Chapter 8: the deadland

The GPS on my phone had given up three miles ago. “Recalculating,” the robotic voice sighed for the fourteenth time. “You are in a restricted, unmapped wilderness. Please turn around.”“Shut up, Siri,” I muttered, tapping the screen to kill the audio. 

“I know exactly where I am.”The Deadlands lived up to their name. The road leading up to the territory was less of a road and more of a suggestion made of gravel and spite. 

To my left, a jagged cliff face rose into the gray sky. To my right, a dense, tangled forest of black pines that looked like they hadn’t seen the sun since the Bronze Age. 

The wind howling through the cracked window of my SUV smelled like wet copper and freezing rain. If hell had a landscaping problem, this would be it. 

The Regional Alpha Council thought they were doing me a massive insult by letting me have this ‘cursed wasteland.’ Silas had literally laughed when I claimed it, telling me I’d freeze to death in the dirt. Let them laugh. Idiots always did.

 I crested the final hill, and the SUV’s tires crunched to a halt. Before me sat the ruins of the Vance ancestral estate. It wasn’t a house so much as a sprawling, gothic mausoleum carved directly into the side of the mountain. Ivy choked the stone gargoyles, and the heavy iron gates were rusted shut. It looked like the set of a low-budget vampire movie. 

I killed the engine and stepped out. The biting cold immediately cut through my jacket, but I didn’t shiver. My newly awakened royal blood ran a little hotter than a normal wolf’s. I walked past the rusted gates, my boots crunching on the frost-covered gravel, heading straight for the center of the ruins. 

According to the legal documents Arthur had given me, the entrance to the Royal Vault wasn’t in the house. It was beneath the courtyard. 

I stopped in front of a massive, circular stone altar in the center of the overgrown courtyard. It was covered in moss and carved with the crescent moon crest of my mother’s bloodline. “Alright, Grandma,” I whispered, rolling my shoulders. 

“Let’s see what you left me.”I didn’t have a key. The vault was sealed with a blood-lock, keyed specifically to the royal DNA. I pulled a small silver knife from my pocket, pricked the tip of my index finger, and pressed the bead of blood against the center of the stone crest. For a second, nothing happened. The wind just kept howling. Then, the stone grew warm beneath my finger. A pulse of silver light flared from the blood, racing through the carved grooves of the crest.

 The ground beneath my feet gave a deep, seismic rumble. Dust and dead leaves shook off the altar as the massive stone disk in the center of the courtyard split down the middle and slowly ground open, revealing a dark, stone staircase descending into the earth.

 A rush of stale, cold air wafted up, smelling of ancient parchment and dry earth. I pulled out my phone, turned on the flashlight, and started walking down. The stairs seemed to go on forever, spiraling deep into the bedrock of the mountain. 

My thighs were burning by the time I hit the bottom, stepping off the last stair and into a cavernous, vaulted ceiling. I swept my flashlight across the room. The beam hit something shiny. Then something else. Then a mountain of it. I stopped dead in my tracks. My breath hitched in my throat, and for a long moment, the only sound was my own heartbeat hammering in my ears. “Holy mother of pearl,” 

I breathed. The vault was the size of a football field. And it was packed. Floor to ceiling. To my left, there were literal mountains of gold bars, stacked in neat, glittering pyramids that caught the flashlight beam and fractured it into a thousand blinding rays. 

To my right, heavy oak chests were overflowing with silver coins, ancient chalices, and uncut gemstones that sparkled like frozen fire. In the center of the room, behind a velvet rope, sat the artifacts. 

There were swords with hilts encrusted in rubies, crowns made of woven platinum, and scrolls sealed in tubes of pure ivory. I walked slowly toward the nearest gold pyramid, my boots echoing in the massive silence. 

I reached out and picked up a standard gold bar. It was incredibly heavy, cold, and perfectly smooth. I let out a sharp, barking laugh that echoed off the vaulted ceiling. Silas had been threatening to cut off my fifty-dollar-a-week grocery allowance. He had been forcing me to beg for winter boots for the pack pups. 

He had looked at me with pure disgust, telling me I was a worthless, low-born stray who couldn’t even afford to buy her own shampoo. 

Meanwhile, my grandmother was sitting on a dragon’s hoard. “Take that, you constipated pug,” I said to the empty room, grinning like a maniac. “Who’s the low-born stray now? Oh wait, you can’t answer, because you’re currently crying to your mother about his lost pack funds.”I dropped the gold bar back onto the stack with a satisfying clack and walked over to the artifact section.

 I ran my fingers over a platinum tiara studded with sapphires the size of quail eggs. It was breathtaking. It was priceless. It was also completely useless for buying bulk canned beans and ammunition.

 I couldn’t exactly walk into a human bank and deposit a twelfth-century royal chalice without the FBI showing up to ask questions. And the supernatural black market would lowball me if they knew I was desperate. 

I needed to be smart. I needed to liquidate just enough to fund the fortress, while keeping the rest hidden. I walked over to a small, ornate wooden box sitting on a pedestal near the back. 

I opened it. Inside lay a collection of flawless, uncut diamonds. These were perfect. High value, easy to transport, and if I went through Arthur’s high-end supernatural contacts, they could be fenced quietly. I grabbed a handful of the diamonds, dropping them into my leather pouch. They clinked together, a beautiful, heavy sound. 

Next, I walked over to a rack of ancient, silver-inlaid weapons. I pulled down a beautifully balanced dagger with a hilt wrapped in dark leather. I gave it an experimental twirl. It was perfectly weighted. 

“Definitely keeping this one,” I murmured, sliding it into the sheath at my belt. I spent the next hour just walking through the vault, taking inventory in my head. There was enough wealth here to buy out the Crescent Moon Pack, burn it to the ground, and rebuild it as a parking lot. But I didn’t want to buy Silas’s pack. 

I wanted to build my own fortress. I hefted the leather pouch of diamonds, feeling the satisfying weight of it against my hip. 

This was enough to pay Briggs and his mercenary crew for the next three months, plus buy the first massive shipment of steel and concrete.

 As I walked back up the spiraling stairs, the heavy stone doors grinding shut and locking behind me with a final, echoing boom, I took a deep breath of the freezing mountain air. 

The Deadlands didn’t look like a cursed wasteland anymore. It looked like a kingdom. And I was finally the queen.