White's Winter

Chapter 1: Turpis Cicatrix (The Ugly Scar)

"Who am I? Why am I like this?"

Riley asked himself this question often. Too often, maybe.

He sat beside a puddle left from last night's rain. Its surface was still as glass. It held his reflection up to him like an accusation, and showed him back every part of himself he had learned to hate. The scruffy tangle of fur between his ears, the tuft that would not lie flat no matter how he groomed it. The bright blue coat that set him apart from every other wolf in the northern clan. The thin, almost delicate frame that had always marked him as smaller than the other males his age.

But the worst of it was the scar.

It ran down his right eye in a thick white slash, stark as fresh snow against the blue. No wolf had ever seen anything like it. It was too clean to be an accident, too strange to explain away. It was not a battle scar. Riley had never been in a battle. The only fights he ever found were with Piper, and those were one-sided things that left him bruised and shaking but never truly wounded. Nothing like this. Nothing that could carve a white river down a wolf's face.

Yet he had it. He had always had it, for as long as he could remember.

Riley sighed. The sound came from somewhere deep in his chest, heavier than a young wolf should be able to make, and he lifted a paw to cover the reflection. As if hiding it from the water could somehow hide the truth. He held the paw there a long moment. Then he rose to all fours and shook the damp from his fur, and the puddle broke into ripples behind him, scattering the scar into pieces.

The northern garden stretched around him, quiet and green. Ancient trees leaned over the paths, their roots breaking the earth like the knuckled spines of something old and sleeping, and flowering vines climbed the stone walls in cascades of purple and white. Riley loved these trees. He loved their patience, their age, the way they simply kept growing whether anyone noticed them or not. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to see one growing wild. Outside. Past the great walls that wrapped the settlement and held the unknown wilderness at bay.

He had never seen anything wild. He had never seen anything outside the walls at all.

He padded onto the stone pathway that led from the garden toward the heart of the settlement, his paws moving on their own along a route they had walked a thousand times. The north was beautiful in its own careful way, a place of sturdy stone houses and swept paths where wolves lived lives that looked happy enough from the outside. The smell of cooked chicken and rabbit hung thick in the morning air, and Riley's empty stomach clenched so hard it ached. Above all of it the great wall loomed, grey and endless, a constant reminder of the line between safe and unknown.

"Why am I not happy?" he whispered. The question disappeared into the noise of the clan, and no one heard it. No one ever did.

He was never happy. Well. That was not quite true. He found a small, secret happiness in singing, in the strange colors that bloomed in the air when he hummed a melody to himself, ribbons of light only he could see. But that happiness was its own kind of danger, wasn't it. A wolf who could see sound as color would be marked as something other, something wrong, if anyone ever found out.

So he kept it folded up small, deep inside, where Piper could not reach it.

The center of town was loud with life when he came out of the garden path. Wolves crowded the streets, their voices rising in bright chatter and laughter, and everywhere there was the rush of getting ready. The Bairbarn was coming. It was the north's biggest festival, the one that pulled every wolf in the clan out into the open, and the work of it was already underway all around him. Long tables went up in rows along the main thoroughfare, and banners in the clan's colors stretched from house to house, swaying gently in the morning air. The scent of festival food drifted down the street, rich and warm and impossible to ignore, and Riley's mouth watered even as his stomach twisted with something that was not hunger at all.

He would not be going, of course. He never did.

The thought of asking a female to come with him made his belly knot up tight. And he had no friends to go with regardless. The Bairbarn was for wolves who belonged, who fit, who had a place in the clan. Riley had none of those things. He had a scar, an empty stomach, and a song he was not allowed to sing.

His stomach growled again, loud and insistent, a reminder that it had been most of a day since he last ate anything at all. He grimaced, dipped his head, and joined the line of wolves waiting for the midday rations, forcing what he hoped was a confident look onto his muzzle. All around him families talked and laughed while their pups tumbled underfoot, and every wolf in the line had somewhere to stand and someone to stand beside. Every wolf but him.

When he finally reached the front, the wolf serving the meat looked him up and down with open contempt. Trex was huge, heavy through the shoulders, his muzzle seamed with the scars of old fights. His yellow eyes held no warmth at all.

"Riley," Trex growled. His voice was like gravel grinding together. "I told you yesterday. You're not getting anything."

Riley's ears flattened. He made himself meet the big wolf's gaze anyway. "Come on, Trex. How am I supposed to eat?"

"Go shovel shit out of the bone pile." Trex leaned forward over the meat, hackles lifting. "But leave. Before there's a problem."

Riley backed up on instinct, his body retreating before his mind could argue—and collided with a wolf behind him. The impact knocked him sprawling onto the stone, his paws scrabbling for purchase, his chin striking the ground hard enough to click his teeth together.

"Watch where you're going, Riley!" The wolf glared down at him, disgust plain across his muzzle. "Wolves like you should be cast into the unknown."

He stepped over Riley as if he were a puddle. Took his portion of meat with no questions asked. Walked away without a backward glance.

Riley pushed himself back up to all fours, his face hot beneath the fur. He could feel the eyes of the others on him. He could feel their judgment without even looking, a weight pressing on his back, and his tail tucked low between his legs of its own accord.

He turned and walked. Head down, tail down, the same question circling in him like a wolf pacing a cage. Why did they all hate him. He tried to be kind. He tried to stay out of the way. He tried to help when he could. And still they treated him like something stuck to the bottom of a paw.

Lost in it, he did not see the broken stone in the path. His front paw caught the edge and he went down hard, his jaw cracking against the walkway, pain flashing white behind his eyes.

Before he could rise, something heavy slammed into his back and drove him flat again. Deliberate. He twisted his head up through watering eyes and saw them ringing him in. A loose pack of wolves, lips peeled back, their expressions equal parts amusement and malice.

One of them stepped forward. Yellow fur, cold eyes. He struck Riley across the muzzle with a paw, and the blow snapped Riley's head sideways, pain blooming hot through his jaw.

"Piper… please just leave me alone," Riley managed. He coughed and curled in, trying to shield his ribs from the next blow he could feel coming.

Piper laughed. It was a harsh, cruel sound, and the few civilians nearby hurried off at the noise of it.

"I hate singing in general," Piper said, conversational, circling Riley the way a predator circles wounded prey. "And I hate your voice even more. So tell me. Why do I always catch you singing? I heard you again this morning. In the garden. You know what happens every time."

Riley dragged himself to his paws. His legs shook under him.

"Maybe… you should cover your ears," he said.

The words were out before he could stop them. A small, stupid flash of defiance he regretted the instant it landed. Piper's face changed—the cruel amusement curdling into something hot and real—and he lunged, jaws snapping for Riley's throat.

Riley threw himself sideways. Piper's own weight carried him past, and his skull cracked against the stone with a sick, heavy sound. He roared, more fury than pain. One of his packmates clamped jaws down on the scruff of Riley's neck.

Riley wrenched, twisted, tore himself loose—and bolted.

He ran. He ran through the settlement with Piper and the pack at his heels, their snarls bouncing off the stone houses, their threats chasing him through the narrow gaps between buildings. His paws hammered the ground in a frantic, stumbling rhythm. His heart slammed so hard against his ribs he thought it might burst right through them. He cut down alleys, doubled around corners, took any turn that might buy him a breath of distance.

In his panic he crashed straight through the door of a stranger's house.

Inside, a litter of pups looked up from their play. They took one look at the blue wolf bursting through the door and started shrieking.

"Hey! My name's Riley! What's your name?" he panted, trying to sound friendly, trying to sound like anything but the terrified thing he was. "No need to be scared—please stop yelling—just passing through, I promise, I'm just passing through!"

He backed toward the rear of the house, still trying to soothe the screaming pups, and backed straight into something large and solid and very, very angry.

"What are you doing in my house?" a deep voice rumbled.

Riley turned slowly. A massive wolf towered over him, hackles up, teeth bared. Before Riley could even shape an apology, the wolf seized him by the scruff and hurled him bodily through the open window.

The world became a tumbling chaos of sky and dirt and torn petals. Riley rolled down the steep slope outside the house and landed at the bottom in a bed of crushed blossoms, coughing, spitting flowers out of his muzzle. Through blurred eyes he looked up the hill.

Piper and the gang were already coming down it.

"Oh, shit," Riley wheezed, and spat out another petal.

He scrambled up and ran for the only place that might be sanctuary. The temple.

His paws carried him through the settlement in a desperate sprint, wolves turning to stare as he passed. He clipped the edge of a food stand and sent dried meat scattering across the stones, the vendor's curses trailing after him like smoke.

Then the temple rose in front of him. It was a great structure of fine pale stone laced with gold, stained red in places by centuries of weather or something older and stranger than weather. It climbed toward the sky like a mountain coaxed up whole out of the bedrock, its entrance set at the top of a stairway that seemed to go up forever. No wolf knew its true purpose, or who raised it, or why. Only that it had stood there since before memory. A silent watcher over the north.

Riley threw himself at the stairs. His muscles screamed. His lungs burned. His legs had gone to water. But terror was a good driver, and it pushed him up, and up, and up. Behind him he could hear the pack on the steps—their paws on the stone, their ragged breathing, their snarls climbing closer with every heartbeat.

He reached the top and burst inside.

The temple's interior was vast and dim and almost empty. Cold stone floors. High ceilings held up by massive pillars. And in the very center, a statue of a wolf Riley did not recognize, carved from dark stone, posed noble and still, one paw lifted as if in blessing. Or warning.

He heard the pack reaching the top of the stairs. Panic seized him whole. He dove behind a pillar and pressed himself flat to the cold stone, making himself as small as he could, and his heart thundered so loud in his own ears that he was sure they would hear it too.

"Where did he go?" one of them growled. The sound rolled around the empty space.

"He's in here somewhere." Piper now, calm, almost gentle. That was worse. "We just have to find him."

Riley held his breath. He listened to them search, paws clicking over the stone, the noise echoing off every surface until it seemed to come from all directions at once. He squeezed his eyes shut. He trembled. He prayed, silently, to whatever ancient spirits might still live in this place.

The pawsteps faded. The echoes died. After a long, long silence, Riley let his eyes open and allowed himself one shaky breath of relief. Maybe they gave up. Maybe—

Jaws clamped around his neck and ripped him out of hiding and flung him into the open center of the temple.

He hit the floor hard. The impact drove the air out of him. He pressed a paw to his throat and felt the warm wet of blood seeping into his fur. The bite was not deep enough to kill. But it hurt worse than anything he had ever felt, and his eyes stung with it.

He tried to rise. His legs would not hold him. He slumped back to the cold stone, his vision swimming, the pillars tilting around him.

Piper stalked toward him with blood on his muzzle—Riley's blood—and murder in his eyes. "I never kill you," he said, almost thoughtful. "I should, shouldn't I? Let's take a vote, shall we. Who wants me to kill Riley?"

The others howled their approval, and the sound ricocheted off the temple walls in a chorus of bloodlust.

Piper's jaws opened wide. He lunged for Riley's throat. Riley shut his eyes, too hurt and too tired to fight anymore, and accepted that this was how his short, miserable life was going to end.

"Time to die, you big blue pu—"

The words cut off in a strangled yelp.

Riley's eyes snapped open. Piper was sprawled on the stone several body-lengths away, blood spilling from his mouth, his face a tangle of rage and something Riley had never once seen there before. Fear.

A wolf stood where Piper had been.

She was unlike any wolf Riley had ever seen. Her coat was a deep, rich grey, near-black where the shadows touched it, and it seemed to drink the temple's dim light and give it back all at once, so that she looked less like an animal than like something out of an old legend. But it was her mane that stole the breath right out of him. Long black hair flowed down from her head and neck like a fall of midnight water, glossy and alive, swaying on its own apart from the shorter grey fur beneath. No ordinary wolf wore hair like that. It made her look like a story walked up out of a book.

She moved with a terrible grace. She seized Piper and hurled him into a stone pillar with a strength that did not match her size at all. The crack of the impact was sickening. Piper slid down the pillar to the floor, dazed and limp.

She stood over him. Her lips peeled back in a snarl that was a promise. "The temple is off limits to civilians," she said, her voice cold and level. "And fighting in it gives me the right to kill you. So. I can let you off with a warning… or we can do the fun option. Your choice."

Piper's packmates had already fled, claws skittering on the stairs in their hurry to be gone. Piper himself worked his mouth without sound, blood still dripping. Then he too scrambled up and ran, limping hard, and did not look back.

"Good decision," she said, the faintest curl of a smile at the edge of her muzzle as she watched him go.

Riley pushed himself slowly to his paws, wincing at his neck, his ribs, his everything. But he could not pull his eyes off her. She was, without any question at all, the most beautiful wolf he had ever seen.

Her grey coat was immaculate, each hair catching the light, and her frame was small and lean and perfectly made—the kind of body honed by years of training into something that was both a piece of art and a weapon. Her muzzle was narrow and fine. Her ears stood alert and expressive, turning at every small sound. And her eyes. Her eyes were a brilliant, impossible emerald, bright as fresh spring leaves, the kind of eyes that seemed to look straight through a wolf and judge everything they found in a single breath.

And the mane. The long black mane poured down over the grey in gorgeous dark waves, falling sometimes across her face, swept back other times to show the whole fierce elegance of her. It was unlike anything Riley had ever seen on a wolf. Exotic. Impossible. Beautiful.

She was small. She was deadly. And she was breathtaking.

She turned, and her eyes locked onto his. Riley's heart skipped. His breath caught somewhere in his throat. And a wild, hopeless thought rose in him before he could stop it: maybe she would go to the Bairbarn with him. Even thinking it, he knew how ridiculous it was. A wolf like her would never look twice at a wolf like him. But he could not help it. Just being near her made his heart race in a way that had nothing to do with the fight.

For the first time all day, he was more alive than he had felt in a long time.

"Stop staring at me right now and get off the temple grounds!" she snapped. Her voice cracked like a whip, and the moment shattered.

Riley's mouth opened. Nothing came out. His mind had gone completely, uselessly blank.

She growled, low and threatening, and every survival instinct Riley owned screamed at him to run. "If you don't leave, I will have to escort you out. And trust me. You don't want that."

The threat broke through his paralysis. But instead of fear, what surged up in him was a desperate, ridiculous hope. An opportunity.

"No," he said, forcing a smile onto his muzzle. "Actually, I do."

Her eyes narrowed. Her expression slid from anger toward something closer to bewilderment. She could see plainly that he was no fighter—no good at anything much, really. She did not want to attack him. It would be like beating a wolf who couldn't fight back. But intimidation might still do the job.

She stalked forward until her muzzle was a breath from his. Her green eyes bored into his blue ones with an intensity that made him want to look away. He could not. Up close she was even more stunning. He could pick out the single strands of her black mane. He could smell her—something clean and wild, pine needles and cold mountain air.

"You don't want to know what I'll do if you don't leave," she snarled.

"I know what you'll do," Riley said. His voice came steadier than he felt, even as his heart hammered fit to burst. "Escort me out. You said it yourself. Let's go."

She stared at him a long moment. Her face gave away nothing. Then she sighed—a sound of pure exasperation—and tipped her muzzle toward the entrance. "Fine. Follow me."

Riley lit up. His tail wagged before he could stop it, and he caught it and tried to look dignified instead. She rolled her eyes, her long mane swaying with the motion, and started walking. He followed, unable to stop watching the way she moved, the way she carried herself like she had never once doubted her right to the ground she stood on.

They went down the temple stairs in silence. Riley concentrated hard on not falling—the steps were large and his legs were still shaking from the chase and the beating. But more than that, he was trying desperately to think of something to say. Some way to stretch this moment out. Some way to make an impression on this extraordinary wolf.

"So… what's it like being a hunter?" The words came tumbling out all at once, breaking the quiet. "What's real fighting like? How do you do that kick thing the hunters do?"

She growled softly. A warning. In his nerves he barely heard it.

"Have you ever killed a wolf?" he went on, helpless to stop. "I bet that's hard. Is it easy? No, I bet not… um… have you ever killed a bear? What even is a bear? This wolf I talk to sometimes says they exist out in the unknown. What's the unknown like, anyway?"

"No more questions. Please." She said it through gritted teeth. "I have a piercing headache now."

Riley stayed quiet for roughly three whole seconds before he started up again. "Why is your hair so long? I've never seen a wolf with such cool hair. How long did it take to grow? It's beautiful—you're beautiful—shit, that was too forward, I mean, you're really pretty…"

She turned her head and looked at him with such bewildered irritation that he finally fell silent, his ears flattening in shame.

They reached the bottom and she sighed, her shoulders loosening with visible relief. "I gave you a free pass. You won't get another. Stay away from the temple."

She turned to go. And Riley could not let her. Not without trying. He was going to lose his one chance if he did not speak now.

"Wait—my name's Riley," he blurted, the words stumbling over each other. "And I know I barely know you, but… I was wondering if you wanted to go to the Bairbarn with me."

She looked at him with a face that was anger and confusion and disbelief all at once. Her green eyes widened, surprise breaking through the fierce calm she wore like armor. For a heartbeat she seemed about to answer. Then she only shook her head, and pushed past him without a word, her black mane swaying with the turn.

"Can you at least tell me your name?" Riley called after her. His voice cracked on it.

She stopped.

For a long moment she stood with her back to him, the long mane stirring in the breeze like dark water. Then, without turning around, she answered.

"My name is Erika Brookes."

She walked away. Her grey form and flowing black mane disappeared into the crowd of the settlement, and Riley was left alone at the foot of the temple stairs, his chest a confused tangle of disappointment and fascination and a strange, stubborn hope that would not lie down.

Erika Brookes.

Even her name was beautiful.

— — —

Erika moved through the clan with purpose, her strides long and even, her mind already leaving the strange scene at the temple behind. That blue wolf had been… unusual. Pathetic in most ways. Weak, clumsy, desperate. And yet there was something about him that snagged at her, a burr she could not quite shake off.

That scar.

She had seen markings like that before. In old books. In ancient legends. A thick white slash down the eye, too clean to be an accident. But that was impossible. It had to be. She pushed the thought away and went looking for the only wolves she truly cared about. Her squad. Taber, her brother by blood. And Owen, who was no blood of hers at all, but family just the same.

As she moved through the settlement, other wolves dipped their heads to her or smiled as she passed. Some of the males watched her go a beat too long, their eyes tracking her. Erika was used to it. She had accepted a long time ago that her strange beauty drew attention, though she found it more tiresome than flattering. She returned the gestures on instinct, her muzzle settling into the calm, certain set the north expected from its finest hunter.

These wolves. These civilians. She protected them. That was her purpose, her duty, the whole reason she existed. She was the best hunter in the clan. Everyone knew it.

She made her way to the training grounds at the front of the settlement. The facility was ringed by wooden walls with a gated entrance, and hunters crowded the space outside it, some readying for patrol, some straggling back from food runs. The familiar sounds of training filled the air—the dull thud of bodies hitting practice dummies, the scuffle of sparring pairs, the bark of sergeants calling corrections.

She spotted her squad mates by the main gate.

Owen was instructing a knot of younger hunters, his brown fur edged in tan and distinctive even from across the yard. He was kind, and he had always been kind, teaching with a patience that made him a better mentor than half the clan deserved. He was a good fighter besides, though he carried it humbly, like a tool rather than a trophy.

The other figure leaned against the wooden wall, apparently fast asleep on his paws. Taber's black fur with its tan coating was unmistakable, and so was his complete disregard for anything resembling discipline. He was reckless. He was impulsive. He was also, when it truly mattered, one of the most reliable wolves she knew. One of the best hunters in the north, in fact. Just not quite as good as her.

She approached as Owen finished up. "Go scout the existing refuge sites and try to stay out of combat," he told the young hunters. "Good luck."

They scattered. Owen turned, and his face broke into a warm smile when he saw her. Erika tipped her muzzle toward Taber, her mane shifting with the motion. "I have to say. It's impressive he can sleep standing up."

Owen huffed a quiet laugh. "He's leaning. I don't think that's that impressive."

Erika padded over to the sleeping wolf, and without warning hooked a paw behind his hind leg and swept it out from under him. Taber crashed to the ground, his head thumping into the grass. He scrambled up, shaking himself groggy, his eyes finding her with a mix of confusion and irritation.

Then he shoved her flat with one paw and laughed. "Thanks for that, Erika. I was having a dream I was killing a whole army. It was pretty great."

He braced and let her lean on him to rise. Her mane had fallen across her face in the tumble, and she shook her head until the dark strands settled back into place.

"That's weird," she said dryly. "Most of your dreams are about being in a palace full of girls."

"Why would I dream about things I can already do in real life?" Taber returned, with a grin so smug it should be illegal. "I've already got five dates to the Bairbarn."

He swung toward Owen. "How many you got?"

Erika glanced at Owen, amused, curious how he would field Taber's needling.

"I have a date, actually," Owen said quietly. "Her name's Rose. We're going together."

Taber laughed out loud. "Bet it's as friends!" He rounded back on Erika. "What about you, Erika? I'm sure you've had a whole line of wolves asking."

Erika sighed. The familiar pressure built behind her eyes again. "It's been happening all week. It's why I've got this headache. But I'm not going. I'm sticking to my patrols. I don't want a break."

Both Owen and Taber sighed in perfect unison.

"Come on," Taber urged. "Drink some libra. Heckle the alpha's speech. Let's get shitfaced tonight!"

Erika chuckled despite herself. Owen shook his head in disapproval, but there was affection in it.

"I'm sticking to my patrols," she said, firmer this time. "But drink a bowl for me."

She turned and walked off before they could argue further, her mane streaming behind her like a dark banner. Behind her she felt Owen watching her go, felt the weight of his worry on her back even without turning to see it.

She passed through the gates of the training grounds. Her territory. Her domain. Training stations filled the compound—areas for sparring, for endurance, for combat drills and groundwork. She had designed the whole layout herself. The Alpha had given her free rein to build the perfect facility, and she had, and this place was more home to her than anywhere else in the clan.

She watched her hunters train with a critical eye, and what she saw was good work. Some of the sparring matches ran well past five minutes, all stamina and clean technique, the kind of endurance she had spent years drilling into them. But her own matches never lasted past a single minute. Her opponents simply could not keep up.

A hunter sidled up to her, expression hopeful, eyes lingering a touch too long. "Hey, Erika! I was thinking—maybe you'd want to patrol together at the Bairbarn? Might as well have some company."

