Chapter 36

The words hit the forest harder than the silver had.

Ty and I went still in exactly the same way, and the moment the bond lit between us, I knew he had reached the same conclusion I had. This was never just a boundary test. Never random scavengers learning borrowed skins in the dark. Alpha Cameron had been marked once by the chamber and escaped it. If these things had carried anything out of the mountain with them, they would want the unfinished thread of that old claim.

“They’re not scouting,” I said.

Ty’s grip tightened on his blade. “No. They’re hunting upward.”

I swallowed hard, never taking my eyes off the white-scarred wolf wearing our sentry’s body. “Tell me you have a better plan than sprinting back and hoping they’re slower than nightmares.”

“I have a plan,” Ty said. “It’s just rude enough that you’ll like it.”

Despite the cold knot in my stomach, I almost smiled. “You confuse me with someone much easier to impress.”

“Good,” he said quietly. “Stay difficult. I need you thinking, not panicking.” His eyes flicked once to the creatures in the trees and back to me. “We cut one free if we can. We slow the rest. And we do not let a single one of them reach the pack house ahead of us.”

“If we can?” I asked. “Ty, you heard that voice. If there’s really a wolf still trapped in there—”

His jaw flexed once. “Then we try,” he said. “But if trying costs the Alpha his throat, I choose the Alpha. And if that makes you angry, you can shout at me while we run.”

The answer hurt because it was right. “I hate how reasonable you get when murder is involved,” I muttered.

The white-scarred thing twitched again, the real sentry’s warning lost beneath a fresh surge of black brine and stolen instinct. Then all around us the wolf-wearing creatures began to circle, not in the smooth, territorial pattern of pack wolves, but in a choreography copied from observation rather than belonging. They were mimicking tactics. Formation. Patrol discipline. Everything our pack used to keep each other safe—hollowed out and turned toward attack.

“That’s obscene,” I whispered.

Ty’s wolf growled so low it vibrated through the bond. Ty himself answered without looking at me. “It learned from watching loyalty. That’s what makes it dangerous.”

Then the voices came again, not singly this time but layered over one another until the whole forest sounded populated by ghosts. Beta patrol calls. Kitchen gossip. Beth’s brittle laugh. Luna Lea swearing. Alpha Cameron issuing orders. My own voice saying Ty’s name in a tone I had only ever used when I forgot anyone else could hear it. The mimicry hit every vulnerable place at once, and for one sickening moment the woods felt crowded with the pack while standing utterly wrong.

“Look at me,” Ty said sharply.

I did. His face cut through the noise like a clean edge—mud on his jaw, eyes bright with focus, wolf close under skin, real in every way the forest wasn’t. “I’m here,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Then hear only this: if it sounds like someone you love, and it smells wrong, cut first and grieve later.”

The words landed like ice in my chest because they were true. Because this was what leadership sometimes was when the world turned monstrous—choosing the wound you could still live after. “I hate you a little for that sentence,” I said.

“That’s fair,” he said. “Save the rest for when we’re not surrounded.”

We moved on the white-scarred one together. Ty went high, drawing its attention with a slash of silver meant to threaten without killing. I dropped low and drove sovereign force through the ground under its front paws, not enough to command, just enough to stagger the thing wearing the body long enough for the trapped sentry underneath to find a seam. The creature convulsed. Its jaw split too wide. For one hideous second, two voices screamed out of it at once—one borrowed, one real.

“North—” the real voice gasped. Then black brine bubbled up and drowned it. A beat later it forced one more word through the wrong throat. “Window.”

Ty looked at me. I looked at him. “North window,” we said at the same time.

The pack house. Alpha Cameron’s office. The north-facing room with the old records, the ledgers, and the maps nobody had yet had time to move after the sanctuary fell. Whatever these things were, they were not only after blood. They were after history. Access. The old architecture of command in a new form.

The forest changed the moment we understood. The circling stopped. Every false wolf turned its head toward the pack house in eerie unison. Not wild anymore. Directed. As if something far from us had just received confirmation that the den’s weak point still existed.

“Tell me we can outrun them,” I said.

Ty’s expression went hard enough to look like prophecy. “No,” he said. “So we beat them there.”

Before we could move, one of the creatures behind us laughed in Luna Lea’s stolen voice. Then all of them broke at once—not toward us, but past us, racing through the trees in a blur of wrong limbs and borrowed fur. And far ahead, from the direction of the pack house, glass shattered.