Chapter 6: What Came Through the Trees

The thing that tore free of the trees was massive, matted with blood, and moving wrong.

Wren didn't have time to process what she was looking at. One second the underbrush was exploding outward in a spray of bark and broken branches, and the next something huge and snarling was already closing the distance between the tree line and where she and Darius stood, faster than anything that size should have been able to move.

"Down." Darius's hand caught her shoulder and shoved, hard, and the world tilted sideways as she hit the dirt.

The creature passed over the space where she'd been standing a half second later, jaws snapping at empty air.

Wren rolled, scrambling backward on her hands, and got her first real look at it. Not a monster. A wolf, huge, easily twice the size of anything born to Ashmoor, its fur matted dark with blood that wasn't all its own. One of its front legs dragged wrong, bent at an angle that should have crippled it, and still it moved like something with nothing left to lose. Foam had gathered at the corners of its mouth, pink with blood, and its ribs stood out sharp enough to count under the torn fur, like it hadn't eaten properly in days.

"Stay back," Darius said, and his voice had gone flat in a way she hadn't heard before.

She should have listened. She meant to listen. Her legs simply didn't get the message in time, some old training instinct dragging her half upright before her mind caught up to how bad an idea that was.

The wolf lunged again, straight at Darius this time, and he didn't retreat an inch. He met it head on, no hesitation, no wasted motion, and what happened next didn't look like any fight Wren had ever seen on the training grounds. Darius moved like something had been switched on inside him, faster than her eyes could fully track, a blur of motion that left afterimages, and the wolf's next lunge ended with Darius already behind it, already driving it down into the dirt with a force that cracked through the clearing loud enough to echo off the tree line.

The wolf screamed. It was an ugly sound, more animal than pain, and it twisted hard enough to nearly throw him off before he pinned it again, one arm locked across its throat, his knee driving into its ruined shoulder to keep it down.

"What is it," Wren said, breathless, scrambling to her feet. "What's wrong with it?"

"It's not sick." Darius's jaw was tight, his eyes never leaving the thrashing wolf beneath him. "It's been running a long time. Hurt a long time."

Behind them, shouts were already breaking out across the clearing, other wolves abandoning their scattered posts and sprinting toward the noise. Someone screamed for the Beta. Someone else was already shifting mid-stride, fur rippling out over skin in a blur that should have been impossible to do that fast, and still looked slow next to what Wren had just watched Darius do with nothing but his own two hands.

Ilsa arrived at nearly the same moment as the first Beta, healer's satchel already open in her hands, and dropped to her knees a careful few feet from the pinned wolf, closer than anyone else was willing to get. "Let me see the leg," she said, already reaching for a strip of cloth. "If he's going to talk to anyone, he needs to still be breathing to do it."

"He won't hold still for it," Darius said, without loosening his grip an inch.

"I didn't ask him to hold still." Ilsa's hands moved fast, competent, wrapping pressure around a wound in the wolf's flank that was bleeding worse than the leg. Her eyes flicked once to Wren, sharp and questioning, then back to her work. "Whatever's coming out of him, it's coming out fast either way. I'd rather it come out as words."

The wolf beneath Darius bucked once more, weaker this time, a shudder running the length of its ruined body, and stilled.

"Don't," Wren said, when she saw the look on his face. "Don't kill it. Not yet. We need to know where it came from."

Darius's eyes flicked to her, just for a second, something unreadable passing behind them. Then he eased the pressure off the wolf's throat, just slightly, enough to let it breathe.

The wolf's eyes rolled toward Wren. For one strange, terrible moment, there was something almost human in them, something that looked less like an animal cornered and more like a man remembering how to be afraid.

"It's Black Fang." One of the Betas arrived at a dead run, weapon already drawn, three more wolves fanning out behind him with hackles raised. "Territory markings on the left flank. Look at it, that's their pack mark, burned in, not natural."

A ripple of unease moved through the gathering wolves at that, more than one of them taking an involuntary step back at the sight of the scarred brand seared into the wolf's hide. Someone near the back whispered that Black Fang hadn't come this deep into Ashmoor land in years, not since before half of them were born.

"Get back," Darius snapped, not looking away from the wolf. "It's not finished."

"It's Black Fang," the Beta said again, like the words alone should have ended the conversation. "You don't wait on Black Fang. You put it down before it wakes up and takes someone's throat out."

"He," Darius said. "Not it. And he's dying anyway. Let him talk first."

The Beta's mouth pulled into a hard line, but he didn't press closer. None of them did. Wren noticed it even through her own racing heart, the careful half circle the pack had formed, everyone giving Darius twice as much room as they gave the dying wolf pinned beneath him. She'd seen that same distance kept around him at the ceremony two nights ago. She was starting to understand it wasn't about manners.

The wolf's ruined leg twitched. Its breath was coming in short, wet pulls now, blood bubbling faintly at its muzzle, and Wren realized with a lurch in her stomach that it wasn't going to last much longer, whatever any of them did or didn't do.

"Why would a scout come alone," Wren said, half to herself, half to Darius. "Why send just one, hurt like this."

"Maybe he wasn't sent," Darius said quietly. "Maybe he ran."

"Ran from what?" the Beta demanded.

Nobody answered him.

The wolf's body convulsed, once, hard enough that Darius had to shift his grip to hold him down, and began to shift. It happened faster and more violently than any shift Wren had ever witnessed, bones cracking back into a different shape all at once, a sound like green wood splitting, fur receding in patches, until what lay in the dirt beneath Darius wasn't a wolf at all anymore but a man. Young. Gaunt. His chest a ruin of old scars layered over fresh wounds still weeping.

He was still breathing. Barely.

A second Beta shouldered forward, sword lifting. "Enough of this. He's Black Fang and he's done talking the second that leg finishes healing wrong and he decides to run again."

"He's not running anywhere," Darius said, and something in his voice made the Beta actually stop. "Look at him. He's got minutes. Maybe less."

The man's eyes found Wren's face, and for a moment something in his expression sharpened, focused, like she was the only steady thing left in a world that was already going dim at the edges for him. It unsettled her more than the fight had. Whatever he was looking for in her face, he seemed to find it, because his hand twitched against the dirt, straining toward her before Darius's grip on him tightened in silent warning.

"Please," Wren said, crouching slightly, careful to stay out of arm's reach even though every instinct told her he had nothing left to hurt her with. "Who did this to you? Where did you come from?"

The man's lips moved. No sound came out at first, just breath, wet and ragged, his chest stuttering with the effort of it.

"Water," someone in the crowd muttered, uselessly. Nobody moved to get any. It wouldn't have mattered, and everyone standing close enough to see his face already seemed to know it.

Darius leaned closer, his whole body gone still in a way that made the hair on Wren's arms rise, a stillness that felt less like patience and more like something coiling.

"Say it again," Darius said, low, almost gentle, nothing like the voice he'd used to snap at the Betas a moment ago.

The man's mouth worked, shaping the words with what little strength he had left, and this time a sound came out, broken and strange, syllables that didn't belong to any language Wren had ever heard spoken in Ashmoor, harsh and old and full of consonants that caught wrong in a human throat.

Darius's face went utterly still.