Her jaw tightened. "No. Sorry. I'm patrolling alone."

That was Bairbarn invitation number eighteen. This week. She had been counting.

The hunter opened his mouth to push it. Another voice cut him off.

"We all know Erika's going with me."

Her head snapped toward the speaker. Her eyes narrowed to slits. Rage flared hot and sudden in her chest—she had had enough of this, all of it, the whole endless week of it—and she stalked toward the wolf with violence written into every line of her body, her mane bristling along her neck. The other hunters backed away on instinct, opening a ring around the two of them.

She got right in his face, so close their noses nearly touched. "Say it again."

He tried to hold his cocky grin. But she could smell the fear coming off him, and his ears flattened and betrayed it.

From somewhere in the gathering crowd, Taber's voice rang out, delighted. "Fight! Fight! Fight!"

The other hunters picked it up. The chant built.

"You're going wi—" the wolf began.

Erika's hind legs drove up and her paws cracked into his jaw mid-word. The impact flung him sprawling backward onto the ground. He scrambled up growling, his pride hurt worse than his jaw.

The chant swelled. Taber was loving every second of it, his tail wagging like a banner.

The wolf charged, lunging for her throat. She rolled smooth and graceful to the side, her mane flying with her, and drove her hind paws into his ribs as he passed. He went down again, the air bursting out of him. Erika pounced, landing on him with predatory precision, and slammed her skull down into his. His head cracked against the ground and his eyes glazed.

She drew her lips back, bared her teeth, lowered her muzzle toward his throat—

Strong jaws closed on her scruff and hauled her off him.

She twisted to find Owen holding her back, his face stern and worried at once.

"Go back to your quarters while I deal with this," he said. His voice was quiet and carried absolute authority. "Now."

Erika opened her mouth to argue. She saw the look in his eyes. She decided against it. She turned and stalked away, her mane bristling with the leftover anger, the dark strands catching the slanting afternoon light.

Taber peeled off from the crowd as she passed and fell into step beside her. "That was awesome, right?" he said to a random hunter, grinning.

Erika walked on through the grounds, aware of the mixed looks her display had stirred up. Some hunters watched her with respect, even awe—beautiful and deadly, a pairing that inspired a kind of fear-tinted admiration. Others watched with plain disapproval. She ignored all of them and went to her quarters.

The cabin was small and bare, just the essentials and nothing more—a spot for food and water, a small bed, and very little else to fill the space. The single window let in only a thin slice of light, leaving the inside dim and cave-like, and it suited her exactly.

She collapsed onto the bed and felt her muscles finally let go of their tension. Her black mane spread across the simple bedding like spilled ink. A few minutes later the door opened and Owen came in and sat on the floor without a word.

After a long silence, Erika sighed. "I know what you're going to say. I shouldn't have kicked his ass."

Owen's muzzle twitched in the ghost of a smile. "That's probably one of my points." He rose and moved to sit beside her on the bed. "You're the fiercest wolf in the north. But stop acting like it. You keep trying to act like you don't have emotions, and we both know you do. You're a sister to me. That's why I worry about you." He paused. "Fighting emotion will always end in pain."

Erika looked at him and saw the real concern in his eyes. She sighed again, and some of the anger drained out with the breath. "I have my duty. I have you and Taber. That's the only thing I need." A beat. "But… I'm sorry about kicking Nolan's ass. I won't come at the hunters again. Just you and Taber."

They both laughed at that, and the tension broke.

As Owen stood to leave, he called back over his shoulder. "Fight another wolf and I'll make them all fight you at once!"

"I'd win!" Erika shouted after him, laughing.

The door closed. The laughter died with it.

Erika rolled over on her bed, her long mane falling across her eyes the way it always did. She blew it out of the way with an annoyed huff, the dark strands floating up and then settling back down across her grey muzzle.

She was a one-wolf army, she told herself. A true hunter. All she did was train and fight. She was the strongest in the north—everyone knew it, everyone accepted it.

But something was getting to her. Some nagging thing she could not name and could not shake.

She rose and left the cabin, padding through the settlement as evening came down. She climbed the stone stairs of the great wall to the top of the battlements. She used to come here often during her training years, whenever she needed to think, and her paws remembered the way.

She stood at the edge and looked out over the unknown. The vast dark forest stretched all the way to the horizon, deep and close and full of secrets, hiding dangers that even the best hunters could only guess at. The evening breeze lifted her long mane and sent the dark strands streaming out behind her like a banner of shadow.

She had gone on countless missions into that wilderness over the years. She had killed wolves from the strongest clans in open combat, faced down predators larger and meaner than herself, and survived things out there that would have buried lesser hunters without a trace.

But standing here, looking out at the darkening trees, she felt something she rarely let herself feel.

Fear.

She could not say how she knew it. She could not point to any sign or any proof. But deep in her bones, in the same instincts that had kept her alive through every battle she had ever fought, she felt a certainty that chilled her colder than the wind.

Something was coming.

— — —

Chapter 2: Adducam eam domum (I'll bring her home)

The Bairbarn began at sunset, and the wolves of the north came down to the center of town like the tide coming in. The square had been made over into something out of a dream. Candles of every color lined the stone buildings, their little flames throwing soft, shifting light across walls older than anyone could remember. Laughter rang off the stone. The smell of meat cooking over open fire pits hung in the air, rich and warm, and Riley's stomach pulled toward it like a hooked thing.

Wolves gathered everywhere in loose, happy clusters. Some passed bowls of libra between them with paws that grew less steady by the hour. Others sat with their families while pups darted between their legs in games of chase. At the head of the square a raised stage had been built for the northern alpha, where he would sit and eat in full view of the clan, ringed by his guards. A symbol. Leadership and protection, up where everyone could see it.

Riley watched from the dark at the edge of it all.

The laughter felt like it was aimed at him. It named, out loud, every single thing he did not have. He took one step toward the warmth and the light. Then he stopped. Then he turned around and walked the other way.

He made it maybe twenty paces before he sat down hard on the cold stone and argued with himself. If he went in, he could talk to Erika. Maybe she wouldn't bite him this time. Maybe she would even smile. He turned around. He turned back. He spun a full circle in the street like a confused thing chasing its own tail. Then he took a breath that did nothing at all to slow his heart, and he made his paws carry him toward the lights.

He stopped at the edge of the square and his breath caught.

The lights were better up close. Blue and gold and deep purple, all of it flickering inside little glass holders, scattering color across the ground like something alive. He smiled. A real one, rare enough on his face that it felt strange wearing it. He moved into the crowd, nodding to the wolves he passed, trying to look like he belonged.

To his surprise, a few of them smiled back.

That alone lifted something in his chest—right up until one of the smiling wolves dropped to the ground, howling with laughter, tears running from his eyes at something only he could see.

Libra. Riley knew the signs. The drink was rare and dear for ordinary wolves, but hunters got it freely, and at the Bairbarn they shared it with the clan. The hallucinations were the stuff of stories. So was the way it stripped a wolf of every shred of sense he owned.

Riley started working the crowd for Erika, his eyes sliding over every grey coat and every flash of long dark fur, while another part of him tracked Piper, so he could be anywhere Piper was not. The crowd was thick. Bodies pressed close, and he couldn't see more than a few lengths in any direction.

Then he spotted her.

Erika moved through the press with that fluid, certain grace, her grey coat and black mane easy to pick out even among hundreds. Two wolves flanked her. One had tan markings over brown fur. The other was black with a tan coating. Her squad. The ones from the training grounds.

A paw clamped onto Riley's shoulder and he nearly came out of his fur.

Piper. It had to be Piper, come to finish the morning's work. He spun around—and found himself staring into the blown-wide pupils of a wolf he had never seen before. The stranger's eyes were huge, only a thin ring of color left around the black, and he swayed where he stood, fighting down a loose grin.

"Hey man… can you like… uh… sit in front of me for like an hour? Your fur is trippy. It's like… so light… and blue… weird man." The words came out slow and stretched, like he had to find each one before he could say it.

Riley scanned the crowd for Erika and couldn't find her. "No, sorry, I'm busy. But thanks for the compliment… if it is one."

"Bye bye, blue guy!" The wolf dissolved into giggles, waving with big floppy movements, and drifted off still laughing.

Riley pushed deeper in, using his small size to slip between the bigger bodies. It was easier than he'd feared. For all its faults, the north kept its manners, and most wolves stepped aside when they saw him trying to pass.

He caught Erika again, closer now, near the center of it all. He tucked himself in behind a knot of older wolves arguing about the alpha's policies, close enough to hear.

"These lights are so pretty," the tan-marked wolf was saying, looking around at all of it like it was the best thing in the world. "They're my favorite part of the Bairbarn."

"My favorite part is drinking so much libra I black out and wake up in the unknown," the black wolf said, and grinned, and swung a paw into the other's chest hard enough to leave a dent in the fur. "Hey Owen. Did you do what I told you to for our bet? Did you ask?"

Owen. So that was his name. Riley tucked it away.

Owen's ears went flat. "She said… just as friends…" It came out barely above a whisper.

"KNEW IT!" The black wolf—Taber, Riley remembered—threw his head back and laughed. Erika fought a grin and almost lost.

"Better luck next time, bud," she said, in that cold, level voice Riley was starting to know.

They walked on. Owen's face went more serious. "Hey Erika. I heard you had a meeting with the alpha. What was it about?"

"Something about a mission in the unknown," she said, careful and flat. "He didn't tell me much besides that."

"That's cool and all, but right now my shift just ended, sooo see ya later!" Taber bolted in the other direction, gone into the crowd before she could say a word.

She opened her mouth to yell after him. Too late. Owen scratched behind his ear with a hind paw, looking apologetic.

"Sorry Erika, but I'm going too. I love these festivities, and—"

"It's okay, Owen." She almost smiled. "Enjoy yourself."

Owen dipped his head and turned to go. Then he stopped, because she had turned to look off at the wall, the way she did when something was sitting on her.

"You okay?" he said.

She looked back at him. "Yeah. I'm good. Go have fun."

Owen held her eyes a moment longer than the words deserved. Then he let it go, and the festival swallowed him.

Riley slipped out of the crowd and crept forward, scared half to death. He had it in his head to go talk to her. He got two steps before she turned on her paws and took off toward the garden, fast.

Riley followed at a distance.

— — —

She was sprinting, and Riley could barely keep up. His lungs cramped. His breath sawed in his chest. She reached the garden wall, slowed, and looked around once before slipping inside. Riley dove into a bush a heartbeat before her eyes swept his way.

He came out of it covered in leaves. He shook himself, brushed at his scruffy fur, and was fairly sure he still had half the bush in his tail. He crept toward the garden entrance.

Then he heard singing, and everything else fell away.

The notes reached him before the words did, and the colors came with them. Ribbons of light bloomed in the dark air, the way they did when Riley hummed to himself, except he wasn't the one making them. They swayed and turned around him, rising and falling with the voice, each note throwing its own shade of light—and the strange thing, the impossible thing, was that he could see the song. He could see the rise of it and the ache underneath it. The color of it folded around him and held him still.

His ears went up on their own. His paws carried him toward it without asking.

He came around the corner and stopped.

Erika stood on the big rock at the garden's heart, the moon pouring down over her, her black mane lifting in the breeze. Her eyes were shut. And she was singing—soft and low and unguarded, nothing like the cold hunter from the temple. The light wheeled around her in slow color. To Riley she didn't look like a wolf at all. She looked like something out of the old stories, too beautiful to be standing in a garden in the north.

He pressed himself behind a tree and just listened.

The voice carried things her face never let anyone see. He couldn't have put names to all of it. But it was loneliness, and it was fear held down hard under years of being strong, and it was a wanting to be free of something she could not name. The colors thinned and deepened with it. Riley felt his own throat tighten. He had spent his whole life thinking he was the only wolf in the north who carried a song he wasn't allowed to sing.

He had been wrong.

Then his paw came down on a twig.

The snap cut through the garden like a struck bell. The voice stopped at once. The colors blinked out, all of them, gone, and the dark rushed back in. On the rock, Erika dropped low, hackles climbing, every line of her gone hard and ready to kill.

"Who is here!" she shouted. "Come out now!"

Riley stepped out slowly, ears flat, tail flat, every part of him trying to make itself smaller.

Erika let out a long, furious breath. "Dammit! Not you!"

He smiled at her. He couldn't help it. She glared like she could light him on fire with it.

"That was so good!" The words tumbled out of him. "We should sing together!"

She growled, crossed the space between them, and drove her shoulder into him. Riley went down hard on the stone and coughed.

"I have no time for this shit! Music is banned!" Her voice shook with it. "Tell anyone, and I will throw you in the unknown myself!" Her lip curled. "Not like anyone would notice you were gone anyway!"

The words landed harder than the shoulder had.

Riley pushed himself up to sitting. His ears sank lower. His head dropped, and he looked at the ground between his paws and said nothing at all.

The fight went out of her in a breath. Erika stopped panting. She looked at him sitting there, folded in on himself, and Riley watched her realize she had gone too far. She came over and sat down beside him. For a moment neither of them said anything.

"Look. I'm sorry I said that." She wasn't looking at him. "But just listen to me. I don't like you. I don't like anyone. Stop bothering me. I have a job to do—protecting the north—and this dumb festival pisses me off enough already. So please. Just don't talk to me anymore."

She got up and walked back toward the lights, and left him there in the dark garden.

Riley sat for about ten minutes. He knew, now, that the "chance" he'd been telling himself about was nothing. A story he'd made up. He got up and walked back toward the festival with his head down, watching the spilled libra bowls go by under his paws.

He bumped into a wolf and looked up. It was the tan-marked one. Owen.

"You seem down, kid." Owen smiled and looked him over. "You're the only wolf at this whole festival staring at the floor."

"Yeah. Some… life stuff." Riley said it to the ground.

Owen took another pull from his libra bowl and nudged it toward him. "Want some?"

Riley pushed it back and shook his head. "I don't drink."

Owen huffed and drank for both of them. He looked around at the lights, at all the laughing wolves, and something in his face went soft and tired.

"I try to do things," Riley said, before he could stop himself, "but everything blows up in my face. Every time. Everything just seems impossible to me."

Owen was quiet for a while. Then he said, "Isn't that the whole purpose of life, though? To achieve the impossible."

He stood, a little unsteady, and rested a paw on Riley's shoulder.

"Good luck with everything, kid. I've got to go." And he headed off toward the stage.

Riley spent the rest of the Bairbarn eating, because he was starving—most of the food stands wouldn't give him a scrap any other night. After a while a wolf howled from the alpha's stage, and the whole clan began drifting toward it, murmuring, craning to see. Riley tried to push to the front and failed, bumped a wolf who growled at him, and settled for a bad spot at the back.

The northern alpha walked to the center of the stage, and the clan went silent.

"Wolves of the north!" His voice rolled out over all of them. "We have been safe for centuries, thanks to the hunters who guard us. The north is an honest clan. But we are having trouble with food recovery, as most of you know. Our stores are nearly empty." He let it sit. "But that ends tonight!"

A ripple ran through the crowd.

"My finest hunters will guard the walls, while others run a recovery mission to a newly discovered food cache. The recon team will be led by Erika Brookes—our most formidable hunter! She will see that the food comes home safe."

Erika climbed the stage to cheers and howls and sat at attention while he went on.

"And no one need fear for the walls. Taber Brookes will lead the guard upon them. Sleep easy, all of you."

The wolves stamped their paws. Riley, near enough to nothing to notice everything, heard Taber's voice cut clear across the noise: "DAMMIT!"

"Now—back to the festival! Eat, drink, and drink responsibly!"

The clan howled and cheered and folded back into the celebration. But Riley didn't move. A thought had come to him, and it was a terrible one, and it would not let go. He watched Erika step down and begin gathering fourteen hunters to her. Fifteen wolves, readying to leave.

He ran to her before he could think better of it.

She sighed the instant she saw him. "Dammit! Not you! Go away! Leave me alone before I kick you in the head!"

"Please—just hear me out!" The words came fast. "The food cache. It turned up close to the north, right? Why would it just appear now? The hunters would've found it already. I think it's a lure. I think someone wants a hunter response!"

Erika looked down. For a moment, just a moment, she went still in thought.

Then she shook it off. "We have to run this mission. It's our duty. The north starves if we don't fix this, and fast." Her voice hardened. "Now get away from me."

Riley opened his mouth to push. Owen caught his eye over Erika's shoulder and gave a small shake of his head. *Not now. Let it go.* Riley sighed and backed off, looking over his shoulder the whole way.

— — —

Erika's squad crossed the border and went into the unknown.

Hunters were the only wolves who ever did—in any clan. They moved through the dense woods in a loose, careful formation, and the unknown closed over them. The trees here grew strange and many-kinded, and there were streams, and low hills rolling off into the dark. Epsilon was beautiful. It was also black as pitch under the canopy, the moon their only light, and they walked on edge, reading every shadow.

They waited for an attack. It didn't come.

"Something really isn't right," Erika said, scanning the empty trees. "What if Riley was right. About the lure."

Owen's muzzle twitched. "Is that his name? Funny, you remembering that."

She glared straight ahead and ignored him.

They reached the food storage. It was a lone shack of recovered stores, sitting in a wide circle of grass with no trees but the ones ringing the edge. Something lay in front of it.

Erika and Owen drew up short, and nothing in their training had readied them for it.

A wolf's carcass lay before the shack. No legs. No tail. The whole of it soaked through with blood, the eyes still open—lifeless, and somehow still full of a dead and frozen fear.

"Spread out!" Erika barked.

Some of the hunters fanned into the trees, noses working, hunting for an enemy. The others moved to the stores. Erika and Owen crouched over the body and made themselves look at it.

"This… this is a level of torture clans don't do." A thread of fear ran under her voice, and Erika almost never let anyone hear that. "It's someone else."

A scream tore out of the woods.

Then howling—from the center of the dark, all around the grassy circle, rising on every side.

It had been a lure.

"Regroup!" Erika shouted. Her hunters broke from the trees and ran to her, falling into a tight knot, hackles up. And the unknown came pouring out of the treeline—wolves at a dead sprint, snarling, black-and-red warpaint slashed around their eyes, their coats stiff and dark with old blood.

"Do anything you can to get out!" Erika yelled. "The north has to know about this!"

The hunters drove for the gap in the line, fighting as they went. It was hopeless from the first breath. They were outnumbered ten to one, and the enemy swarmed them like water finding low ground.

Erika fought like something the stories had warned about.

She launched off her hind legs and twisted in the air and came down with all her weight, slamming the first attacker flat. A wolf lunged for her flank; she rolled with it, hurled him to the ground, and tore out his throat before he could rise. Three came at once. She slipped the first lunge, ducked the snap of the second, and buried her teeth in the side of the third, dragging him down. The last one drove into her—and Owen hit him from the side and bore him into the dirt.

Erika and Owen carved toward the trees together, back to back, falling into every drill they had ever run. She would shoulder a wolf off balance and into Owen, and Owen would slam him down and pin him. She vaulted clean over the attackers, twisting free whenever a jaw closed on her, never still long enough to be caught. She glanced over once and saw Owen flagging, his movements gone heavy.

She spun right just in time. A wolf left the ground straight at her. She sidestepped, and the jaws snapped shut on empty air—but a second one caught her hind leg and clamped down. She went over. She rolled, recovered, and bit deep into that wolf's side, taking him with her.

Her hunters were trying to clear a path and losing it. The enemy had begun to wheel around them, closing the circle, herding them in.

"They want a fight," Erika said, breathing hard, "but they want no survivors more." She looked at Owen. "So I fight, and you survive. Go back to the north. Tell them what's out here."

The hunters holding the line were buckling.

Owen shook his head. "Don't do this—"

A wolf sprang for him. Erika threw herself into the path of it and took the hit meant for him.

Owen looked at her, and his whole face broke. Then he turned and ran, straight through the heart of the army.

The remaining hunters threw themselves at the enemy to open his way. They were dying fast. Erika twisted up off the ground, found the wolf that had hit her, sank her teeth into him and flung him aside. She kept fighting. The army watched her cut down its soldiers one after another, and it did not like what it saw.

Owen reached the trees and looked back once. By then every north hunter on that field was dead.

And the whole of the army had turned its eyes on Erika.

She was magnificent and she was alone. She leapt over one and cracked her hind legs into the jaw of another. One caught her by the neck; she sprang off a third wolf's back and wrenched the grip loose, then bit down and used the dead weight of him as a shield while the others tried to reach her past it. Then a wolf drove its hind paws into her ribs. The air went out of her. She dropped the shield. She tried to rise and took another blow to the head, and the world tipped.

A larger wolf closed its jaws on her neck and lifted her off her paws. It carried her a few steps, then drove her down onto a flat rock with everything it had.

She lay in the blood-wet grass, gasping, as they ringed her in. Her sight began to go gray at the edges, then dark. The last thing she heard, as the black came down over her, was a voice.

"This one killed over sixteen of ours. He'll want to speak with her."

— — —

Back at the north, the festival was guttering toward its end, but Riley wasn't there.

He had found a tunnel that ran out to the line of the unknown—the north was full of them—and he had spent the whole night standing at the border, staring into the dark trees. After two hours he turned to go home. "She's the best fighter in the north," he told himself. "Nothing could go wrong out there."

He walked back to his little tent at the rear of the clan and crawled into bed and tried to sleep. He couldn't. He lay there turning it over for hours. When sleep finally came it felt like the sun came up and shook him awake the same minute his eyes closed.

He came out of the tent into a morning of wolves cleaning up after the festival. Everything looked normal. Whole. No attack had come on the walls in the night. Riley walked down the street with worry sitting heavy on his back, headed for the hunter camp to see if Erika was there.

The camp was wrong before he even reached it.

Hunters ran in and out through a gate left standing open, all of them moving too fast. Riley waited until no eyes were turned his way and slipped inside. He found a spot out of sight and listened—and then he heard Owen, and looked, and saw him.

Owen was covered in dried blood. He was shaking. And he was standing in front of the alpha.

"Owen. We know how much she means to you," the alpha was saying. "But we have to think of the whole clan."

Owen's voice cracked. "Please. Just let me go back out. I can find her."

"She's dead." The alpha said it calmly, which was worse. "The living need your help now. Are we clear?"

Riley's ears went down on their own.

She's dead.

He didn't hear the rest. The words just stopped reaching him. Owen turned to walk away, and Riley—too rattled to be careful—stumbled out of his hiding spot and scrambled to get up. Owen turned at the noise. His eyes were red and raw from crying, his ears flat, his tail dragging.

