patrols,” Kael said, walking toward the edge of the roof. “Double the watches. Triple them if you must. Anyone crosses into our territory without permission”

  “Anyone, Alpha?”

  The question carried layers. Lost and bewildered human tourists. Wolf children chasing balls over invisible lines. And the woman from three nights ago, with her strange scent and stranger eyes, who had stared at him like she was peering through flesh and fur straight to the rot in his bones.

  “Anyone,” Kael repeated, but the word tasted wrong by this point. Tasted like compromise.

  Marcus nodded slowly. “And the dreams?”

  Kael went still. Ironhaven hummed around them, the sound of its mechanistic heartbeat—trains, factories, ten thousand human lives oblivious to the monsters in their midst. But under the thumping of the city he heard something else. A rhythm not so much wolf as human. Something that made his teeth ache.

  “What dreams?”

  “The ones that have you waking up with her scent in your nose... the ones that make you pace your rooms until sunrise.”

  “I don’t dream.”

  “We all dream, boy. Some of us just lie better about it.”

  Kael wanted to snarl, wanted to remind Marcus who was in charge here, but the old wolf had already turned away, already slipping into shadow and memory. Leaving him alone with the city and the curse and the swelling sense of dawning realization that his world was changing beneath him.

  He closed his eyes and allowed the wind to bring smells into his heightened senses. Industrial smoke, human sweat, wolf musk, and underneath it all something else. Something that made his chest clench with recognition he’d never felt before.

  Fire walks among wolves.

  The prophecy rang as it did in its echo, Alpha of the continent’s most feared pack, cold and ruthless and utterly alone as he stood there. He kept his wolves in their territories below, always aware that their Alpha would kill to keep them safe.

  He would kill. He had killed. But until the prophecy took his life or he found a way to break it, he would continue killing.

  But tonight, for the first time in years, Kael Blackthorn felt the weight of something he’d thought long dead: doubt. Not at all about his strength or his willingness to use it, but simply the knowledge that strength alone might not be enough.

  A train whistle sounded out in the distance, long, mournful, inevitable. Like the future rushing toward him on steel rails, bringing something which would either save him or erase everything he had made.

  He stood there until dawn painted the sky the color of ancient blood, waiting for an unlikely sign to show up, unaware that three miles away in a human apartment building that smelled of herbs and secrets, she was waking from dreams of her own.

  Dreams of wolves and fire and a man with eyes like winter midnight who would either bring her salvation or deliver her death.

  The prophecy had begun to turn.