"You aren't supposed to be here," Owen said. "But I won't tell."

He walked to a jug of libra and drank from it, and drank, until he sat down hard on the ground. Riley went and helped him back up, and Owen coughed against his shoulder, and Riley didn't say a word. He just held him steady.

Owen sat. He sighed, and the sound was empty. Riley sat down beside him, not knowing what a wolf was supposed to do with any of this.

"She was my best friend," Owen said, to no one. "I fought so many battles next to her. We always said we'd die in a battle together." A long pause. "But I didn't die with her."

"Are you sure she's dead?" Riley asked. He was reaching for anything.

Owen looked down. "I didn't see her die. But she stood against an army. They kill you for that." He made a sound that was supposed to be a laugh and wasn't, and kept staring at the ground.

Riley thought about it for a long minute. Then he stood up.

"I'm going to save her," he said. "There has to be a chance she's alive."

He'd meant it to come out confident. It came out frightened and forced, and they both heard it.

Owen looked up at him, swaying a little. "She's most likely dead, kid. Even if I didn't see it. And you—you've got no hunter support. You don't even know where to go. It's impossible."

Riley felt half a smile pull at his muzzle.

"Hey. Well. Isn't the whole purpose of life to achieve the impossible?"

— — —

Riley sprinted back through town. The hunters were patrolling thicker now, and twice he had to wait, pressed against a wall, until a patrol moved on. He reached the tunnel and slid into it the moment no one was looking. He crawled the length of it and tumbled out the far end, and got to his paws, and looked.

The unknown spread out in front of him. A vast dark forest, going on past anything he could see.

He walked, awkward and slow, to the very edge of the border. He lifted one paw and set it down past the line.

He yanked it back instantly.

He retreated to his spot, well clear of the edge, and sat, and his breath came fast and shallow. He couldn't do it. He just couldn't. He turned to walk away—and stopped, and looked back at the trees one more time. He was terrified of what would happen if he crossed.

So he stood there and made himself think it through.

He was the only wolf who would come for her. Nobody else even believed she was alive. He thought about Erika on that rock in the garden, the song still around her, before she knew he was there. He thought about how it would feel if she ever once smiled at him instead of growling. He laughed a little, at himself, at the whole hopeless idea of it.

And under the fear, something else was growing. Something he didn't have a name for, because he had never felt it before.

He wanted to go. Not because he had to. Not because there was no other way. He wanted to go because he wanted to help.

Riley stepped over the boundary of the only home he had ever known and looked out into the unknown.

That was when he felt something land on his head.

He looked up, and his breath caught in his chest. Snow. Actual snow, drifting down out of the gray morning sky in slow, turning flakes, each one its own small impossible pattern. No wolf in over a hundred years had seen it. A flake settled on his nose, cold and wet, and melted there, and another caught in the fur over his eye.

*That's so cool,* he thought, and for a breath the wonder of it pushed everything else out.

The snow kept falling. It gathered on his fur and along his ears, cold and light and real, and as he stood in it something quietly shifted inside him. The fear didn't leave. It was still there, every bit of it. But it wasn't the only thing in him anymore.

For the first time in his life, Riley felt brave.

He looked back at the clan—at the walls that had kept him safe and kept him caged, at the settlement lying peaceful in the morning light, unaware of the danger out beyond it, unaware that the least important wolf in the north was about to walk into the unknown to do the one impossible thing nobody had asked him to do.

"Well," he said, with a small crack of doubt still in it. "Here we go."

And he turned and ran into the dense woods, fast, before he could let himself turn back.

— — —

Chapter 3: Lux Borealis (The Northern Lights)

Riley went through the unknown in pure awe.

The sights were unlike anything he had ever imagined. Snow lay soft along the tops of the trees, and the whole ground had gone white, and the flurries kept drifting down out of a pale sky to settle on his fur. He jumped around in it for a while, laughing to himself like a pup, batting at the falling flakes. He chased rabbits whenever he saw them, sprinting and skidding and never once getting close to catching a single one. He didn't mind. The unknown was beautiful, and for the first time in his life nobody was watching him be ridiculous.

He walked for hours. After a while it began to feel like he was going in circles, and the cold was sinking past the wonder into his bones, and his legs were getting heavy. He dragged himself up a snowy hill—and tripped at the crest and went tumbling down the far side. He hit the bottom hard, but a deep drift caught him and softened the worst of it.

He climbed out of the snow pile, shook himself, and froze at what lay in front of him.

A lake. A lake so wide he couldn't see the end of it, stretching off into the white distance. He walked to the edge, having never seen so much water in one place. Half of it wore a thin blanket of ice. Riley dipped a paw in and snatched it back instantly, the cold biting straight through his fur to the bone. He did it again, and again, a few more times, the way you poke at something you can't quite believe. He wanted to swim in it. Then he pictured how fast the cold would take him, and decided he liked being alive.

A little farther on he found a cave, and being Riley, he went in.

The dark swallowed his sight whole. He blinked, useless, and crept forward—and then something growled, deep in the back of the cave, low and huge. A roar tore out of the black and slammed off the walls and stabbed into his ears. Riley ran. He shot out of the cave and risked one look back and saw a great shaggy animal barreling after him. He leapt off a rise meaning to slide and instead crashed down it in a heap. The creature stood at the top, roaring down at him, and did not follow.

"That must… be a bear," Riley wheezed, dropping his head into the snow for a second. "I don't like them."

He got up and went back to searching.

Night came on. The stars wheeled out overhead, and the moon was thin, and his fear climbed with every step. He could barely see. He picked his way carefully so as not to slip, ears swiveling at every small sound.

His head jerked up. Snow was cracking somewhere behind him. Footsteps.

He kept walking and told himself it was a deer. The crunching came faster. Then he heard the growling, and he turned his head just in time to see a wolf launch out of the brush straight at him.

Riley threw himself sideways and ran.

They howled and gave chase, and they were faster than him—far faster. They came up on his flanks one by one, snarling, herding him. "Shit, shit, shit, SHIT!" Riley yelled, legs pumping, snow flying. A wolf close behind left the ground and hit him from above, and the weight slammed him flat and drove every bit of air out of his chest. They hauled him up and threw him into a tree. One of them reared and brought its skull down hard against his. Riley slid down the trunk, blood already running into his eye. He tried to rise. A jaw closed on his neck and flung him into the open where they ringed him in, though it wasn't as if he'd ever stood a chance. He couldn't move. His face was running red into the snow.

"This one's weird-looking," one of them said. "I don't think he's a hunter."

"Then what's he doing out here?" Another circled him. "You know what—let's let Zane decide whether to kill him."

They laughed. One of them cracked a paw down across his skull, and his vision swam, and the last thing he saw was the snow sliding past beneath him as they dragged him away.

— — —

He came in and out of himself for a long time, going up, always up, deeper into the mountains. Somewhere along the way the snow gave out and the rain took over, and it came down in cold sheets that soaked his fur through. He was miserable and shivering. That, it would turn out, was the smallest of his problems.

His sight cleared, and what it showed him stopped his heart.

The wolves had dragged him into something out of a nightmare. The walls of the clan were painted in old blood. Wolf heads hung from posts along the way like trophies, mouths frozen open. Every wolf he passed wore the same red-and-black warpaint slashed across its eyes. Bodies lined the streets like grim decorations, left where they'd fallen. Riley trembled and waited for his own death, hauled along toward whatever was waiting. There were so many of them. And there were cages everywhere, rusted and old, packed with hunters—some dead, some alive, some weeping, some just sitting with the hope already gone out of their eyes.

They threw Riley down in the center of it.

The clan closed in around him, growling, glaring, hundreds of them. Then, all at once, they went silent. The candles guttered low. The wind rose, and the temperature seemed to fall thirty degrees in a single breath. Riley tried to push himself up and slumped back into the mud.

That was when he met the worst thing Epsilon had ever known.

A giant of a wolf came through the crowd, and they parted for him like water. He had pitch-black fur threaded with lines of red across his body and head. His fangs were razors, stained dark, dripping red at the tips. He was three times the size of any wolf in the north. But it was his eyes that froze Riley solid—they glowed, a steady burning red, with no white and no soul behind them. He circled Riley slowly, and his gaze bored in like it was reading everything Riley had ever been afraid of.

"What clan do you fight for?" His voice came slow and crackling, a sinister thing that put ice down Riley's spine.

"I'm not a hunter," Riley managed, coughing blood. "I'm from the north."

The giant wolf chuckled.

"Where am I?" Riley's whole body was shaking now.

"You are in your new home." He let the words drip. "Look around. What you see is the future of Epsilon. The Atrum Semita are rising. Aretarian will have his redemption, after all these years."

"Who… are you?" Riley whispered.

The wolf lowered his great head until it filled Riley's whole sight.

"I am who the four brothers feared would come one day. I am Zane."

"Listen, I don't know anything about that!" Riley said. "I just came here to save Erika!"

Zane laughed, and the whole of the Semita laughed with him, and the sound rolled around the clan like thunder. Then Zane went quiet, his eyes drifting off in thought.

"Erika." He turned the name over. "The grey one. Long black mane. Yes… I remember her. An incredible fighter. But far too committed to her own cause." His teeth showed. "A lost cause."

"So she's alive?" Riley's voice cracked clean in half.

"Only until her home is ashes. Then I'll put her out of her misery."

Something rose in Riley that he had never felt before—not fear, the opposite of fear. A deep, stupid rage. And he did the single dumbest thing he had ever done.

"LET HER GO!" he screamed, and charged.

He hit nothing. Zane simply wasn't there—he dissolved into the shadows, and Riley landed in the mud where he'd been. Riley spun, lost. Zane came out of the dark behind him and drove a shoulder into his ribs like a falling tree. Riley went down coughing, white pain forking through his side. Zane watched him try to crawl back up and laughed.

"The north will beat you," Riley gasped. "Even if I die trying."

He got up. He charged again.

Zane melted into the shadows and came out at Riley's flank and cracked a paw across his skull. Riley dropped, rose, lunged, got his teeth into Zane's neck for half a second before he was thrown off like nothing. Then Zane was everywhere—warping to every side of him, blows landing from the dark, ribs, shoulder, skull, one after another, faster than Riley could turn. He finished with a strike to the head that put Riley down for good. Riley lay in the blood and mud, fighting just to stay awake. Zane walked to him slowly.

"I like you." His glowing eyes bore down, so bright it was like staring into the sun. "What's your name?"

"Riley… White."

Zane lowered his muzzle to Riley's, growling and grinning at once, as Riley's sight began to go.

"Nothing can save Epsilon from me," Zane said. "And I'll be there. Very soon."

Riley blacked out.

— — —

He woke slowly on a floor of metal, cold as ice against his cheek.

The mountain dark was thicker at night than any dark he knew. He pushed himself up and looked out through the bars. The cage was large, and it sat among other cages, all of them holding Zane's prisoners. He looked over and saw a shape in the next cage—a wolf, sitting low, head down in defeat. He went closer. It was Erika.

She had heard him coming. She didn't look up.

"Hey…" Riley said quietly.

She raised her head, and there was no anger in it. Only a deep sadness. Her black mane hung bloody across half her face, and there was blood dried on her muzzle and matted through her grey coat. She looked back down at the floor.

"Dammit," she said, and a small, tired chuckle came with it. "Not you."

Riley sat down beside her. She gave him a puzzled look.

"How did you even get here? Why are you out in the unknown at all?"

He looked away for a moment.

"I came to save you. I had to. I don't know how, but I just knew you were alive—I can't explain it. It was like giving up just wasn't an option. I knew I couldn't do it. I came anyway. I know it's dumb. It just… seemed right."

"I don't think it's dumb," Erika said.

She looked at him, then out through the bars, and they sat in the quiet for a while.

"Hey," Riley said. "I was wondering—why were you singing, back in the garden? It was beautiful. But music's shunned. I'd never have guessed you of all wolves liked it."

She sighed. "It just makes me feel better sometimes."

Somewhere out in the camp a wolf screamed in pain. Riley flinched hard. Erika didn't move at all—she was used to it by now. She looked at him, shaking, caked in his own blood, and she could see plainly that he was no fighter. But he was making himself be one anyway. She found she admired that.

"You're brave, you know," she said. "Coming out here. No other wolf would have."

She smiled at him, and for one whole second Riley was happy—until he remembered he was in a cage.

A big Semita guard slammed against the bars. "Shut the hell up or I'll rip both your necks out!"

Riley cowered. Erika threw herself against the cage door with everything she had. "Just you wait, you bastard. I'm gonna break your jaw."

The guard walked off chuckling. Erika sat back against the wall, sulking, and Riley folded himself into the corner, afraid. She watched him a while. He had come all the way out here for her, and she couldn't make sense of why. She turned her head toward him.

"The mane took two months to grow, by the way." She was trying to lift the mood. "I know you asked. Few days ago."

He looked over. She was still leaning on the wall, staring at nothing.

"All the hunters used to tell me I glared too much. Said I should wear a cloak so I'd stop scaring the recruits. Owen thought it was hilarious—told me I should just grow my mane out long instead." A faint grin. "Then it happened on its own. I went out on a salvage mission after our food stores got destroyed, scouting, and I ran into a patrol of East hunters. They chased me down and tore me up bad. Two West wolves found me half-dead and carried me back to their hut. They kept me two months, fed me some herbal treatment. One of the side effects was that it grew my mane out long, like this. I woke up looking like a different wolf." She ran a paw through the dark length of it. "Worked out, I guess. Taber says it hides my menacing look."

She got up and walked to the back of the cage and sat again.

"And now I'm going to lose all of it," she said. "Zane's going to kill every wolf I care about. And I'll be stuck in here." A tear traced down through the blood on her face.

Riley got up and came and sat beside her. She didn't look at him, just kept staring off. He knew she was afraid, because he himself was petrified down to his marrow. And more than anything, he wanted to make her feel better.

"What do you see," he asked, "when you hear music?"

She kept her eyes on the floor. "Nothing. I just hear my own voice."

Riley smiled. She caught it and frowned, confused.

"Do you want to see something cool?"

He reached for her paw. She yanked it away and stared at him like he'd lost his mind.

"Trust me," Riley said, and reached again.

This time she let him. And Riley began to hum.

The cage had been silent, and then it wasn't. The colors came first—soft ribbons of light unspooling out of the dark, the way they always did for him, except this time he watched her face instead of the lights. Erika went still. Her eyes went wide. She was seeing them. The glow rose around them both, turning and folding, deepening with every note, and where Erika had heard nothing all her life but her own flat voice, now the whole air had filled with sound and shape and color. She turned her head slowly, following a thread of light as it drifted past her ear. Her mouth opened a little. She looked, for once, completely unguarded—like a pup seeing snow.

Riley's voice rose, and the light bloomed brighter with it, washing the rusted bars in green and gold.

And then, quietly at first, Erika began to sing with him.

Their voices found each other and braided together, and the colors answered, swelling and wheeling around the two of them in time. For a little while there was no cage, no camp, no Zane. Just the light, and the harmony, and two wolves who had each spent a lifetime believing they were the only one who carried a song they weren't allowed to sing.

The notes slowed. The colors thinned. They faded, and the dark came gently back.

"What was that?" Erika breathed. For a moment she had forgotten entirely where they were.

"Oh. That." Riley shifted on his paws. "Those lights and sounds—they always come when I sing. I don't know why. I call it synesthesia."

"That was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen." She laughed, soft and surprised. "You're really gifted."

"Trust me, that's not true. No wolf thinks that."

"I do now," Erika said. She held his eyes a moment, then looked away with the ghost of a grin. It was gone almost as soon as it came.

"Did Zane tell you," Riley asked, "what he told me?"

"Yes. And that's why we're getting out." She was already on her paws, moving along the bars, hunting for a weak spot. Riley searched with her and found nothing useful. She went over every length of the cage and came up with the same.

The guard slammed the door. "No escape! Keep trying and I'll go get Zane!"

Riley's ears went up. An idea.

"Can you take him?" he asked, nodding at the guard.

"Without a doubt. But they know better than to open my cage."

Riley thought for a moment. "I can get them to."

Time, he decided, to be Piper for once in his life.

"Yeah, of course you're gonna go get Zane," Riley called after the guard. "Can't do a damn thing on your own, can you, you fat prick."

The guard turned, teeth bared, and came back to the cage slowly. He hit the bars. Riley flinched and made himself hold still and forced out a laugh.

"You're laughing now," the guard growled. "You won't be when I tear your neck out."

"At least I've only got the one neck," Riley said, chuckling. "Come on in. I'll smack you around so hard your chins'll vibrate for an hour." He felt sick saying it. But he'd learned from the best. Hunters in the other cages started to lean in and laugh.

The guard pressed right up to the door, shaking with the effort of holding himself back. "Shame it's Zane who gets to rip your leg off and not me."

"Kind of like how your mother was disappointed in you your whole life," Riley said. "I mean, damn. Who's your father even? Probably took one look at you and ran for the mountains."

Erika started laughing. So did half the caged hunters.

"OOOHHH!" the prisoners howled.

"Fine, blue bitch," the guard snarled. "I'm coming in." He glanced at Erika. "Help him, and the whole camp dismembers you."

Erika tipped her head and slunk to the far corner. "I hate him. Do whatever you want."

Riley prayed that was part of the act.

The guard called two more wolves over to wait outside in case Erika ran. Then he shoved into the cage and charged Riley—and Erika's hind legs snapped up and cracked into his jaw. The joint gave with a wet pop, and he dropped, half his jaw hanging loose.

"Told you I'd break your jaw," Erika said, grinning. The cages erupted in cheers. "Open all the cages! I'll keep them busy!"

The two backup wolves rushed her. She vaulted clean over the first and sank her teeth into the second's neck, tripped him, dragged him down. The first caught her in a grip; she rolled, broke it, and slammed her skull into his head. The wolf let out a long howl—and a few seconds later, answering howls came rolling up from deeper in the camp.

Erika sprinted to Riley and started tearing open the other cages. Freed hunters poured out. Most of them ran. Others howled and threw themselves toward the Semita, wanting revenge more than they wanted to live. Riley smashed at the hinges as fast as his battered body allowed. Some of the freed hunters joined him, breaking locks, taking on Semita troops as they came. Then the Semita hit them in a wave, and blood was spilling everywhere at once. Erika juked one wolf and slammed her skull into him, then grappled another and tore its throat out. Riley wrenched the last cage loose and its hunters bolted.

He turned to find Erika fighting two at once across the yard—and spun back around into three more, standing right behind him, teeth bared.

"Bad idea to hang around the crime scene, don't you think?"

Riley turned to run and the lead wolf was on him. It slammed its skull into his and threw him down, then closed its jaws on his side and ripped. The flesh tore. Riley collapsed, the pain white and total, blood pouring from the wound. The Semita laughed and set to beating him where he lay.

Erika saw it from across the fight and was already moving. One of them hauled Riley up to slam him—and Erika hit the wolf full force and bore him into the ground. Riley dropped to the dirt in a spreading pool of his own blood. She slammed her skull into the downed guard, rolled clear as the others lunged, came up and rolled over one of them and drove her hind paws down on him as she landed. She tore the throat out of the last—and knew, even as she did, that more were coming. The downed guard tried to rise, staggered, and fell, cracking his own head.

Erika ran to Riley. He wasn't moving. His eyes were shut. She got him up onto her back, panic rising in her chest, and ran—fast, low, hard—through the blood-painted clan. Most of the Semita were still tangled with the rebelling prisoners; if she was quick, the gate was close. But Riley was leaving a long red trail behind them, and that frightened her more than the army did.

She nearly reached the exit when the temperature dropped.

The wind kicked up around them. Zane warped into the gateway in a curl of shadow, his razor teeth bared in a grin so cruel it stopped her in her tracks. He stared at her, and she fought with everything she had not to look away. And then—unhurried, certain—he simply stepped aside.

"Well? Go." His eyes brightened, shadows steaming off his fur. "Warn your clan, Erika. Go and try to save your friend. Because none of it changes the fact that I'm coming."

She glared at him, and his eyes felt like they were sifting through every fear and every weakness she had. Then the shadows exploded outward around him. The Semita surged after her—and Zane raised a single paw, and the whole army stopped dead. He turned and walked back into the camp, going to deal with the prisoners who had dared to rebel. Erika ran for the gate and didn't stop, the Semita glaring after her until she was through it and gone.

— — —

She tore through the mountains with the rain hammering down and Riley limp across her back.

She had been trained for terrain like this. It was another thing entirely with a dying wolf on her shoulders. She kept running, and the panic kept rising, because there was no possible way she reached the north in time to save him. She wasn't watching her footing. She didn't see the rock until it caught her, and then she was going over, the two of them tumbling down the slope, Erika sliding and Riley flailing loose beside her—and ahead, the slope ran straight off the edge of a cliff.

She found her footing for half a second and threw herself off the lip on purpose, twisting, catching Riley by the scruff and rolling with him onto a shelf of grass. They slid toward the drop. Erika slammed her hind legs down into the earth, dirt heaping up around her paws, and they slowed, and they stopped—right as Riley's nose reached the edge. Pebbles skittered out from under her and fell away into nothing.

She got up, panting, and dragged him back to the flat of the shelf. She crouched over him and laid her paw against his. The tear in his side ran red in steady streams, pooling into a dark moat around him, and his eyes had gone glassy and far away.

"I'm so sorry," she said, and her voice broke on it. "This is my fault."

She didn't know why she cared. But she did. She knew his death was on her, like so many others before him. Riley smiled faintly and turned his head to look out past the edge.

"You… can see all of Epsilon from up here," he said, and coughed blood.

Erika looked at him, near tears. "Yeah. You can." A pause. "Not a bad place to die."

"I'm… not dying." His voice was very faint. "Help me… get to the end of the cliff."

He didn't have long, and she knew it. But she ran over, lifted him, and braced him as he cried out in pain. He leaned into her shoulder, fighting to stay upright, and she walked him to the very front of the cliff, where all of Epsilon opened out below. The rain came down in sheets. Riley swayed and steadied himself. Erika watched him with real worry now, sure the blood loss had turned him delirious.

He closed his eyes. He began to chant.

Ego postulo viam nunc pro tutela. Malum habet educatus caput eius et oportet crescere. Da mihi lumen senex, lumine ductu, et da mihi lucem vincere malum et concede unitatem, ut innocens. Aurora borealis, da mihi vires veteris!

The wind gathered around him. Erika backed away a step, not understanding. And on the final word, Riley threw back his head and howled at the sky—and the sky answered.

The heavens erupted.

Erika stared up, struck dumb, as the rain clouds were torn away and a vast aura of color swept across the dark in their place. The rain simply stopped. The stars came out, and their light caught in the great sheets of color overhead, and the whole sky flashed and shifted and rolled—green and blue and violet and gold, alive, breathing.

She looked back down and saw Riley's wounds closing themselves. The torn flesh of his side knitting shut. The white scar down his eye burning brighter and brighter, like a coal. And then, impossibly, she felt it in her own body too—the deep ache in her bones easing, the pain draining out of her like water.

Riley sank down at the cliff's edge, and Erika sat beside him.

"How did that happen?" she said, astonished. "What is this?"

"This is aurora borealis. Or what I call the northern lights." He watched the colors turn overhead. "All my life I've had these… weird abilities. They heal me. Every time."

She looked at him. "Then why did they heal me?"

Riley blinked, puzzled. "They healed you?" He turned to stare at her. "That's never happened before."

"Weird," Erika murmured, gazing up into the lights. Riley was gazing at her. Even soaked and bloodied, she was the most beautiful wolf in all of Epsilon to him. She turned, and caught him at it, and his eyes shot off in every direction but hers. She chuckled.

The lights slowly drew back, leaving a clean, starry sky behind them. She stood. Riley got up too, and stumbled, drained from pulling the aurora down out of the heavens.

"We need to get to the north, and fast," Erika said. "The mountains will be a challenge. But once we hit Epsilon proper, I know shortcuts that'll get us home."

"I need to rest," Riley groaned. "Go on without me."

Erika laughed and hauled him up by the shoulder. "It's just walking. You'll live."

Then she bolted off toward the trail. Riley sighed, and chased after her, praying with every step that he wouldn't fall.

— — —

Chapter 4: Propositum Inveni (I Found Purpose)

Riley and Erika climbed back through the mountains with the snow settling soft on their fur.

The wind up here was strong, and it sent Erika's long mane flying every which way, whipping it across her face and out behind her in wild dark ribbons. Riley fought hard not to laugh. It looked so reckless, so completely out of character on a wolf who held everything else about herself under such tight control. He kept his muzzle shut and his amusement to himself.

They both felt the same relief the moment Epsilon came into view in the distance.

Erika broke into a sprint for the edge of the mountains, and Riley followed as best his battered legs allowed. She drew up at the border and looked out over it all. The southern city sat far off, and snow lay over the whole of Epsilon, dropping gentle and slow onto the woodland, growing the white blanket thicker by the minute. It looked so peaceful she half wondered if it was the same place she'd left. Far in the distance the moonlight caught the surface of the great lake and threw it back.

"We have to get back fast," she said. "The north needs to know what's coming."

She turned, and Riley wasn't beside her.

She looked around and found him collapsed in a dead sleep right at the border, worn down to nothing. Erika sighed, walked over, and dragged him by the scruff into the cover of the trees. She laid him out on the grass behind a wide trunk and lay down herself. She needed the rest too. She might as well take it. She shut her eyes and was asleep in seconds.

— — —

Riley opened his eyes and knew at once that something was wrong, because he wasn't in his own body.

He was standing on the wall of a strange castle. Below him, armored wolves stalked through the streets with civilians clamped in their jaws. They threw the wolves down and tore their throats out, one after another. A guard charged straight at Riley—and passed clean through him, like he was made of mist. Riley reeled, horrified and confused and, somewhere under it, faintly relieved.

An armored wolf ripped a pup from its mother's grip and threw it to the ground. The mother begged. The wolf grinned and lowered its head to bite—

A force of light smashed it flat, searing half its body black.

A blinding glow erupted from the alley behind them, and the armored wolves wheeled around in horror. Four wolves walked out of the light. Their eyes were glowing. So were the strange necklaces hung at their throats.

Then the castle was gone.

Riley flashed to the top of a mountain he had never seen, high and misty, looking out over everything. He spun in a panic, finding no edge to the cloud.

"I have been very anxious to meet you."

The voice rolled out of the air, huge and echoing. Riley jumped and turned, and what he saw stopped his breath. A great white wolf stood there, light shining off his coat, his eyes a glowing yellow—but kind, somehow, not cruel like Zane's. A calm, easy grin sat on his muzzle.

"Who… are you?" Riley managed. "Why are you in my dreams?"

The white wolf laughed and looked out over Epsilon.

"There's no need to be afraid, my friend. My name is Alpha. And you are not dreaming. I've brought you to a vision." He studied Riley closely as he said it.

"Why did you show me those wolves?" Riley asked. "The ones with the glowing eyes."

"Those were the four wolves of legend. The four brothers." Alpha's gaze went distant. "They both saved and destroyed Epsilon. Their legacy lives on either way. They ended Aretarian's tyranny—and brought a chaos of their own. And now it has come back."

The mountain dissolved.

A city burned in front of Riley. The four brothers stood over the body of a wolf even larger than Zane.

"We will not make his mistakes," one of the brothers said. "We will rule together, brothers. We will bring peace."

The snowy mountaintop snapped back into place around him, and Riley dropped to the ground, his head spinning.

"Please," he groaned, climbing back up, dizzy. "At least warn me when you do that."

Alpha ignored him. "The four brothers swore they would not repeat Aretarian's mistakes. But they did. The power took hold of them, and they turned on one another, and they broke out into civil war. In time they split into the clans you know now. And the wolves of Epsilon, out of fear, hid behind those clans—until Epsilon became what it is today. A place of fear and isolation." He paused. "So I stopped the snow. Snow is the symbol of courage in this land. And courage no longer lived here."

"Then why did the snow come back?" Riley asked, lost. "After all this time."

Alpha chuckled.

"You believe the absence of fear is courage. You've built your whole life on that idea. You call yourself weak because your fear is so great—and you never once see your overcoming of it for the perseverance it truly is." His glowing eyes held Riley still. "Courage requires fear. Without it, there is nothing to grow from. Nothing to triumph over."

Riley felt his legs going, his sight blurring at the edges.

"It came back because of you, Riley." Alpha turned away. "And you are going to need your courage for what is coming. All of it."

Riley was fading fast now. He forced out one more question. "What… does Zane want?"

Alpha turned his head.

"Malevolence."

A great yellow light flared across Riley's eyes, and the vision broke apart.

— — —

Riley jolted awake into the real world, heart hammering, looking wildly around. It took a few breaths to remember where he was. When he did, he let it out and calmed himself. Erika was sitting on a rock nearby.

"You sleep long," she said. "I already worked out routes to the north with little chance of running into hunters."

Riley got up, yawning. "What do you mean, little chance?"

She grinned and started walking out of the mountains toward Epsilon without another word. Riley tipped his head, then followed without question.

As they went, he asked her things every few minutes, the way he always did. The difference, this time, was that she answered.

"What's it like, being a hunter?"

"Honorable. But hard." She kept her eyes forward. "Every wolf in the north—all their lives are under my protection. So I do my duty. I protect my wolves and my family, no matter what." There was a thread of fear under the words that she didn't try to explain.

She made him go silent as they skirted the southern territory, home to the most ruthless wolves in all of Epsilon. Once they were past it she let him talk again, and Riley took the opening immediately.

"Have you ever met a south wolf? What about an east wolf?"

"Both. Both highly hostile—they'll kill a wolf from another clan on sight." She grinned. "But yes. I've 'met' plenty."

They walked on in the quiet she'd asked for. Their path took them past the frozen lake, and Riley noticed Erika keep her eyes turned away from it the whole time, a strange and pained look settling over her muzzle. He looked at the ice, then back at her. She was very deliberately not looking at it. He wondered why. But he figured there had to be a reason she didn't want to talk about it, so he let it lie.

After a while she looked around at the trees and the lay of the land, and relief eased into her face. The north was close.

"Erika," Riley said. "Do you think Zane is really coming? Like—actually."

She stopped for a second and looked down. Then she forced a grin and turned it on him.

"He'll fall to the north. He has no idea what he's getting himself into."

Riley looked relieved, and they kept walking. Erika knew it was a lie even as she said it. The army was enormous, and then there was Zane on top of it—he could take the north on alone if he chose to. She knew, walking home through the snow, that she would have to do everything in her power to protect her clan.

— — —

They reached the wall and walked in through the entrance, and the whole clan turned to stare.

Wolves stopped where they stood. Riley caught the muttering as they passed—*Holy shit. Is that Erika? I thought she was dead.* He walked along beside her, awkward, watching the staring faces watch them back. A squad of hunters spotted her and their jaws dropped. By the time she reached the center of town, wolves had gathered all around them, and Riley looked about anxiously, sure something bad was about to happen.

Then the whole crowd erupted. Cheering, howling. The hunters snapped to attention and howled in unison.

"Erika!"

She turned at the voices and saw Owen and Taber shoving through the crowd, relief written plain across both their faces. They reached her and crowded in close, overjoyed to find her alive.

"I'm mad at you," Taber said. "I had to cover all your patrols. You should've risen from the dead two days ago, easy."

Erika grinned and shoved him. He rested a paw on her shoulder.

"But for real. You did a good job, sis."

Owen stared at him in open shock. "Was that a compliment from Taber? I can't believe it. He was just… nice." He turned to Erika with a humbled smile. "I'm glad you're okay, Erika."

She leaned into him, glad to be home.

Riley sat off to the side, not sure where he fit. A squad of hunters came barreling through the crowd; Riley pushed up to his paws and a guard's shoulder caught him and knocked him sprawling. He stayed down a moment, just trying to get his breath back. The guards reached Erika.

"Good to see you alive. We need to take you to the northern alpha—he's in the strategy room at the hunter camp. How much do you know about this threat?"

"Too much," Erika said. "Let's go."

She glanced back at Riley once before she walked off with the hunters.

A paw helped Riley up. He turned and found Owen. Riley said nothing, still catching his breath.

"I was certain Erika was dead. We all were. We were terrified." Owen looked at him steadily. "And while the rest of us sat here with our tails between our legs, you walked out into the unknown and brought my best friend home." He grinned. "I'm proud of you, kid. Good job doing the impossible."

He helped Riley the rest of the way up, and walked off toward the hunter camp. Riley was left standing there, turning the words over and over.

— — —

Erika walked through the hunter camp between Taber and Owen, drawing looks from every hunter they passed. They came to the building and stepped into the strategy room, where the northern alpha stood bent over a great map of Epsilon. The three of them came to attention.

"At ease," the alpha said. "Erika. I'm told you understand this threat."

She sighed and stepped forward.

"The threat is the Atrum Semita. They have a massive army—as big as the north's. Maybe bigger." She held his eyes. "And their leader, Zane, is ruthless and sociopathic. He can bend light. He makes shadows and steps through them to move wherever he wants—I don't know how. He could kill an army on his own. I made the mistake of underestimating him once. I regret it, and I'd ask that we never make it again."

She looked around the room and saw the fear settle into the other hunters' faces.

"What do we do?" the alpha said.

She knew she had to give them something, even if it was hopeless. Hope mattered, she had decided long ago—even against a failure you couldn't avoid.

"We focus on defense. Pull every squad back. Get all the civilians inside the walls. We need every hunter here to hold, because this is our last chance."

"We can manage the fortifications, and I'll pull the squads back." The alpha's voice cooled. "But we will not frighten the public. This stays confidential. Otherwise the whole clan panics."

Owen's eyes went to Erika. Her face had gone tight with concern.

"Sir—the civilians will be completely exposed when the attack comes. We need to—"

"There is no 'we,' Erika." He cut her off flat. "I have my duties. I run the clan, I keep the peace. You have yours. Protect it. I suggest you find a way to do your job."

Erika glared at him. He held her stare and didn't blink.

"I'll lead the defense," she said at last. "But I have to go."

She turned and walked out, and the alpha allowed himself a small grin behind her. Taber and Owen moved to follow her—and he raised a paw.

"You two. Pull the squads back and plot their routes. And Taber—no snide remarks the second I stop talking."

Taber rolled his eyes. He and Owen went over to the charts. The alpha left the strategy room to see to other business, carrying himself as though none of this were the least bit out of the ordinary.

— — —

Riley sat out on the blanket of snow, looking off into the unknown.

For all of it, he found he was glad he'd gone. He pushed the snow around with his paw and thought about the journey, and hoped he might run into Erika somewhere in town—hoped he'd hear her talk about how she was going to save everyone, hoped she might still want to talk to him at all. He was so deep in it he didn't hear the leaves crunching behind him.

"Hey."

He turned. Erika stood there, the blood all washed off her now, her grey coat clean and her mane combed back into order. "Can I sit here?"

Riley looked up, lit with surprise, and nodded. She sat down beside him.

"When I was in that cage, I was sure I was going to die," she said. "I was sure no one would come. I knew they couldn't. And then you—out of every wolf in the north—you came for me." She looked out at the snow. "I wanted to thank you for that."

Riley felt something warm and unfamiliar settle in his chest. For once in his life, it felt like he had done something that mattered. Erika rested a paw briefly against his back, then got to her paws.

"I have to go. I've got strategies to plot and an army to put together."

Riley felt the disappointment of it immediately, wishing she would stay just a little longer. Erika would never have said so out loud, but she felt the same. She looked back and caught him watching her, and when she did he looked quickly away at nothing. She laughed.

"I set my own breaks now that I'm running the army," she said, hiding a smile. "You should come by the hunter camp sometime. It'd be nice to see you again."

His ears shot up. He smiled.

"That sounds great!"

Erika turned and walked off toward the heart of the north. Riley stayed where he was, looking out into the unknown, feeling—for the first time in his whole life—like he had accomplished something.

— — —

Chapter 5: Cinis et Sanguis (Ash and Blood)

To Erika's surprise, the north stayed quiet—quiet apart from the hunters, anyway.

They ran extra patrols and pulled back from the unknown, bracing for the attack everyone now knew was coming. The wall and the borders swarmed with them. Erika led it all; the northern alpha had handed her full command of the hunters, and she spent her days making sure every spot in the north that could be a target had eyes on it. The hunters were afraid. They hid it from the civilians, the way hunters were trained to.

She walked the border line through the snow with Owen and Taber at her heels, the way the three of them had a hundred times before. Snow capped the trees and lay thick over the ground, and the sun threw a hard glare off all that white—which Taber kept slipping on. He caught a patch of ice and went down in a heap. Erika and Owen stopped and looked at him. He scrambled up, slipped, and went down again.

"I hate this damn snow," Taber said, laughing, fighting for his footing. "I'm hitting the ground harder than Owen does in every sparring match."

Owen padded over and gave him a light shove. Taber's paws slid out and he dropped again. Erika started laughing. Owen grinned down at him.

"You're right. You are hitting the ground harder."

Taber rolled his eyes and let Owen haul him up. They walked on, and after a while he got the hang of the snow.

"So what are you losers doing after this?" Taber said, grinning. He loved to pick at them. They were also, at the end of the day, his best friends in the world.

Owen worked his leg up and down and winced. "Getting my leg looked at. It's been feeling weird. Might try to fit some sparring in before our next patrol, though."

Taber looked over at Erika, who was very busy with her mane and very pointedly not meeting his eye.

"So I'm guessing Erika does all our patrols today," he said, sliding into a glare. "Unless she's got a date."

She kept fussing with her mane. "I'm meeting Riley later. Going to show him the view from the temple." A beat. "Not a date."

"Wait." Taber's grin spread. "Is this the new Stan? Remember how you used to follow Stan around the camp the whole time we were training?"

Erika cracked a smile despite herself. "I do remember that. I also remember you dragging a severed bear head back to the north to impress a girl who turned you down anyway."

Taber rolled his eyes, chuckling. He remembered it too. It had worked, eventually.

"I think Riley's great," Owen put in. "I've met him a few times."

Taber rolled his eyes again. "No he isn't. My boy Piper says he's a bitch. Runs from his own shadow."

For a reason she didn't fully understand, that one made Erika angry.

"He's got more guts than you. He actually came out to save me. You didn't." She tried to land it as a joke. Owen and Taber exchanged a look, and Taber laughed.

"Whatever you say, sis." He reached over and mussed up her mane with a paw. She swatted him off, her hair falling across her eyes, and blew it out of the way and kept walking.

"So do you like him?" Owen asked.

Erika rolled her eyes at him. "No more Riley questions. Please."

"Hey, Owen," Taber stage-whispered. "Notice she didn't say no."

"But I didn't say yes either, so shut up." She shoved him, and he went down in the snow again.

"Dammit, I hate snow!"

Owen helped him up, fighting not to laugh. They finished the line that way, ribbing each other the whole walk, and Erika loved them for it. They reached the end of the border and Taber cheered.

"YES. Patrol's done. Time for some liiibbbrrraaa, bitch." And he took off toward the north entrance.

Owen looked at Erika, who was looking at the gate.

"You should go. Take off, see Riley." He smiled. "He's a good kid. I'm glad you finally have a friend. Outside us, I mean."

"Thanks, Owen."

She ran for the entrance. The hunters saluted her as she passed, and she could see the fear sitting under all of them—they knew something was coming, they just didn't know what. They were acting strong. That was the job. But hunters weren't trained to lie to the clan, and that was exactly what they were doing.

Inside the walls, the town went on as if nothing were wrong, because as far as the townsfolk knew, nothing was. Pups chased each other, laughing. Families strolled. The whole place hummed with a false, easy comfort, and Erika walked through it slow and uneasy, greeted on every side, trying to look calm when she was anything but.

— — —

As she neared the temple she heard yelling, off in the distance.

She dropped into a fighting stance—*this is it*—and her eyes shot everywhere at once. Then she looked, and it wasn't the attack. It was a knot of wolves brawling at the foot of the temple. She squinted. Riley was on the ground, and Piper's pack was driving their paws into him without mercy, and Piper himself was on top of him, slamming his skull down into Riley's. The tan bully was laughing loudest of all of them, plainly the ringleader. Riley's face was running blood, and he was shaking, and the sight of it made Erika furious.

She growled and charged. Piper barely got his head up in time to see a grey blur tearing toward him. She slammed through his packmates and hit him full force, knocking him clear off Riley. They came up, and her hind legs cracked into Piper's muzzle and threw him back into the temple wall. She drove him against it and slammed her skull into his. His head bounced off the stone, and he slid slowly down it, blood across his face.

She only had to glare, and the rest of them ran.

Riley pushed himself up, blood still dripping from his nose. Erika started toward him—and Piper got his voice back.

"This bully-beating bitch can't protect you forever!" he coughed.

Erika turned and went back to him. She slammed him into the pillar again, the air bursting out of him.

"I will sink my teeth into your neck and have you screaming like the coward you are," she said, low and flat. "If I see you near Riley one more time, it'll be the last breath you take." She threw him aside. Piper stumbled, fell, dragged himself up, and limped off as fast as his legs would carry him.

"Hey," Riley wheezed, half a laugh in it. "I had them on the ropes."

She grinned. "Yeah. Sure you did. Hold still—let me check your eyes." She walked over, took his head between her paws, and looked into each eye in turn, checking for a concussion. She let go.

"Why do those wolves always come after you?" she said.

Riley opened his mouth to answer.

And the ground heaved.

The whole earth bucked under them, and they both went down. Across the north, every wolf felt it, and panic broke over the clan like a wave. Then came the howling—dark, wrong, rolling out of the unknown. Warpaint wolves poured toward the wall. Balls of fire arced up into the sky and burst against the north's defenses. One screamed across the whole settlement and slammed into the temple.

Erika scrambled up and grabbed Riley and ran him to a ledge—and froze at what lay below.

"No," she breathed.

The walls were breached. And out past them, throwing fire into the air at her home, stood a machine. She had no name for it. She had never seen such a thing in her life. She only knew that it was tearing her defenses apart.

Then she found Zane.

He was strolling through the middle of the sprinting army, grinning, taking his time. His eyes burned bright, the red glowing out of the shadows that coiled around his paws. He was savoring it. The Semita were overrunning the hunters and flooding in through the gaps, and the civilians ran screaming, snatching up their families and what little food they could carry. The quiet life these wolves had always known was gone, all of it, in the span of a few breaths. Burning buildings folded in on themselves and sent smoke pouring up into the sky. Collapsing walls crushed wolves in the street. The ones who weren't being hunted hid and wept and clutched their pups.

Erika took off toward the town, Riley right behind her. A fireball hit a building dead ahead and brought it down across their path. She threw Riley clear and they both hit the ground hard. She got up and pulled him up after her—he was still staring, trying to make sense of what could possibly be throwing fire like that.

"I have to kill Zane. It's the only way to stop this." The words came fast and frightened. "You tell the northern alpha to evacuate. He has the plan I made—once Zane's dead, I'll regroup."

"Erika, he's too strong. I've seen what he can do." Riley was shaking. "Don't go after him alone."

She threw back her head and howled, and hunters flooded to her position. The ones not staying broke for the town. The rest dropped to attention.

"I won't be alone," she said, with a smile she had to force onto her muzzle. "Don't worry about me."

She howled again, and the hunters massed and began to fight as a body. Erika ran for the town. Riley wanted to follow her with everything in him—but he had his own task. He turned and sprinted for the alpha's chamber, through the chaos tearing his home apart.

— — —

Erika fought beside her squads at the center of the north, holding the line, driving fleeing wolves deeper toward safety. Then a howl tore across the settlement—devilish, piercing—and it came from the temple. She growled and broke for the monument, hunters massing behind her, swallowing down their fear and their confusion as they ran.

They cut their way to the temple through a clan turning to ash. Wolves met her eyes as she passed, and what she saw in them was empty—she had failed them, and they knew it, and so did she. They reached the foot of the stairs. Zane's forces held the top. Zane stood among them, growling, that malicious smile fixed on his muzzle. He raised a paw and slammed it down, and the stone surface cracked, and the Semita poured down the stairs.

The hunters surged past Erika and crashed into them, ready to kill or die for the north. Erika went straight for Zane, who strolled through the slaughter as if it were a garden.

She launched at him, jaws open for his throat. He warped sideways and drove a paw across her and put her on the ground. She tumbled down a few stairs, wiped the blood from her muzzle, and came up striking—her hind legs lashing out where he'd been—but he warped behind her and slammed her down another flight. She kept after him. He kept teleporting higher up the stairs, just out of reach, until they reached the top, and she lunged to tackle him and he turned it against her and threw her into a pillar. She dropped. He bent to bite—and a north hunter hit him from the side.

Erika looked up. The Semita on the stairs were dead. The rest of her hunters were charging Zane.

Two of them pinned him. He tore one's throat out and slammed the other down hard enough to break ribs. Two more leapt; he warped clear, cracked his hind legs into one's jaw, and seized the other and drove its skull into the ground. The survivors ringed him in, Erika among them. Zane warped through the circle and took them apart one at a time. They fought. They didn't stand a chance against the thing in the middle of them. Soon only Erika and one other hunter were still on their paws. Zane sprang and drove a paw into Erika's muzzle, and she went down, and he tore the last hunter's throat out where it stood.

Erika tried to rise. Zane's jaws closed on her neck and flung her into a pillar so hard the stone cracked. She hit the ground and screamed. Blood ran from her neck and down her body, poured from her muzzle. She pushed herself up and collapsed.

Zane laughed and circled her.

"The shadow assassin. The siren of death." He turned the names over with something like fondness. "That's what my men called you, after they met you. You were good, Erika. A very good fighter. A smart soldier." He lowered his head. "But your allies never quite shared your… what shall we call it. Motivation."

He warped down beside her.

"This is only the beginning of my vision. I'm sad you won't get to see it through to the end."

He struck her and hurled her down the stairs. She fell the whole flight, slamming her stomach and her head on every step, and hit the bottom with her sight swimming red, her mane and her body soaked through. She lay there coughing, finished. Zane came down the stairs after her, slow, and looked down at her with something like disappointment.

"I'm let down, truly. I expected a fight." His teeth showed. "But you'll die here, Erika. Alone. Coated in fear and blood."

— — —

Riley was not doing well with his task.

He was trying to stay brave, but he was no hunter, and he knew it. He'd worked his way to the back of the clan, which had gone strangely, terribly quiet. He flinched at every scream that flooded out of his burning home. The torched buildings terrified him; the smoke crept upward like something climbing to the afterlife. Fireballs came down around him and knocked him off his paws again and again. He reached the entrance of the hunter camp and stopped cold.

The gate was painted in blood. Dead hunters lay strewn across the ground in a sea of red.

The whole camp was drenched in it—dark pools soaking the walls like some sick fresh coat of paint. Riley made his shaking legs carry him through. There were no Semita here anymore. The emptiness was almost worse. He reached the entrance to the alpha's quarters and found it just as red, and he climbed the stairs stepping over dead hunters and dead Semita both, certain each step would be his last, amazed he was still breathing at all.

The stairs ended. He walked into the chamber.

Dead hunters everywhere. He dragged his eyes away from them and nearly threw up when he saw the northern alpha. The body had been torn apart, almost past knowing. The neck was simply gone, and the head hung off the edge of the table.

Behind the horror Zane had left him, two words were painted on the wall in blood.

*I'm here.*

Riley stood frozen, staring at the alpha—and then he heard howling from the hunter camp below. He panicked, spinning, looking for anywhere to hide, because he knew they were coming. He heard the Semita pounding up the stairs, paws hammering the stone like a stampede. An idea came to him, and he hated it. He rolled himself through the blood until he was soaked in it, gagging, and dragged a dead wolf over the top of himself, and shut his eyes, and prayed.

Six Semita came in and looked around. They prodded at the corpses. One jabbed Riley in the ribs, and he held still through it, knowing he'd end up like the alpha if he so much as twitched.

"Why are we even doing this? The alpha's dead," one said, poking at another body.

"The blue wolf who escaped is supposed to be in here. Zane said so."

Riley went pale under the blood.

"Shit," he whispered—not quite quietly enough.

The Semita turned, growling, and came for him. He threw the corpse off and bolted for the exit. One cut him off and drove a paw into him; he went down, and another clamped jaws on his neck—and a fireball crashed through the chamber and blew every wolf in it off their paws. The room caught fire. The Semita scrambled to beat out the flames. The blood drying on Riley's fur turned the color of coal, but he wasn't burning, and just then he'd take any small mercy he could get. The roof came down on one of the Semita. Another charged him through the smoke.

Riley spotted a hole torn in the wall, and knew there was only one way out. He ran at it and threw himself through.

Lucky for him, a small hill waited below to "catch" his fall. He tumbled down it, battered by rocks and falling debris, hit the bottom, and rolled clear an instant before the rubble could bury him. He came up panting and shaking, unable to believe any of this was real.

He ran through the ruins of the clan. Civilians fled past him, hunting for somewhere to hide. The air was thick with screaming and weeping and howling. He passed dead civilians and broken families, most of the living more hollow-eyed than the dead—wolves caked in ash or blood, moving slow, despair and pain in their faces. He sprinted for the temple, making himself look past every fallen hunter on the way.

— — —

He reached the temple to see Zane with his jaws around Erika's neck.

Zane looked up and fixed Riley with a sick, delighted stare. He dropped Erika, and her body hit the stone hard, and he started toward Riley slow, the fear of him rolling over the much smaller blue wolf in waves. Riley backed up. He made himself stop backing up.

"You won't win!" His voice cracked. "This is a hopeless fight!"

Zane laughed and slammed him to the ground with brutal force. Riley coughed and forced himself up, legs shaking under him. Zane warped behind him and drove a paw into his side, then warped to his flank and cracked another across his eye. Riley collapsed again, blood sheeting down his face. He dragged himself up, stumbled, lunged for Zane, and got nothing. Zane caught his neck in his jaws and slammed him into a pillar, and Riley slid down it, leaving a long smear of red on the stone.

"You have good ambition," Zane said, growling and smiling at once. "Shame it was wasted on a coward."

He turned and started back toward Erika with murder in every step.

Riley opened his eyes. He coughed up blood. And an idea came to him. He pushed himself up slowly, leaning on the cracked pillar, and gave a soft, ragged whistle. Zane looked back, a flicker of surprise in his glowing eyes.

"Ambition isn't the only thing wasted on this coward," Riley said, grinning through the blood, and furious. "Check this out."

Ego postulo viam nunc pro tutela. Malum habet educatus caput eius et oportet crescere. Da mihi lumen senex, lumine ductu, et da mihi lucem vincere malum et concede unitatem, ut innocens. Aurora borealis, da mihi vires veteris!

The northern lights blasted across the whole clan.

Riley began to heal at once, his cuts and his wounds fading. The bite marks closed on Erika's neck, though she stayed unconscious. Zane stared at it all, astonished—and instead of charging, he looked up at the lights.

"Would you look at that. What pretty colors." His grin spread. "Though I prefer red. I want to see red—on your body."

He warped behind Riley and slammed him to the ground and bit into his neck. He hurled him into a pillar, and overhead the lights began to flicker. He cracked a paw across Riley's muzzle and put him down, then drove another into his ribs and knocked the breath clean out of him.

"I came here for a FIGHT!" Zane roared, and seized Riley and threw him again. Riley's head bounced off the stone. The northern lights were nearly drained now—Riley was burning through all of them just to keep breathing. He pushed up, and Zane cracked into his muzzle and dropped him, then sprang on top of him and drove his skull down into Riley's. Only the last of the fading light kept Riley alive through it.

"Is this my fight? I was promised a fight." Zane sighed. "Well. A massacre will do just as well."

He took Riley by the neck and warped to the top of the temple. He held him there, those razor fangs sinking in like blades, carried him to the stairs, and threw him down.

Riley fell the whole flight, his head and body striking every step. Zane stood at the top, grinning, watching him go. He hit the bottom, and the lights died for good, healing him just enough. Zane came down the stairs slow, expecting a corpse.

Riley looked up at him. And slowly, in immense pain, he got to his paws—and put himself between Zane and Erika.

Zane laughed, and there was something almost like respect in it.

"I do like you, Riley." He tipped his head. "I hope to see you again."

He howled, long and dark, and the shadows folded in around him, and he was gone.

— — —

Riley ran to Erika and tried to wake her. The bite marks on her neck had sealed, but her eyes stayed closed. Then Semita came pouring around the corner at them—and Riley shut his eyes—and north hunters charged in from behind him and crashed into the attackers.

Owen ran to Erika and bent over her, checking. Taber hovered, then turned to Riley after a moment.

"She's alive. Unconscious." Owen's voice was tight with panic. "Something sealed her neck wounds. But we have to get her out of here, now."

Taber ran up to Riley. He was out of options and he knew it.

"Listen, kid. We have to fight here. You don't." A Semita broke through the line; Taber met it, took it down, tore its throat out, kept talking. "The north is gone. We've got one move left and it's killing Zane. You've got the option to leave. Take it."

Riley started to argue. A dark howl rolled across the north, and Taber and Owen both looked up at the temple. Zane was there, walking down it slow. The Semita surged onto the temple grounds and threw themselves at the last of the hunters, and a fireball slammed into the temple and brought debris down on the unsuspecting.

"Dammit! Get my sister out of here!" Taber shouted.

Riley ran to Erika and got her onto his back. Owen reached out and gripped Taber's paw, and the two of them held it a moment.

"It's been good fighting beside you," Owen said, sad and proud at once. "Ready for the end, hunter."

"I bet you go before I do, Owen." Taber grinned, huge and reckless. "Let's make a game of it."

And the two of them turned and charged the temple together, ready to die for the north.

Riley ran through the dying clan in terror, Erika's blood running off his back, sick with worry for her. He was glad the lights had healed her. He still didn't understand how. The north was gone around him, every building wrapped in flame, civilians scattering ahead of the Semita. He reached his secret tunnel and brought Erika through.

He came out the far end and looked back at the wall—at the only home he had ever had, lost now for good. It was burning. Semita still poured through the breaches, and the screams of his clan carried out through the broken walls. Riley gasped, and trembled, and made himself stop.

He settled Erika on his back, and turned, and ran into the unknown.

— — —

Chapter 6: Spes Nova (New Hope)

Riley ran from the northern clan with fear roaring through his head.

The snow was hard to move through. It dragged at his legs and packed cold between his pads, and the wind drove it sideways into his eyes, but he didn't notice any of it. All he could hear were the screams behind him, growing a little fainter with every stride. Then he noticed something worse. The cries for help were going quiet, one by one, the further he got—not fading into distance but simply stopping, as if each voice had been switched off. He told himself it was distance. He decided they had to be far enough now. He ducked behind a wide tree, out of the worst of the wind, and set Erika down on the snow as gently as his shaking legs allowed.

She was still breathing. He watched her ribs rise and fall to be sure of it. But she was still covered in blood and bruises, her grey coat black and matted with it, her mane stuck to her face. He figured he had a fair collection of his own. He just hadn't had time to feel them yet.

The snow was doing them both a kind of mercy. It melted against their torn fur and washed some of the blood away. Where it didn't melt, it lay over them in a thin cold sheet, dulling everything down to numbness. Riley made sure Erika was breathing one more time, his nose almost touching her muzzle. Then he walked a few feet off—he wasn't sure why, except that it felt wrong to just collapse on top of her. He fell into the snow. He had nothing left to stand on. He couldn't keep his eyes open either. The cold had stopped feeling like cold. It felt almost warm now, almost kind. He passed out, and the two of them lay there in the white quiet, unconscious, slowly disappearing beneath a soft and steady blanket of snow.

Riley opened his eyes onto the familiar mountain of his visions.

The air up here was different—thinner, clean, with none of the smoke in it. The clouds hung so low he felt he could lift a paw and run it through them like water. Alpha stood at the edge of the cloud, looking out over that vast snowy landscape Riley still had no words for. He turned, slow, and came and sat down without a word. Riley couldn't bring himself to meet those glowing eyes. He looked at the snow between his paws instead.

"I'm sorry, Riley," Alpha said at last, and there was real pain folded into that great voice. "I truly am."

Riley's ears flattened against his skull. He stared down and fought, hard, not to cry.

"It's over." His voice came out small. "I knew we didn't stand a chance. Part of me just hoped we did."

He looked up in something close to desperation, hoping to find some comfort there, and found Alpha's face unchanged—patient, steady, kind.

"And why has that hope gone away?" Alpha asked. He said it calmly, but a thread of stubborn optimism ran under it, like he knew something Riley didn't. Before Riley could answer, he went on. "Do you know why Zane is so fascinated with the four brothers? It is because he is afraid of them."

"He isn't scared of anything!" Riley snapped—and heard how rude it sounded the second it left him, and shrank. Alpha looked entirely unbothered, his calm never so much as rippling.

"Even the strongest evils fear something. A danger in the present, or a wound in the past." He rose to his paws, and as he did, power seemed to glow up off his white coat and warm the cold air around him. He crossed to Riley and rested a single paw on his shoulder.

The world changed around them.

They stood in a temple now—massive, ancient, dark, the ceiling lost somewhere far overhead. Snow flurried past the great open doors and skated across the floor. The stone walls had broken open in places, and through the gaps the wind wandered in and made itself at home, and Riley shivered. And then, all at once, the whole place came alive with color and music. It was unlike anything he had ever seen in his life—and he had been seeing the lights since he was a pup. These were different. These were more. Light-blue notes lifted off the floor and soared up into the dark, and burst there into showers of color. Deliberate. Patterned. Each one a small planned explosion of feeling, of understanding. The song moved around him soothing and driving at the same time. For one long stretched moment the fear simply went out of him. He stood in the middle of it with his mouth open. Alpha reached up and slid a paw through one of the drifting notes, and it burst against his pads, soft and bright.

"This is what I heard when I first made music," Alpha said. "I saw this. A whole portrait of color and emotion, hanging in the air. And I decided to shape it into something that any of us could make, and any of us could understand."

Riley couldn't put two words together. He turned in a slow circle, watching the colors wheel, and he had never heard or seen anything so beautiful, and he didn't think he ever would again.

Four silhouettes faded into being around them, tall and still. Riley could feel the power coming off them like heat off a fire. He could almost smell it—old blood, turned earth, the dirt of wars they had ended long before he was born. He flinched and stepped back. Alpha pretended not to notice.

"The four brothers used this to unite Epsilon, with the gifts I gave them."

Light bloomed at the silhouettes' throats, and four gold necklaces shone out of the dark. Riley leaned toward the nearest one and caught his own scruffy, scarred reflection looking back at him in its surface, and he flinched at that too, and backed off, and just looked. Each one was carved over with languages he couldn't read, fine lines worked into the metal. One was stranger than the rest. It carried a kind of headpiece above it that he couldn't quite make his eyes settle on, no matter how he tried.

Alpha raised a paw and swept it slowly through the air. The music answered him. It gathered itself into a turning tornado of color, building and bursting all at once, faster and brighter, until Riley's eyes ached and he had to look away. He felt the air shift. When he looked back, the whole churning mass had poured itself into the necklaces. All four crystals were shining now—one a bright, deep blue, the others red, green, and yellow. Each sat in the heart of its gold like a small captured star, lighting the carvings around it.

"I gave them these gifts," Alpha said. "The relics that birthed the ways of alpha."

Riley walked up to the red one, slow, and reached out, and touched it. It glowed brighter the moment his pad met the crystal. The carvings flared with warm light. He felt something in it answer him—a welcome, not a warning.

"These relics were bound to the brothers by my own paw," Alpha said. "I have never once stepped into the affairs of Epsilon before this. And for good reason. But music is hope, Riley. So I allowed myself this, just the one time." He gazed at the four shining crystals. "Even when all hope is gone, music can wake new courage in a wolf. It gives us a reason to face our challenges. To face our true demons."

"But how does this help me?" Riley asked, lost.

Alpha went on as though he hadn't heard. "The brothers fed the relics with the traits that defined them. The things they did, the choices they made, the way each one chose to live. All of it made the relic he wore stronger."

"But how does any of this help me?" Riley burst out, frustration cracking his voice.

Alpha turned and looked at him, and the harsh churning faded, and the room settled back into the calm, soothing melody they had arrived to. The fear drained out of Riley all over again, gentle this time, and for a breath he nearly forgot the burning home he'd left behind. Alpha chuckled, low and warm.

"This is how it helps you, my friend. What you are feeling right now is Alpha's Harmony. This song can unite Epsilon the way it did once before." He let the words settle into the quiet. "It made reason rise up over emotion, so that even the hardest truths could be looked at and understood."

The room flashed white, and grey washed over everything. Now they stood at the edge of a great gathering of wolves, hundreds of them, all howling together. At the front of it all, the four brothers stood singing on a bed of snow. Riley walked forward through the grey shapes of the crowd, toward a faint thread of melody hanging in the back of the air.

"This was the day Epsilon was first united," Alpha said behind him. "They sang Alpha's Harmony, and the wolves looked at one another, and for the first time they saw only other wolves. No clans. No enemies. It took all four brothers, standing together, to sing it." His voice gentled. "Alpha's Harmony makes fear fade away, Riley. With it, you can save Epsilon. And that is the real reason Zane fears the four brothers."

"But the four brothers are gone," Riley said, watching the grey wolves sing. "That's the whole problem."

"But hope is not gone." The scene began to thin and fade, and Alpha began to fade with it, calm even as he came apart into light. "The relics still exist. They still hold the power they held then. And Alpha's Harmony still lives, sleeping, inside every one of them." His voice grew faint and far. "There is one wolf left who can sing Alpha's Harmony, and harness the relics."

A pause, soft as snowfall.

"It's you."

And everything went black.

— — —

Riley came back to the world as a smear of blurs that slowly hardened into shapes. He blinked up at huge trees wearing the snow like a peaceful white coat, their branches bowed low under the weight of it. The ground was freezing beneath him, and he was cold straight through to the middle, his fur stiff with old ice. He pushed himself up, slow. There was pain everywhere, dull and spread out, but nothing sharp, nothing broken. Then he saw Erika.

She was sitting a little way off, awake, staring out into the forest. Her mane lifted and fell in the wind, and it was still dark with dried blood, and she didn't seem to feel the cold at all.

Riley got up and walked over the crunching snow and sat down beside her. She was looking toward the north, where a smudge of smoke still climbed into the grey sky in the far distance. There was nothing in her eyes. Just emptiness, and defeat. They sat that way a long while, watching the smoke rise, and neither of them said a word.

"I had one duty my whole life," Erika said finally. Her voice was flat and worn down to nothing. "I protected the north, because it was my home. It was my responsibility. And I failed myself, and I failed every wolf in it." She stared at the smoke. "Now I don't have the first idea what to do."

She got to her paws, slow, shaking—part fear, part the last of the adrenaline burning off.

"I need to try to kill him. It's the only thing left that could end this."

She turned to walk away. Riley scrambled up after her, snow flying, because he knew—plain and certain as anything he'd ever known—that he didn't stand the smallest chance without her.

"No—wait, wait. I have an idea." It came tumbling out of him all at once. "There's this—this white god wolf. He's been talking to me. He told me about these relics, and he says I can harness their power and sing a song that'll unite all the clans. It's called Alpha's Harmony. And if every clan fought together, all of them at once, we'd actually have a real chance against Zane." He was running out of breath and pushing on anyway. "I know it's a long shot. I know it sounds completely insane hearing it out loud. But I think it could actually work."

Erika stopped. She turned back to him, and her face was defeated, scraped clean of any hope at all.

"I'm sorry, Riley. But it's my duty as a hunter to protect the north, or to die trying." Something low and grieving moved under the words. "Go west. Keep going until you reach the Western clan—they'll help you. They're the only clan that takes in outsiders. I'm sorry. I really am."

She turned again to go. Riley lunged and caught her paw in his.

She whipped around to snap at him—and saw the fear standing naked in his eyes, and the snap died in her throat. *Follow protocol,* she told herself, the way she'd told herself a thousand times. *Just leave. It's cleaner. It's what hunters do.*

"Please, Erika." His voice stuttered and broke, and tears welled up in his pleading eyes. "I don't want you to die. I don't want to do any of this—but now I have to, and I can't do it on my own. Alpha said I'm the only one who can use these relics. I don't know how, and I don't know why. I don't even know where they are. I'm terrified. And I need your help." He could barely get it out. "Please. Please, Erika."

She thought about it for a long moment, looking down at the snow gathered on her paws. Hunter code was everything to her. It always had been—it was the one solid thing she'd built her whole life on top of. But then she looked back up at him. At his blood-soaked fur, his frightened blue eyes, the shiver running through him that he kept trying to hide and kept failing to. And the truth she didn't like to look at was that she didn't want to be alone either, however hard hunters were taught that they should be. Riley let go of her paw and dropped his head, sure she was already gone.

She stayed where she was. And then she turned to him.

"Did you say the white wolf's name was Alpha?"

"Yeah." Riley looked up. "Why?"

"The hunters used to tell an old story about him. They said he gave the first Alphas the power to beat the tyrant ruler. To unite all of Epsilon under a single song." Something was kindling behind her eyes now, slow, against her own better judgment. "I always figured it was just a story they told the recruits. But—do you think these relics, or whatever they are, could really do that? Bring everyone together?"

"That's what Alpha said." Riley dipped his head helplessly. "I just don't know where they are."

Erika went quiet, and Riley watched her think, and watched an idea take shape and take hold.

"The north's relic was kept in the temple. So we know that much is true—they're real, and they're in the clans." She looked east through the trees. "I think our best move is to slip into the clans one at a time and stay low until we find each one. The East is closest. Ten miles out, maybe. We start there."

"Wait." Riley's voice was still shaking, but a thin thread of hope had wound its way into it. "You're—you're staying?"

She reached out and took his paw, and held it, and rubbed it slowly between her own in a way that was almost gentle.

"I'm scared too," she said. "So I might as well be scared with someone." A faint, tired smile touched her muzzle. "We can be scared together."

Riley looked down at her paw, then back up at her face. He stared at her for a moment, something swelling up in his chest too big to hold. Then he threw himself forward and hugged her, tight, and buried his face in her shoulder. Erika went stiff with surprise. Then, slowly, she softened, and hugged him back, and Riley felt that she was shaking just as badly as he was. He held on for a full minute. And for that one minute the whole burning, terrible world felt far away—like something finally stood between him and all of it.

"Thank you," he said into her fur. "Thank you, Erika." And he let her go.

"Ready to save Epsilon?" she said, with a confidence that hid the fear underneath it well.

"I hope so." Mostly, Riley was just happy she was staying.

They got up and started east, into whatever was waiting. The snow came down fast now, swirling and hissing through the forest. They kept to the cover of the bigger trees to dodge the worst of the wind chill. They stayed alert—well, Erika stayed alert. Riley mostly just tried to keep up with her and listen for trouble, though the wind ate every sound before it reached him. After hours of walking the snow finally let up, thinning to a few stray flakes. Riley guessed they had to be getting close, though he had no real way to know. Then Erika stopped him with a paw across his chest and pulled him off the open ground, down behind a snow-heavy bush.

"We're in East territory now," she murmured. "They're highly hostile—I've had more run-ins with them than I can count." Her voice dropped lower. "They're smart, which is bad enough. But the real problem is the armor. You can't bite them."

"You can't bite them?" Riley's already-grim odds in a fight fell straight through the floor. "Then how do you even kill them?"

"You hit them in the head. The armor rings like a struck bell and rattles their skull and knocks them clean out—but you have to hit hard. Hind-leg strikes, body blows, whatever you've got." She smirked at some old memory. "Taber once rammed his own skull into one of them, head-on, full speed. To this day I can't tell you who hurt worse, him or the wolf."

"So what's the plan?"

Erika opened her muzzle to answer—and they both heard it. Snow, crunching, off to the side. She grabbed Riley and yanked him flat under the bush, into the cold and the dark of it. She held still and listened. Three sets of footsteps, and they came down heavy, the weight of them pressing prints deep into the snow. Armored, she figured. East hunters, out on patrol.

Then a silver-plated wolf shoved straight through the bush and seized Riley before he could so much as gasp. It hauled him out into the open and flung him at a tree. Riley hit it and slid down and looked up, dazed, into terrifying silver armor. He could see his own panicked face staring back at him out of the polished chest plate. Then Erika came over the bush in a grey blur and drove her shoulder into one of them, slamming him flat into the snow. The second lunged in to bite her; she vaulted clean over his back and brought her hind legs down hard against the side of his helmet. He went down in a heap and clawed the helmet off and lay there clutching his skull, groaning. The wolf that had thrown Riley grappled him and lunged for his throat. Riley wrenched sideways and dodged the bite by a hair—the one and only thing in the whole world he'd had real practice doing.

Erika's first attacker shook off the snow and sprang at her again. She juked to the side, shouldered him down, and twisted him into a hold. She glanced over and saw Riley still locked up and struggling against the armored hunter.

"Hey!" she shouted across to him. Riley looked over mid-dodge, wild-eyed. "Hit them with the vibration—like this!"

She gripped her wolf's helmeted head between her front paws and slammed it down against the frozen ground. Once. Twice. The wolf howled. On the third slam, he went limp and silent, out cold. She got up and turned to watch Riley, ready to throw herself in if she had to. He was fighting with everything he had to break the grip, and he couldn't. He dodged another snap of teeth—and an idea lit up his face. When the wolf surged in to bite again, Riley reared back and threw his own skull forward, straight into the helmet, as hard as he could.

Erika winced. Then she laughed.

The wolf rolled off him yelling in pain. Though nowhere near as loud as Riley. He was flat on his back in the snow now, gripping his own head between his paws, groaning and rocking side to side. The hunter started to drag himself up. Erika simply stepped over and cracked a front paw across his muzzle. He dropped like a stone, falling still right beside Riley—who was very much still cradling his skull.

Erika laughed and nudged him with her nose.

"Good job," she said. "Taber would be impressed."

She caught hold of him and pulled him up onto his paws. He swayed, dizzy, blinking hard until his sight finally swam back into focus. Then she padded over to one of the fallen helmets in the trampled snow and picked it up in her jaws. She turned it over. She looked at Riley with something new in her eyes.

"Quick question," she said. "Can you fit in this?"

Riley came over, and she set the helmet down over his head. It slid right on, heavy and cold, and sagged down low enough to cover one of his eyes.

"I've got a new plan," she said. "Put on all the armor."

Riley didn't ask a single question. He went to one of the downed wolves and started working the plating loose and fitting it onto himself, piece by piece. It went on a great deal less easily than it had seemed to come off. The straps and seams fought him. It took him several clumsy tries before it sat right. In the end the armor wrapped his whole body and head in cold silver. The only trouble was his tail. His light blue tail still stuck right out the back of it, bright as a flag. Erika hunted around for a set that might fit her too, but every last one was built for the males, far too big. She wasn't nearly as distinctive as Riley was anyway—just another grey wolf—so she decided she'd manage fine without. Riley clanked his way over to her in his new armor. She looked him up and down and laughed, and couldn't quite have said why it struck her as so funny.

"How do I look?" Riley asked, half-blind under the sagging helmet.

"Like an east hunter." She grinned. "Just be careful in a fight. Or I might kill you by accident."

"Wait—you're joking, right?"

Erika only nudged him with her shoulder and took off east through the trees. "Come on. We've still got ground to cover."

"Wait—you're joking, right?!" Riley called after her.

She didn't answer. She just ran faster, laughing into the wind. Riley let out a nervous little chuckle of his own—but the strange thing was, he felt better. Lighter, somehow, even with the weight of all that silver on his back. And he took off running after her, clanking and stumbling and a good deal slower, after his new partner. His best friend.

— — —

Chapter 7: Bibliotheca Argentum (The Silver Library)

Riley found it hard to keep up with Erika.

The armor weighed him down more than he'd expected, dragging at every stride, the plates clanking with each step until he sounded like a falling pile of pots. Every so often Erika had to glance back and remind him that she'd only been joking about killing him in a fight. The joke kept sailing clean over his head, and he kept asking, just to be sure, and she kept sighing and telling him again. Still, none of it could dull his wonder at Epsilon. He stared at everything they passed, and the questions came out of him in a steady, happy stream. Erika didn't mind answering. It made her remember the parts of Epsilon worth loving, which was something she hadn't let herself do in a long time.

"How many kinds of animals are there in Epsilon? How many trees? Is there an animal that can climb trees?" The questions tumbled over each other. "Can wolves climb trees?"

"No, Riley." She laughed. "Wolves cannot climb trees."

"How big is that lake I saw? It looked huge. Does it cover the whole of Epsilon?"

Erika's smile dropped off her muzzle, and she stopped walking, mid-step.

Riley stopped too and looked around quickly, sure there was a threat somewhere. There wasn't. When he looked back at her, her face had gone strange—sadness and anger braided together, her eyes somewhere far away.

"Please," she said slowly. "Don't bring up the lake."

Riley tilted his head, lost. "Why?"

Her glare snapped to him. "Just don't bring it up!"

He stepped back, ears dropping, a little scared. Erika saw it, and shook the anger off her face, and started walking again.

"I'm really sorry, Erika. I won't ask again." He hurried it out, anxious, hating the thought that he'd made her angry.

She brushed her mane out of her eyes and looked over at him, and the hard edge was gone.

"It's okay." A faint, tired smile. "Just—let's not talk about the lake."

They walked on. Riley decided to ask fewer questions for a while. Erika felt bad for snapping at him. The lake was just a sore spot. An old one—the kind that never quite closes over, no matter how many years you pile on top of it. She left it at that, and tried to walk it off.

After a few more miles, the East rose up in the distance, and Riley forgot all about being quiet.

From where they stood they could see the city's tall buildings, and the late sun bouncing off the silver plating that wrapped them, so that the whole place shone like something dropped out of a dream. It threw light back at the sky in long bright sheets. Whole rooftops caught the sun at once and flared white. The glare rolled across the city in slow waves as the clouds shifted overhead, until the East looked less like a place wolves lived than like a fire someone had built out of metal. Even from miles off it hurt a little to look at. Riley's jaw fell open.

"Look at that! It's shining!" He was nearly bouncing. "That is so amazing—I can't wait to get there!"

"Just remember the East is the most hostile clan we'll deal with. Some hunters say they're even worse than the south." She kept her eyes on the shine. "Be vigilant."

"Okay—just one question." Riley tilted an ear. "What does vigilant mean?"

Erika laughed. "It means don't act like an idiot, and stay in your armor. Iron wolf." And she picked up the pace, heading for the gleaming city.

A little more walking brought them to the entrance. There was no wall around the East—just a single open way in, leading straight into the shining silver streets. And near the line between the clan and the unknown stood a massive statue.

Riley and Erika walked up to it and stared, both of them caught by it at once. It looked almost exactly like the one in the north temple—the same noble pose, the same carved stone wolf, gone grey and pitted with age. But this one carried something on its back that neither of them had ever seen before. A kind of pack, with a great cannon mounted to it, the barrel angled up over the statue's shoulder. The whole strange device was worked into the stone as though whoever carved it had simply expected wolves to wear such things. Erika frowned up at it. She had spent her whole life fighting the East, and she had never once seen anything like that on any wolf alive. And around the statue's neck hung a carved necklace.

The relic.

Riley pointed. "Look!" And before Erika could say a word he scrambled up onto the statue and started yanking at the stone necklace with both paws.

Erika sat down and watched him try to pry a chunk of carving off a solid stone statue.

"You do know that's not the real relic, right?" she said, laughing.

Riley pulled harder, slipped, and dropped off the statue into the dirt. He came up grinning and opened his mouth to say something clever—and they both heard howling from the East.

Four wolves were running at them, decked out head to tail in armor. Riley spun to bolt. Erika stopped him with a paw.

"I have an idea," she said.

The four hunters pulled up short in front of them, plates gleaming.

"What happened to your squad, soldier?" one demanded. "Why aren't you wearing armor?"

Riley braced for a fight. Erika already knew exactly what to say.

"My armor was lost in a skirmish with south scouts. We lost most of the squad. We need to report immediately." She rattled it off crisp and bored, the way only a real soldier would. "Identification code beta-five, omega-four, east-sixty-two."

Riley tilted his head, completely lost. The East wolves looked at one another, then back at her.

"Glad you two made it out," one said. "We'll scout the area." And they took off toward the unknown.

Riley stared after them. Erika just flicked an ear.

"Those were fake east codes," she said. "They wouldn't hold up against a smart soldier for a second. But it looks like we got lucky with those idiots."

She grabbed him and they walked on into the East clan.

It was beautiful. Tall silver structures rose on every side, plated and seamed and polished, throwing back warped little reflections of everything that passed. The walls were lined with strange candles that burned in colors Riley didn't have names for—deep greens, cold blues, a violet that didn't look like any flame he'd ever seen. The light from them slid across all that metal and made the whole street shimmer. East wolves moved along the stone walkways and ducked in and out of what looked like shops. The place hummed with an ordinary, busy life that felt wrong somehow, this close to the unknown. Riley turned his head every which way, drinking it in. The height of the buildings. The shine. The sheer strangeness of a clan that had built itself out of silver instead of fear. Erika looked too, but most of her attention went to the hunters—where they stood, how many, how fast they could close. They could be stopped at any second. The hunters didn't pay them much mind, though a few glances followed the strange pair as they passed.

Riley noticed one building that didn't fit. It was stone, large and dark inside—the only stone building he'd seen in the whole silver clan. He filed it away without quite knowing why.

They walked on and came to what looked like the center of the East: a silver walkway ringing a great metal bell, hung where the whole clan could see it, plainly some kind of icon.

"This is incredible!" Riley said, having never seen anything like it.

Erika opened her muzzle to answer—and a hunter caught her by the shoulder and hauled her aside.

"You think you're clever?" he snarled. "We remember you. You long-black-haired bitch."

Erika remembered them too. Taber had killed their squad a few months back, and these two had barely crawled away from it. Just her luck. She lunged to strike him, but the second wolf bore her down to the ground and clamped his jaws on her neck.

"I don't know how you got in here," the first hunter spat, "but you're going to die for what you did to my brother." He glanced at Riley, thrown for a second by the armor. "Get to east central. Tell them to prepare an execution."

Erika twisted, caught the hunter's paw in her jaws, and ripped. He screamed. She cracked a front paw across his head and tore loose, and the hunter threw back his muzzle and let out a long, ringing howl—answered, a moment later, by more howls in the distance.

She bit him down and put him on the ground. The second wolf sprang onto her; she drove her skull into his and threw him off, swallowing the throb that bloomed through her own forehead.

Hunters began pouring toward them from every direction.

Erika broke for the center of town, Riley clanking after her. But they came from everywhere—silver shapes closing in down every walkway—and she couldn't find a gap. They were surrounded.

"They only know I'm an outsider," she said, low, glaring around at the ring of them. "They don't know about you. You have to leave. I'll keep them busy. You keep going."

Riley's head whipped around, frantic, hunting for another way. He looked at her and opened his mouth to argue—and the East hunters charged.

"Go!" Erika shouted, and threw herself at them.

They tore right past Riley. The armor hid him well; in the chaos he was just one more iron wolf. Erika hit the first group head-on and rolled clean off one wolf's back. She landed and drove her hind legs into him, and he went down clutching his head. She slipped between two more and slammed a third with her front paws, striking his body, then his head, until he folded. She grappled the next and hurled him down onto the armored wolf already on the ground.

Riley stood frozen, looking for the way out she'd told him to take.

He found it. He took one step toward it. Then he looked back at Erika.

She was fighting beautifully, but they were swarming her, more of them every second, and there was no version of this where she won. Riley's heart slammed. The panic rose up his throat—and then, somewhere underneath it, the decision made itself.

He wasn't leaving.

He started scanning the whole town square, desperate, hunting for anything that might help. Erika fought on across the plaza, a grey blur in a sea of silver, leaping off one hunter's head to crash her whole weight down onto another. For a moment it almost looked like she might cut her way clear. But there were too many of them, and they had learned not to come at her one at a time. They closed in together. She came up fast from a throw—and a wolf clamped down on her wounded leg and ripped, and Riley heard the sound of it from across the square. Erika screamed and went down. The hunters swarmed over her in a pile, pinning her flat, jaws closing on her neck and her bleeding leg, and her struggling slowed, and then nearly stopped.

Riley's eyes shot around the square, frantic, *do something, do something*—and landed on the bell.

He understood the whole thing in a single breath. The armor. The vibration. The bell.

Riley sprinted straight at it, and as he ran he started the chant under his breath, fast and low, timing every word to his stride. Erika cried out as the hunters bit down harder. Riley kept the chant going, full speed now, praying he had the rhythm right, praying any of this would work. He fixed his eyes on the great metal bell and threw everything he had into the run.

Ego postulo viam nunc pro tutela. Malum habet educatus caput eius et oportet crescere. Da mihi lumen senex, lumine ductu, et da mihi lucem vincere malum et concede unitatem, ut innocens. Aurora borealis, da mihi vires veteris!

He hit the last word the instant he hit the bell.

The power burst out of him and slammed into the metal, and for half a heartbeat the whole world seemed to hold still. Then the bell rang out a single vast note. It was so deep and so loud that Riley felt it in his teeth, in his ribs, in the ground under his paws. The vibration rolled out across the whole clan like a wave breaking. Every armored East hunter dropped where they stood, clutching their heads, howling at a pain they couldn't see or fight. The note hung in the air a long time before it faded. And as it died, the northern lights bloomed across the silver city, green and gold and violet spilling over all that metal. The civilians froze in the streets and stared up at them. None of them had any idea what to make of it.

Riley got up slowly, his own skull pounding just like the wolves around him—the bell hadn't spared him either. The whole square tilted and swam. But the East troops were still down, gripping their heads, and that was all the time he was going to get. He staggered to Erika, found her in the tangle of stunned wolves, and dragged her onto his back. By the time he had her up, he was already steadier than the hunters around him. The northern lights, it seemed, healed concussions too.

He ran for the unknown as fast as the armor and the weight of her would let him.

— — —

Erika was in a great deal of pain, but she was stable. Her eyes hung half-shut, and she fought to keep them open, bouncing on Riley's back as he ran. The lights had healed her some, just not all the way. Behind them, Riley could see the East wolves starting to push up off the ground, shaking their heads, looking around in pure confusion at what had just happened to them.

He knew they didn't have long. They had to hide, and they had to do it now.

He pulled up short and looked up at the old stone building they'd passed before—the one that hadn't fit, dark and shut and clearly abandoned.

"Good as it's gonna get, I guess," Riley muttered.

He sprinted up the stairs and shoved the heavy door open and ran inside, and laid Erika down gently on the floor. Then he pushed the door shut behind them, crossed to a window, wiped a clear patch in the thick dust, and peered out through the cracked glass.

The East hunters had nearly all recovered. They roamed the streets now, searching everywhere, checking down every walkway, flipping over crates and shouldering open doors. Riley's heart jumped into his throat each time one passed near the building. Twice, armored shapes paused right outside, so close he could hear the plates shifting as they breathed, and he went dead still against the wall and didn't dare even blink. But none of them came inside. Maybe the place looked too dead to bother with. The search dragged on for a few long minutes that felt like an hour. Then, slowly, the hunters gave it up and drifted back to their ordinary routines and their thin patrols.

Riley let out a breath he felt like he'd been holding for an hour, and slid down the wall to sit.

Then he popped right back up and lit a few of the strange candles along the room.

The light spread, and they both went still, looking around in quiet awe.

It was a library. An enormous one. Thousands of books lined the walls and filled long rows of shelves that ran back into the dark, further than the candlelight could reach. It was more written words gathered in one room than either of them had known existed in the whole world. Dust lay thick over everything, soft and grey and undisturbed, and it rose in slow clouds where the candlelight stirred the air. Spines in faded leather and cracked cloth stood shoulder to shoulder, their titles worn down to ghosts. Somewhere in the back, water had gotten in over the years and swelled a whole shelf of them shut. The whole place smelled of old paper and cold stone and time. Erika figured it had to be ancient—libraries were almost unheard of in Epsilon, lost somewhere back in the wars, when wolves learned to fear knowledge nearly as much as they feared each other. Riley wandered along the nearest shelf with his mouth open, running a paw down the spines, leaving four clean lines in the dust. Erika watched him do it, and smiled.

"That was smart, with the bell," she said. "I'm impressed."

Riley's ears shot straight up. He could hardly believe he'd impressed her—actually impressed her—and the happiness of it nearly knocked him over.

"You could have died too, you know," Erika said, softer now, watching his face. "Coming back for me was a risk."

"I know," Riley said, and looked back at the bookshelves.

She glanced down for a moment, then back up at him. She couldn't think of a single time a wolf had come back for her. When things went wrong, she dug herself out—that was the job. Even Taber and Owen didn't come back for her, most of the time. They couldn't; it wasn't how hunters worked. But Riley had.

"That," she said, with a chuckle, "was the bravest and the stupidest plan I have ever seen in my life."

Riley laughed too, and pulled the helmet off and tossed it into the corner.

"I aim to please."

She tried to push herself up—and yelled in pain and dropped back down. Riley ran over and helped ease her flat again. Erika took stock of her wounds. They could have been worse, but they weren't good. Her neck had healed over, but her leg was bruised and bloody and stiff, and it hurt even to move her head.

"I need to rest," she said, eyes already closing. "We can look for the relic tomorrow."

"You need to heal." Riley sat beside her. "I know you don't think so, but we can keep searching once your leg's better. You'd hate going as slow as you'd have to right now anyway—you yell at me when I'm more than five feet behind you. Imagine how crazy it'd drive you if I was the one out in front." He grinned, laughing a little at his own awkwardness.

Erika chuckled. He was actually right.

Then Riley's eyes went wide. "Wait! I have an idea!"

He ran over to a shelf, pulled down a stack of books, and started carefully tearing out the pages. After a few minutes he had a thick pile of them laid out on the floor like a bed, with a smaller heap mounded up at one end for a pillow. He came back, helped Erika up off the cold ground, and walked her over to it, and eased her down. She laid her head on the pillow of pages.

It was, to her surprise, really comfortable.

"So, yeah! Hope you like the little bed I made—"

"I do," Erika said.

"You do! So that's great!" Riley said, lit up. "I'll keep watch. You get a good night's sleep, and I'll take care of you until you can walk again." He puffed up a little. "So—yeah! Goodnight!"

He walked over to the window and stood looking out of it. Erika watched him a moment—the small blue wolf who couldn't fight, who flinched at his own shadow, standing guard over her like it was the most natural thing in the world. For the first time in her whole life, she trusted someone completely. It was a strange feeling, lighter than she'd expected, and a little frightening for exactly that reason.

"Hey," she said. "Thank you. For everything."

"Right back at ya," Riley said, with a smile.

Erika chuckled, closed her eyes, and settled into the pillow of pages. Riley looked back at her and smiled to himself. He watched her for a few minutes. She was a peaceful sleeper, all the hardness gone out of her face, her mane spilled across the torn pages. She looked less like the fiercest hunter in the north now. More like a wolf his own age who was simply, finally, tired. Then he stripped off the rest of the armor, piece by clanking piece, and stacked it quietly in the corner, and checked the window one last time. The patrols were thin and far between. He figured he could risk some sleep himself.

He lay down by the window and closed his eyes, and in less than a blink, he was gone.

— — —

Chapter 8: Lacus Memoriae (Lake of Memory)

Erika hated dreaming. Her dreams were always nightmares.

She opened her eyes slowly and looked around, and she already knew where she was, because she was always here. The snowy ground had become grass. The trees stood tall, the way they always did. And there, ahead of her, was the lake—the image that had burned itself into her memory and never once let go. The sun was going down over it, throwing long red and purple light across the water. She walked to the edge and looked down at her own reflection staring back up at her.

She was young here. Her fur was clean, and her hair was normal—short, the way it had been before, nothing like the long mane she carried now. She was barely older than a pup. And the expression on her face was one she hadn't worn in years, one she barely recognized as her own anymore. Happy. Carefree. The face of a wolf who didn't yet know what the world was going to take from her, who still believed her father could keep anything bad away just by standing close. Erika watched that little face in the water and felt the old ache open up in her chest, the same way it did every single time, because she knew exactly what came next, and she could never, ever stop it.

She turned around, and there he was.

A large black wolf stood behind her. He wasn't as big as the other hunters. But he was the best fighter the north had ever known, and everyone in the clan knew it, and Erika had spent her whole short life certain that nothing in all of Epsilon could ever bring him down. He came up beside her and rested a paw gently on her back, and the two of them looked out together at the mile-long stretch of water, the last of the sun laying a road of red and gold straight across it.

"I wanted to show you this, Erika," he said. His voice was deep and warm, and it pulled at something in her chest she'd spent a long time learning to bury. "This lake is the center. The heart of Epsilon. We fight, and we kill, and we lose each other—and no matter what happens out there, the lake stays still. Peaceful. There's something beautiful in that, I think."

Young Erika looked up at him, and he smiled back down at her.

"The older you get, the more you'll see that Epsilon is a frightening place." He gazed out across the water. "But you'll know how to face it. You're different from the others, Erika. Don't ever be scared of that." A pause. "And don't let it convince you the world has no light in it. It does. You just have to know where to look."

He turned and started walking a different way around the lake.

"Come on. I want to show you something."

They walked in a comfortable silence, following the curve of the shore. Erika looked around in awe at all of it. She knew they were deep in the unknown, further than she'd ever been, and the danger of it thrilled her more than it scared her. Then her father stopped, and lifted a paw, and pointed to a small group of wolves gathered near the water a little way ahead.

"Look, Erika. Those are west wolves."

Erika dropped instantly into a clumsy, amateur fighting stance—the one he was still teaching her—her small heart hammering.

"Are they hard to kill?" she said, panicked. "I've never killed a wolf. I don't want to. Not yet."

Her father chuckled and laid his paw on her back again.

"It's all right. They're west wolves. They mean no harm. Theirs is a peaceful clan."

The group of west wolves came toward them, and when they reached the two of them, they pushed back their hoods. Erika's breath caught. For the first time in her short life, she was looking at a wolf from the outside—a wolf she'd been raised to call the enemy. The lead west wolf extended a paw to her father.

"We are glad to help guide your daughter to the path of enlightenment," he said.

Erika looked between them, wide-eyed, and her father smiled down at her. She could tell, young as she was, that this was a big moment for him. Maybe for both of them.

"They're not so different from north wolves, are they, Erika?" he said.

And the moment the words left him, one of the west wolves spoke up.

"We're very different, actually," it said. "Much more different than your father thinks."

Erika took a step back. Her father's head came up. More wolves were coming out of the trees now—too many, on every side. Erika pressed herself behind him, and he stood tall and steady in front of her.

"What is this?" His voice turned to iron. "You're betraying your own clan! The west is built on peace!"

The wolf laughed, and threw off the hooded cloak.

"We never said we were from the west," it said. "If you recall."

And then it threw back its head and howled at the sky, and the imposters charged.

"Run, Erika!" her father shouted.

They both took off along the lake, hugging its curves, the wolves close behind them. Erika ran out ahead of her father even though she didn't know the way—her legs just went, fast and blind and terrified.

"Erika, wait up!"

She turned her head to look back at him. And in that half-second of looking, a wolf slammed into her from the side and checked her clean off the bank and into the lake.

The cold swallowed her whole. It drove the air out of her in an instant and clamped down on her chest like jaws. She went under, came up gasping, went under again. She thrashed, her legs churning uselessly against the black water, and she couldn't tell up from down, couldn't find the surface, couldn't find anything but black water in every direction. Her head broke into the air for half a breath and then sank back below it. The panic took her completely. No one had taught her to swim yet—that was meant to come later, there was always supposed to be a later—and the water kept closing over her face, dark and freezing and endless, and somewhere far above it she could hear her father screaming her name.

"NO!"

Her father's voice, somewhere above the roar in her ears. He hit the wolf that had thrown her and bore it to the ground and tore its throat out. Then he plunged to the bank and hauled her up out of the water by her scruff, and they collapsed together on the grass, both of them soaked through and heaving for air. He pressed her against his chest. Out across the dark, the imposters were still howling. And the howls were getting closer.

"Erika. You listen to me." He held her by the shoulders and made her look at him. "You're going to run back to the north. You are not going to stop. And you are not even going to dream of coming back for me. Do you understand?"

Erika was already crying, hard, the kind of crying that takes the whole body. He pulled her in close.

"You have to be a big girl now. Okay?" His own voice was breaking. "Take care of your brother. And never forget what I taught you. I love you, Erika. Everything is going to be okay."

"I love you too, dad," she sobbed, and held onto him like she could keep him there by holding tight enough.

The wolves came out of the dark and ringed them in. Her father got to his paws and stepped in front of her, and she pressed in behind his legs, shivering, terrified.

"Please." He kept his voice level. "Let her go. Do whatever you want with me. But she's just a kid."

The wolves looked at one another, and laughed.

"The kid gets a ten-second head start," one said, grinning. "Soon as we kill you."

They opened a gap in the circle.

"I don't want to go, dad!" Erika cried.

Her father turned and smiled at her, sad and gentle, and gave her a small push toward the gap.

"I've lived my life, Erika. Now you go and live yours. You're going to do great things." He nudged her closer to the opening. "Now go. Please."

She walked away from him slowly, crying so hard she could barely see. The wolves on either side growled low as she passed between them. She made it to the edge of the trees—and she stopped. And she looked back. She couldn't help it. She would never be able to help it.

Two of them took her father to the ground. He threw one off with a hard drive of his hind legs, but the other had him pinned, and a third lunged in and bit down on his leg. He screamed—and then he twisted, and caught the wolf at his leg in his jaws, and flung it bodily into a tree. He drove his hind legs into the other and knocked it clear and forced himself back up, swaying, bleeding into the grass. For one moment he was on his paws again, and he looked like he might actually win, the way he always won, the way he'd taught her a wolf could win against anything if it just refused to fall. Then two more leapt on him at once and pinned him down. He fought up out of it somehow, slammed one of them into a tree trunk, struck another hard across the muzzle—and a wolf came out of nowhere and closed its jaws on his neck, and spun, and ripped.

Her father dropped to the grass and did not move.

Erika fell where she stood, sobbing, every part of her screaming to run to him. And she made herself stay. She made herself not move, not make a sound, dug her small claws into the dirt and held herself in place. It was the hardest thing she had ever done, and it bought nothing, because it was already far too late.

The imposters turned and looked at her, and smirked.

"This is what Epsilon is, kid," one of them called. "Welcome to the real world. You've got ten seconds. Well—nine, now."

Erika looked at her father one last time, her face streaming, soaked through with tears and lake water both. She knew what he'd told her to do. And she knew she had to honor it, even if honoring it would haunt her for the rest of her life. She turned herself around, and she ran for the north, and she cried the whole way, and she did not stop running until the lake was far behind her and the trees had closed over the place where he fell.

She always wished she had helped. Done something. Done more. Stayed, and fought, and died beside him instead of living with the running.

That was the part of the nightmare that never let her go.

— — —

Back in the waking world, Riley opened his eyes onto the library.

The morning sun came in through the dusty windows and laid pale light across the shelves. The books he'd torn apart to make Erika's bed were scattered everywhere across the floor, pages drifted into the corners. He figured it didn't much matter. It wasn't his library, and by the look of the dust, it hadn't been anyone's in a very long time. He got up and padded to the window and looked out.

The lives of the east wolves went on, unchanged. Hunters passed by at an ordinary, unhurried pace, dipping their heads to civilians, ducking in and out of the stores. Riley figured they'd decided the two intruders had slipped away for good. Not very sharp, he thought, for a clan that prided itself on being a pack of geniuses.

Then he glanced over at Erika, and the thought died.

She was twitching in her sleep. Growling, low, her legs jerking, her whole body shaking. Riley hurried over and crouched down beside her, and he didn't know what to do, and the panic climbed up fast. Her face was screwed up tight, caught in something he couldn't see and couldn't reach. He hesitated. Then he reached out and tapped her shoulder.

"Erika. Erika, wake up!" He raised his voice, with no idea what was happening to her.

Her eyes flew open and she shot upright, screaming. Riley fell back onto his haunches. She tried to lurch to her paws and collapsed straight back down. He scrambled over to her, frightened now, because she was still shaking, her head whipping around the room, her eyes hunting the corners for an enemy that wasn't there. There was raw fear in them. He almost never saw that in her.

Riley hated nightmares. He'd had them his whole life—long nights alone in his little tent at the back of the north, waking with his heart slamming and no one anywhere who cared to ask why. He'd never once had a friend to sit with him through one. And it occurred to him now, looking at the fiercest wolf in the north shaking on a bed of torn pages, that maybe she'd never had one either. The thought steadied him somehow. He set his front leg over her shoulder and rested his paw against the back of her neck.

"Hey—Erika! It's a dream. It's okay, see? We're in the library." He kept his voice bright and steady, the way you'd talk to a spooked pup. "I've still got to remake your bed of books, by the way—you scattered them everywhere. But everything's okay. I promise. It was just a dream."

Erika looked down, and then back up at him. She was calmer—not fixed, not even close, but no longer drowning in it. Riley drew his paw back off her shoulder, not at all sure whether the touch had helped or made it worse. Erika let out a small, shaky laugh and looked at him again.

"Sorry, Riley." She said the word *nightmares* like it had quotation marks around it, like it cost her something just to name it. "I get them sometimes. I'm okay. Don't worry. It won't happen again."

The confidence in it was a thin, brittle thing, and they both knew it. Riley sat down beside her, and Erika dropped her eyes to the floor.

"It's okay if it does happen again," he said, gently. "I'll just do whatever I can to help. I'm always here for you."

Erika looked at him and brushed her mane back out of her eyes. She hadn't heard anything like that in a very, very long time. Not since before the lake.

"Thanks, Riley," she said quietly.

"Hey! You know, I heard it helps to sleep next to someone when you get nightmares!" Riley brightened. "And I've got real soft fur, so you could totally use me as a pillow, and—" He stopped dead. "Shit. That was a dumb thing to say. I do make a good pillow though. Soft fur. I'm—I'm gonna stop talking now."

He shut his mouth with an audible click. Erika looked at him sideways, fighting down a grin.

"I'll keep that in mind," she said, losing the fight a little.

She tried to get up again, and dropped straight back to the floor. Riley hurried over and got under her shoulder and helped her hobble across to the bed of pages, and eased her down onto it.

"I could do the northern lights to heal you, if you want," he said, glancing at the window even though nothing out there had changed. "Then we could find the relic and get out of this crazy clan for good."

"No. We have to play it smart." She shifted carefully on the pages. "Doing the lights again would light us up like a beacon and give us away. I'm okay, honestly. The lights already helped a lot—I just need a few days to rest the leg. I'll stay off it."

"Okay. Well—I could go check out those store things. Get us some food and water. Maybe other stuff, if the stores, like, sell other stuff." He tilted his head. "I've never actually been inside a store. It's a weird concept when you think about it."

"I could go for some food," Erika said, a tired laugh in it. "Tell me what the stores are like. I was wondering the same thing, honestly."

Riley tilted his head the other way. "Do you think they'd sell the relics?"

Erika laughed—really laughed, this time—picturing for a second how easy that would make their whole impossible quest.

"Just go get the food and water, errand wolf." She waved a paw weakly toward the door. "We'll figure out the relic once I can stand up again."

Riley laughed too, and went and fit the armor back on, plate by plate. He crossed to the door and pulled it open, and the morning light spilled in across the dust. He looked back at her, and held her eyes for a moment, and gave her a small, certain smile. Then he slipped out, and the heavy door swung slowly shut behind him.

Erika lay back on the pillow of pages. She didn't close her eyes. She just lay there in the dusty quiet, listening to his armored footsteps fade, turning something over and over in her mind—trying, and failing, to work out exactly how that ridiculous little blue wolf had managed to make her feel even a little bit better.

— — —

Chapter 9: Cor ad Cor (Heart to Heart)

Riley sprinted from the library door to the next building over and pressed himself flat against the side of it. He poked his head out past the corner.

The east wolves were still going about their business, easy and unbothered, walking in and out of the buildings and the stores. Riley watched them haul the strangest things out into the street. Some carried tables. Others came out balancing trays of multicolored drinks, or exotic-looking food that made his stomach growl inside the armor. Food, he decided. Start with food. He stepped out from behind the corner to head for the nearest store—and a paw clamped down on him. Riley yelped and jumped half out of his fur, and spun around to find an east hunter looking at him very strangely.

"Why are you hiding back there?" The hunter's voice had suspicion in it. "You should be doing your rounds."

Riley panicked. Luckily the armor hid it; he had some very easy tells when he was scared, and right now every one of them was firing at once. He hunted for something to say and came up with nothing. The hunter kept staring.

"Come back to the hunter camp when you're done with your patrols," the wolf said, and gestured for Riley to follow.

Riley's stomach dropped. He started walking, slow, as the hunter turned toward the camp. This was a disaster. If he set one paw inside that camp his cover was finished. He'd only wanted to buy some food and slink back to the library. Now he trailed along behind the hunter through the silver streets, scrambling for any excuse on earth that might get him out of it.

"Stop, hunters!"

Riley turned at the shout, and got his excuse.

A wolf was striding toward them, and he was like nothing Riley had seen. His fur was a deep green, lined with white, and he was big—though he didn't look like a wolf who fought much. His armor was gold instead of silver, and it left his head and face bare, and it caught the sun so brightly that Riley had to squint and look away. The wolf came up and looked the two of them over. The hunter snapped to attention. Riley scrambled to copy the stance, sitting up at an awkward angle.

"I need an escort," the green wolf said. "I'd like to visit a few stores today, and I think it wise to have a trained wolf along to protect me. After all—if I die, the whole clan dies with me."

The hunter opened his muzzle to volunteer. Riley got there first.

"I'm in! Let's go!"

It was the only way he could think of to keep his cover.

"Very well. Follow me, hunter."

Riley jumped to the green wolf's side, and the two of them set off through the east. Wolves saluted the green wolf as he passed—some even bowed—and Riley figured this had to be the alpha. He kept stealing glances at him. It seemed important to find out who, exactly, he'd just attached himself to.

"So, quick question," Riley said, half-choking on it. "Who are you?"

The wolf stopped and gave him a long, strange look.

"How do you not know who I am, hunter?"

Riley tripped over his own tongue a few times before something came out.

"Yeah, I, uh—I got hit in the head by a rock the other day. Pretty hard. Jumbled my memory all up. Yeah. That's what happened."

*That,* Riley thought, *was the wrong thing to say.*

The wolf went from glaring to laughing. He laughed so hard he nearly tipped over, and he set a paw on Riley's shoulder to steady himself. Riley stood there with an awkward smile, forcing out a laugh of his own. He didn't really think it had been that funny.

"Oh, I needed that today, hunter. I don't hear jokes often." He straightened up. "I am Armano. Your clan alpha. I am your boss." The salutes and the bowing made a great deal more sense now. "And what's your name, hunter?"

"Riley… White," Riley said faintly.

Armano hauled himself fully upright, using Riley as a post to push off of.

"A pleasure to meet you officially, Riley White." He waved a paw. "Come."

They walked on through the east, Riley shaking inside the armor and Armano still chuckling here and there at the rock joke. He paid almost no attention to the wolves of his own clan. They saluted him, they bowed, and he didn't so much as glance their way.

"Look around you, Riley White," Armano said, with a cocky lilt. "The mere sight of all our wonderful progress proves how superior we are."

Riley nodded. The motion knocked the helmet down over his eyes.

"It's real pretty," he said, the words muffled under the metal. "The silver's really cool."

"The east was built on top of a silver mine. Over the decades the clan has only grown stronger. We can make things no other clan can—stores, armor, reinforced buildings." Armano said it like a wolf reciting his own legend.

A small fear curled in Riley's stomach. He pictured the east marching out to slaughter any clan that crossed it, only now with better tools than anyone else had.

"Have you ever thought," Riley said, before he could stop himself, "that maybe the clans are all kind of the same? I dunno. It just seems like every wolf deserves to be treated good. Even loved. You know?"

He felt his cover blow apart the instant it left his mouth. Armano stared at him—then burst out laughing, harder than the first time.

"Oh, Riley White. That is the funniest joke I've heard all month. You are hysterical."

He wiped his eyes. Riley forced a smile and waited for him to recover.

Then they went shopping.

Riley had never gotten a good look inside the stores before, and he was fascinated. Each one was crammed with different things—some sold food, others sold tables and drinks and odd little objects he couldn't name. The doors all stood wide open, and wolves wandered out carrying the strangest hauls. Riley watched one carry an entire table by himself.

He followed Armano into a food store. The wolf behind the counter was old, his fur gone white, his legs trembling a little where he stood. He looked up and saluted at once.

"Hello, sir! So good to see you. How can I help you today?"

Armano scratched his chin and pointed at a few cuts of meat and bread.

"Venison, with a side of bear, please." He turned. "My friend here will be carrying my essentials. Speaking of which, Riley White—grab yourself a bag. Over in the corner there."

Riley fetched the sack and slung it on, and walked back to the counter, where the old wolf loaded the meat into it. It was heavy. Riley was a fair bit smaller than your average hunter, and it showed.

"Ready to head back now?" Riley said hopefully.

Armano just laughed. "We are in the *first* store, Riley White. We have many more to visit."

"Shit," Riley whispered, and they moved on to the next one.

Armano, it turned out, was not a light shopper. They went into store after store and bought everything from rugs to silver tables. Riley sagged lower under the weight at every stop, but he made himself stay upright, because falling over might just blow the whole thing.

"I appreciate your help today, Riley White. I find you a unique individual." Armano's cocky smile softened into something more genuine. "You're funny. You even perplex me a little. I suspect we'll be seeing a good deal of each other." Riley was very near to toppling over backward under the pile on his back. Armano whistled, and two east hunters came running and snapped to attention. "Take all this off my friend's back. I'd rather he not snap his legs and fall over."

The hunters stripped the load off in seconds, and the moment they did, Riley went straight down and lay flat on the ground. Armano looked down at him a beat, then reached over and hauled him back up. Riley was still panting.

"Thanks… for taking all that off," Riley wheezed. He was breathing harder than he had running from the north. Carrying that pile, he decided, made for a heck of a workout.

"Of course. I appreciate the help gathering my materials." Armano flashed the cocky smile again. "I have a few more things to pick up for my date tonight. But I think you've earned a rest."

Riley tilted his head, and the helmet shifted into a worse position than before.

"How do you go on a date?" he asked, fixing the helmet. "I've never been on one. What's it like?" The north had dates too. He figured every clan must.

"It is like looking into someone's soul for the very first time." Armano said it slowly, almost reverent. "As though everything about them is laid open and shared at once. To see another wolf in that light is breathtaking. You sit, and you simply let yourselves feel it."

Riley thought that was a genuinely beautiful way to put it.

"Tell me, Riley White. Is there anyone special in your life?"

Before Armano had even finished, Riley was picturing Erika.

"Yeah. She's really special. She's—she's so amazing, honestly. I hate even being away from her." He scuffed at the ground with a paw. "I just don't know how, or even if I should tell her. She used to hate me. But I think we're friends now."

Armano set a paw on Riley's shoulder. Riley couldn't feel it through the armor.

"You don't tell her, Riley White. You show her. You show her that you're loyal, that the two of you fit together." His voice dropped, lost some of its cockiness. "Dates do reveal deep things. And in this world, you never know what's going to happen. What's going to be taken from you. Don't wait for that. Don't wait until it's too late."

Riley turned that over for a long moment.

"I guess I could try it," he said quietly. "Maybe she'd like it. I dunno."

Armano lifted his paw and knocked it lightly against Riley's foreleg. Riley wondered if that had hurt the alpha's paw—he had just struck solid metal, after all. Then Armano whistled again, and three more hunters came running.

"You two—gather dating supplies from the stores. A table, candles, drinks, food. Everything my friend will need for an important date." He turned to the third. "And you. Fetch my box from my quarters."

They bolted off at once. Riley stared at Armano, amazed.

"Thank you so much, Armano. I—I don't know what to say."

Armano smiled.

"Love is beautiful, Riley White. But it takes time. So does a rose. So does anything worth having." He looked off toward the silver towers. "Trust time. Don't fear it."

Riley sat with that while the hunters returned, and when they did, his jaw dropped at what they'd brought. There was a beautiful table of dark wood, mahogany, he guessed. There were drinks, clear, with little flecks of color drifting inside them, and food that smelled so good he had to physically stop himself from devouring it where he stood. There were soft pillows to sit on, and tall red candles. The hunters loaded it all onto Riley's back and walked off. Riley fought to stay standing—he had to carry it himself, he knew, because leading those hunters straight to the library would be the dumbest thing he could possibly do.

The last hunter handed Armano a small silver box before going. Armano turned to Riley and smiled.

"I want you to have this, Riley White. To show how grateful I am for our friendship." He set it on the ground. "It's a music box. You open it, and it plays a beautiful little tune. Here—let me show you."

He opened the lid.

A melody lifted out of the little box—small, bright, achingly sweet—and the moment it did, Riley's gift answered it. Soft ribbons of light bloomed up out of the silver, turning and drifting on the notes, the color rising and falling with the tune. It was beautiful. Riley stood and watched the light dance until Armano closed the lid and tucked the box gently into Riley's bag.

"Use it at the right time. If this girl is as special as you say, she deserves to hear the music too."

He turned, and two hunters fell in at his side.

"Thank you for the conversation, Riley White. I hope I see you again soon." He started off. "And good luck with your date, my friend."

— — —

Riley walked back through the east with his mind flipping between happiness and dread.

He couldn't decide if any of this was a good idea. He kept imagining how mortified he'd be if she hated it. He reached the library and stopped at the door. He went to open it—then turned and walked back down the steps. *Maybe I should just return all this stuff.* He looked down, opened the bag, and pulled the music box out, and held it, and sighed. Then he figured he might as well try.

He shoved the heavy door open and shut it fast behind him.

Erika sat in the middle of the library, deep in a book. She looked up at the sound of the door. *This is a dumb idea,* Riley thought, and quickly hurled all the date equipment behind the nearest bookshelf.

"Hey there." Her voice came out light and friendly. "What's all that stuff you just threw?"

"Nothing." Riley said it too fast, looking away. "It's nothing. Just some wood I found, to fortify the library. Yeah. That's what it is."

Erika chuckled and looked back down at her book. Her mane had fallen over her eyes and half the page, and she had to keep huffing it out of the way to read. Riley tilted his head at her.

"What are you reading?"

She flung the book aside and sat up straight.

"Nothing." Just as fast as he had. "It's a really dumb book. Just found it kind of entertaining."

Riley walked over to where she'd thrown it. Erika watched him the whole way, anxious; she hated being seen. He reached the book and flipped it over to the cover. Two wolves were pictured with their heads together, the moon shining down behind them so that they fell into silhouette. The title read *The Art of Dancing.* Riley looked back at her, and she dropped her eyes instantly.

"You like dancing?" he said, surprised.

Erika looked back up, but past him, not at him.

"I told you it was dumb. I don't know. I always just admired it. I've never actually done it—I don't even know how. But back when I was a hunter, I always sort of wanted to try." She chuckled, low. "Told you it was dumb."

Riley tilted his head, trying to catch her eye. She kept looking off.

"Want me to show you?" he said.

He figured it was worth a shot. He'd never danced with a wolf either—he only knew it from watching the others at the Bairbarn. Erika's eyes came up, and her ears shot straight up with them. She tried to flatten them back down and gave up.

"I think that would be really great," she said, fighting to hide how much she meant it.

She never in her life would have guessed Riley would be her first dance.

He brought her to the center of the library. She didn't really know what to do or how to be. She was excited, and she was nervous, and from what she'd read, dancing was about emotion—the very thing she'd spent her whole life armoring over. Riley ran back to the pile of supplies, dug out the music box, and hurried back. He set it down beside her, which left her thoroughly confused as to how a little silver block was going to help anyone dance. Then he stood in front of her, looking into her eyes, watching her smile.

"Okay, so first—sit down, and put your paw on my shoulder."

Erika lifted her foreleg and set her paw on him.

"Now I put my paw on your back."

She gave him a look, then tipped her head. He laid his paw against her back, her mane spilling over it. She laughed, and the laugh made him chuckle, nervous.

"Now we just dance to the music, and we let it lead us."

He nudged the music box open with his paw.

The melody spilled out into the room, and the colors came with it—soft and turning, washing the old shelves in gentle light. Everything went euphoric, the whole dim library lit up around the two of them. Erika began to rock with him, side to side, following the tune. Then, without quite deciding to, she lowered her head onto his shoulder, still swaying. Riley looked down at her, amazed. This was something he'd never once imagined he'd be lucky enough to do.

"Now we walk alongside each other," he said softly. "Holding paws. Then back to the regular part."

Erika glided beside him, and he matched her, and they walked together that way twice before drifting back into the sway. He returned his paw to her back, and she closed her eyes, and kept her head close against him. She couldn't have explained it. But she felt safe. She felt comfortable. She never felt either of those things. Maybe it was the dancing, maybe the music, maybe both—but the whole weight of their lives seemed to lift away for as long as the song lasted. The way he held her made her believe, somehow, that nothing could reach her here. Like he was telling her, without a single word: *Everything's going to be okay. I've got you.*

The melody wound down, and the colors thinned and faded. Erika lifted her head and looked up at him, and he met her eyes, and he held them a moment too long before she let go—which sent him stepping back, flustered.

"Sorry if I—if I sucked at that, or did something dumb, I don't know, I liked it but I can see how—"

"That was really nice. Every part of it." Erika cut the ramble off clean. "The best dance a north hunter's had in a few hundred years, I bet."

Riley's ears shot up. He had just danced with a girl. The best girl in all of Epsilon, no less.

Then Erika looked past him, at the bookshelf by the door.

"What is that stuff you were hiding back there?" she said, pointing.

Riley's whole body seized up. He scrambled to plant himself in front of the hidden supplies. Erika leaned to see around him; he kept shuffling into her line of sight. He knew the date idea was stupid—he wanted to be rid of it—but the more he hid it, the more Erika wanted to see. She chuckled and pushed herself slowly up.

"Are you going to move," she said, limping toward him, "or am I going to have to move you?"

"It's really nothing," Riley said, still blocking the shelf. "Just some wood and stuff."

She walked right up until she was nose to nose with him. He glanced back at the shelf one last time, then stepped aside, still shaking with nerves. Erika rounded the corner and found the whole spread of dating supplies. She worked hard not to look surprised, and mostly failed. She'd never been on a date in her life, but everything Riley had gathered fascinated her. She turned a puzzled look on him, and it set him off.

"It was really dumb, I know. The alpha told me it was a good idea, so I went with it, and on the walk over I was like, 'this is dumb, I gotta get rid of it,' but then it was too late 'cause I'd already walked through the door and I th—"

"Yes," Erika said.

"…Yes what?" Riley tilted his head.

"Yes, I'll go on a date with you."

Riley's ears shot straight up. He fought to keep a lid on the happiness and the panic both fizzing through him. He searched her face for a sign she was joking. The smile on it told him she wasn't.

"Well, what are you waiting for?" she said. "Set it up, you blue dummy."

Riley snapped to attention and went tearing around the library setting everything up. He put the table in the center, laid the pillows down to sit on, lit the candle and set it in the middle, arranged the food, stood the colorful drinks up beside the plates. Erika watched him scramble around, smiling to herself. She thought it was a sweet idea. She could also tell he was terrified of it.

"Okay! All set up!" Riley dropped the last cut of meat onto her side of the table.

Erika limped over and sat down on her side, and Riley sat on his. She studied the bottle in front of her.

"How are we even supposed to drink these?"

"They're made to fit in our mouths. You just put it in and throw your head back. Watch." Riley fit the neck of the bottle into his muzzle, tipped his head up, took a swallow, and set it down. Erika copied him and threw back a drink of her own. It was delicious—berries, bright and sweet, the color of it pretty enough on its own. She looked over the slab of meat on her side and sniffed it.

"Is this venison?" she asked, perking up. "Venison's my favorite!"

"Yep! It's really hot, but it'll cool down."

Erika flicked an ear and tore off a chunk, ignoring the warning entirely.

"Oh, wow. That's really good," she said around a full mouth.

Riley ripped a piece off his own, and they ate together. He kept sneaking looks up at her—but every time she looked up to smile, he looked away. She didn't want him so nervous. She wanted him to enjoy this too.

"Hunters aren't allowed to date, so this is my first one as well," she said. "Taber's been on a bunch. He just doesn't get caught much, for how often he breaks the rules."

Riley laughed. He could only imagine what her brother got up to. He bit off some food and tried to look less nervous than he was. Erika figured she'd better break the ice for him.

"I really like this date idea. I never thought I'd get to do something like this." She said it gently.

Riley looked back at her and took another drink.

"Yeah, I thought it'd be fun. I was just worried you wouldn't like it."

"Well, I love it. I think it's sweet of you."

Riley smiled and looked away again. Erika shook her head, chuckling.

"Hey. You've got to look at me if we're going to do this right."

Riley brought his eyes back to her and smiled.

"I have a hard time with eye contact," he said, sheepish.

"I noticed." She smiled back. "It's just me. You don't have to be nervous."

Riley's ears dipped. "Okay, so—this one might make you mad. But why did you hate me, the first time we met?"

Erika looked down this time, instead of at him. Then she looked back up at him tilting his head.

"I never hated you. I just need a reason to trust a wolf before I'll call them a friend." A pause. "But to be fair—that wasn't the first time I met you."

Riley stared at her, more confused than before.

"I went on a… personal mission, a long time ago. We were both really young. I looked different—my mane was still short." She laughed a little.

"What happened?" Riley said, hunting his memory.

"I was covered in blood, and I couldn't go back to my station. It wasn't an *official* mission, let's say. I'd have been suspended a week if I came back like that. And then I ran into you." She chuckled.

"Uh oh. What dumb thing did I do?"

"You helped me to that little tent of yours, and you helped me lie down. I got blood all over the place, and you didn't even look at it. Didn't get angry. You stood watch outside your own tent all night so I could sleep after a—after a really hard day. And then I left in the morning while you were still asleep out front. Taber helped me sneak back into camp and clean the blood off."

It all came rushing back to him now. He hadn't thought about it in years. She'd looked nothing like she did now, and the fact that she'd been drenched in blood at the time hadn't helped him place her.

"Well, I wanted a friend." Riley grinned. "But hey—little Riley would be so proud. My best friend now is a badass super-hunter who kills whole armies."

Erika looked at him, and before she could stop it, she giggled.

Riley's paw shot out, pointing right at her. "Holy shit—I just made Erika Brookes *giggle!* Where's the hunter record book? We have to write this down for history!"

"Yeah?" She laughed, playing with her mane. "Well, now I don't feel so bad about staining your tent with my blood."

"You know what I love?" she went on. "That you can sing in front of other wolves. I saw you, years ago—dancing and singing some song you made up, running all the way across the north. You even barged into wolves' houses, still singing."

Riley tilted his head. "You saw that? That was years ago."

Erika smiled and tilted her own head, imitating him, which dropped half her mane across her face. Riley laughed. He thought it was adorable, and he also knew that if he said so out loud she would murder him.

"How long have you been singing?" she asked, blowing the hair out of her eyes.

"Ever since I could say my own name." He chuckled. "How about you?"

"A while. I just never performed in front of a wolf before." A beat. "Except you. But you were stalking me."

Riley opened his mouth to launch into a defense, and she said, "It was a joke, dummy. Calm down." He shut it and kept listening as she went on.

"I always wanted to sing in front of an audience. I just always knew I couldn't."

Riley took a drink. "I'd love to hear you sing. Like—officially. Not me hiding in a bush."

Erika smiled, but she laughed it off. "I get stage fright. Why do you think I stopped the second I saw you?"

"Don't be nervous. It's just me." He grinned. "Hey—you said that line first, not me."

Erika started to protest, but Riley was already up and running for the music box. He set it down by the table and sat beside it.

"Please. I'd really love to hear you sing."

She sighed, and pushed herself up, and limped over, and sat down in front of him. Riley nudged the box open. The colors drifted up around the library again, riding the little melody, and he looked at her and grinned. Erika let out a soft, laughing sigh. Then she closed her eyes.

And she sang.

Her voice came out low and unsure at first, then steadied, then opened. The colors gathered to it the way they'd gathered to nothing else—blooming and deepening with every note, wrapping the two of them and the old shelves in slow, living light. There was a sweetness in it, and a sadness underneath, and a kind of hope laid over both. Riley sat completely still and watched her, and watched the light, and barely dared to breathe for fear of breaking it. He had never heard anything so beautiful in his life, and it wasn't only the song. It was that she'd let herself be heard at all—the fiercest, most guarded wolf in the north, eyes shut, singing in front of someone for the first time in her life. The light rose with the last note and hung in the air, and then it slowly faded, and the dark drifted gently back.

Erika opened her eyes and found him sitting there, just watching her.

Riley threw back his head and started howling and stamping his paws. Erika laughed and lunged and pressed both paws over his muzzle.

"Don't be so loud! They'll hear us!" she said, barely keeping it together.

"That was the most beautiful song I've ever heard!" he said, breaking free. "That was amazing!"

Erika smiled. She could hardly believe she'd just sung in front of a wolf, even if the wolf was only Riley. She looked at his smile, and at his calm blue eyes, and she knew, with a strange certainty, that he was the only wolf in the world she'd ever be able to sing in front of.

"Hey, we'd better get back over there," she said. "Our food's getting cold, and those drinks won't down themselves."

They walked back to the table and sat and went on eating, neither one wanting the food to go cold. Erika loved the venison, and she found it very funny when Riley tore a piece off of *her* slab and acted like nothing had happened. She watched him eat for a while.

"So," she said. "We talked about what I always wanted to do. Now it's your turn."

Riley looked up with meat between his teeth. "What?"

"What's something you always wanted to do?"

He looked down at the floor. She reached across the table and mussed up his mane. He laughed and looked back up.

"It's really dumb. Don't make me say it."

"Try me. You made me say my dumb dream. Now it's your turn." She wanted to give him what he'd given her. Even if his dream was just to kill a bear or something.

Riley mumbled it a few times. She couldn't make out a word.

"Speak up!" Erika said, playful.

"I want to sleep next to another wolf," Riley said slowly.

Erika looked at him, confused. His eyes stayed fixed on the floor.

"Like—I just wonder what it's like, you know? To wake up next to someone you care about. Getting to hold them. Being safe together. Not alone." He let out a long breath. "Man, that's the dumbest ramble. But I guess I just want that. To not be alone for one night."

"Oh, come on, that's not dumb!" Erika said, taking a drink. "That's just companionship. Don't feel bad about wanting it. Every wolf wants that."

"I guess so," Riley said quietly.

He went back to eating, and so did she. He felt like an idiot for saying it. But she was still being kind, still having fun, so he figured he hadn't blown it too badly. The candle melted down to a puddle on the table by the time they finished. Erika raised her glass, and they clinked them, and chugged the last of both drinks. She yawned. Riley yawned right after her. She looked at him and smiled, meeting his eyes.

"That was fun, Riley. I really needed something like that. It was a really good idea." She held his gaze. "Thank you."

Riley's ears perked up. He'd been so sure she'd hate it. Instead he'd just gone on a date with a girl, and somehow it had gone well. He jumped up and started putting the candles out, and Erika sat and watched him scurry around until the library was dim.

"Alright, all set! You can have the pillows if you want. They're probably the comfiest."

Erika tipped her head. "You can have the pillows." She walked over to the bed of pages and lay down.

Riley spread the pillows out on the floor and rested his head on them.

"Goodnight, Erika," he said through a yawn, and closed his eyes.

Erika stared at him for a long while in the dark. Then, slowly, she got up, and walked over to him—figuring she could use the company, for when the nightmares came. She lay down beside him and ran her body gently along his fur, smiling, and rubbed her head against his neck a few times with her eyes closed. Her mane spilled after her and nearly wrapped around him. She tucked herself in closer, against the warmth of his soft fur, and rested her head on him, her hair drifting across his face. Riley looked down at her in pure surprise and happiness. He folded his front leg around her and drew her in. Erika's eyes were already closing, and she was still smiling. Riley could hardly believe it—he was curled up with Erika Brookes, the exact thing he'd named not an hour ago as the one thing he'd always wanted. He let his eyes fall shut and simply held onto the moment.

"Goodnight, Riley."

— — —

Chapter 10: Vigiliae Nocturnae (Night Watch)

The nightmares disguised as memories swallowed Erika whole once again the moment she slept.

Rain fell over Epsilon. The trees shook loose fat drops of it onto the soaked grass, and the clouds had pulled themselves across the whole sky, smothering the sun down to a dull grey smear. Everything dripped. Everything smelled of wet earth and cold bark. Erika and Taber walked through the dense woods together, picking their way between the dark trunks. They were young here. Taber was only a few years past being a pup, much smaller, his greyish coat soaked flat and dripping. Erika was young too, though no one in the north dared call her a kid anymore—she was smaller and softer-faced than she'd one day be, and the only real difference was her mane, still short, tied back in a small ponytail behind her ears. Off through the trees they could both hear the rain tapping the surface of the lake, a sound she would spend the rest of her life unable to forget. Erika kept them close to it. Her prey would come to the water. They always did.

"Erika, we need to go back. This isn't funny." Taber's voice cracked on it. He kept throwing frightened looks around the dark woods. He wasn't the wolf he'd grow into yet. Back then he was just a scared child.

"It's not supposed to be funny." Her own voice cracked, but with something harder. "I've been tracking this bastard for years, Taber. I clawed my way to this exact moment."

"I know, I know. I just really doubt that blue wolf's gonna let you crash again." Taber laughed. "You got blood everywhere last time."

He caught the look on her face, and the laugh died.

"I don't care," she said. "Everything I've fought for leads here. This is where I'm supposed to be."

Taber opened his mouth—and a chorus of howls rolled out of the woods. He yelped and jumped back. Erika stood her ground.

"Okay, so, this actually isn't where *I'm* supposed to be," Taber said, already backing away. "I'm supposed to be in bed. Bye!"

He bolted for the north. Erika lunged to grab him and he shoved straight past her.

"Taber! Get back here!"

But he was already gone, swallowed by the trees and the rain.

Erika stood alone in the downpour and didn't go after him. Part of her was glad he'd run. Whatever happened next, she didn't want him to see it. She'd spent years becoming the kind of wolf who could do this, and that wasn't a thing she wanted her little brother to watch up close. She breathed slow, the rain sheeting off her short mane, and waited, because she knew they were coming. She could feel it.

"He was the smart one, young lady."

The voice was so ruined and cracked she could barely make the words out. Erika turned. A gang of wolves stood glaring at her through the downpour, cloaked—but the cloaks were dark with old blood, and they were not west cloaks, whatever they wanted a wolf to think. These were them. The ones she'd hunted her whole short life. She locked her eyes on the one in the middle and did not let go.

"Are you Xeras?" she said, slow.

The wolves chuckled together. Erika didn't blink.

"I am. And you'd be the little thing that keeps killing my brothers." Xeras stepped forward, sneering. "I expected someone strong. Instead I get a scared little girl."

"Who said I was scared?" she said, cold, still holding his stare.

They took her for a joke. That was exactly what she wanted.

"You're my prey now," Xeras crooned. "I'll devour you, and my brothers will feast on your bones beside me. You'll die right here. A scared little bitch who thinks she made some difference. You killed a few wolves. Now you die. Alone. Sca—"

Erika turned her back and walked away.

Xeras blinked at his followers. They muttered among themselves.

"Don't walk away! I wasn't finished telling you the frightening things we'll—"

She kept walking, without a word. The wolves murmured, baffled, then trailed after her, picking up the pace to keep her in sight. Erika led them through the rain to the edge of the lake, and there she sat down, and stared out across the water. Xeras and his gang fanned out and ringed her in.

"Ready to hear what horrors await—"

"I have been killing your friends since I was a pup," Erika said, cutting clean through him, rising. "What you took from me made me into what I am. A weapon. And this weapon is aimed at you. I have already killed every wolf you ever cared about. Every wolf standing around you now is going to die in pain. And when I'm finished—it'll be me, feasting on your bones."

Her whole body shook with it, rage and rain together. The wolves traded uneasy glances.

"That was actually pretty good," Xeras admitted. "Give me a minute. I'll think of something scarier to top it."

"I'd honestly rather skip the song and dance," Erika said. "Let's get right to the show."

She closed her eyes and listened to everything around her—the rain, the breathing, the shift of paws in wet grass.

"Fine. Kill her, boys!"

They charged. The first wolf left the ground, jaws wide—and Erika's eyes opened, and for half a heartbeat the whole world seemed to hold still around her, the leaping wolf hanging frozen in the air. Then she slid aside and he slammed into the dirt where she'd been. She caught him in her jaws and flung him into the second wolf mid-leap. They scrambled up; she was already on them. She tore the first one's throat out, and the second bit down on her, and she cracked her front leg into its neck until it let go and dropped coughing into the mud. She sprang off its skull, driving its head into the dirt, and landed square on Xeras and slammed her own skull into his. He went down clutching his muzzle.

"You're last," Erika said.

The rest tried to shake the fear off—they were sick with shame at being afraid of a child—and they came at her together. She slid past the first, seized the next, and ripped its throat out. Two more burst from the bushes. One tackled her and lunged for her face; she snapped her head aside and it got a mouthful of wet grass. She drove her hind legs into it, twisted, and bit down on its leg, hauled it to the ground, then leapt and brought her weight down on the one beneath her. She grabbed it and slammed a front paw across its muzzle. She rolled up and lunged at another, sank her teeth into its neck, and hurled it into a tree.

"Holy shit—KILL THIS BITCH ALREADY!" Xeras screamed, the fear stripping his voice bare.

She drove the next one skull-first into the side of a tree. Two came at her at once and she was simply faster. She slipped their bites, drove her legs into one and bit the other, and as they staggered she slammed one flat and tore its throat out. The last got its jaws around her neck from behind and dragged her down—she twisted free, bit onto its leg, and threw it off of her. Then she stood in the rain, panting, the water running pink off her coat, every one of them down but the one who mattered. Xeras dragged himself up against a tree, cradling the body of one of his dead brothers.

"Why would you do this?" he said—as if the answer weren't lying all around him in the mud.

Erika walked up to him. He shrank back into the tree until she was nose to nose with him, staring straight into whatever he had instead of a soul.

"Welcome to the real world," she said quietly.

The words landed. Recognition broke over his face.

"*You,*" Xeras breathed.

He went to speak, and Erika bit down on his paw with everything she had, and ripped. He shrieked. She tore until it came away, and Xeras reeled back howling, and she caught his throat in her jaws and dragged him bodily across the wet ground toward the lake. She slipped on the grass, scrambled up, and hauled him the rest of the way, and threw him down at the water's edge. She pinned his head under a paw.

"You took everything from me," she said—and struck him across the face, hard, and again, and again, his head a ruin of blood and rain. "You killed my dad."

She hit him until there was almost nothing left of him to hit. Then she stood, slowly, breathing hard.

"Now you'll know," she said to the broken thing at her paws. "Now you'll know what it's like to drown in a pool of misery."

She let out a long, raw howl, took him by the neck, and ran for the lake, and dragged him down into the black water with her. The cold closed over them both. She held him under and felt him struggle and felt the struggling slow, his last bubbles streaming up past her face, and she watched him sink down into the dark below her until the dark had all of him.

Then she swam hard for the surface and burst out of the lake, gasping. She dragged herself to the shore and rolled onto it, coughing up water and blood. She lay there a long time in the soaking grass, looking at the bodies of the wolves who had killed her father. She felt no triumph. She'd thought she would—she'd imagined this exact moment for years, lying awake building it piece by piece—and now that it was here there was nothing in her at all but a hollow, ringing emptiness, and the rain. Whatever she'd believed killing them would give back to her, it hadn't. Her father was still gone. She was still here, soaked in their blood, smaller and more alone than she'd ever felt in her life. The rain came down harder, until the whole world was as wet as the lake. After what might have been an hour she rose, panting, and looked up at the storming sky as thunder cracked somewhere far off. And not knowing what else in the world to do, she threw back her head and howled, long and broken, and then she simply sat down in the mud and cried.

— — —

Erika jolted awake into the library and shot to her paws—and her bad leg folded under her and put her straight back down.

She sat there hyperventilating, her eyes raking the dim room for an enemy that wasn't in it. Slowly her breathing came back under her. But the sadness stayed, and the fear stayed, the same ones that rode out of every dream with her. Her first clear thought was Riley—she twisted to check whether she'd woken him. His paw had slipped off her when she lurched up, but he was still down, breathing slow and easy. He deserved the rest. She made herself not wake him.

She got up and limped to the window.

The streets were nearly black, the strange candles burned down low, the only wolves out the hunters walking their patrols. She watched them move through the dark, and it pulled at her—it looked exactly like the rounds she used to walk with Taber and Owen. She missed them. She missed her old life, most of it anyway. She glanced back at Riley, and a small smile found her in spite of everything. He was the one piece of this new life that made any sense at all. Whatever had happened, whatever was coming, she knew with a strange certainty that he would stay at her side. He'd proven it at every turn.

She looked back out the window, and her eyes filled. She wished she'd done more to save her father. She'd run the night a thousand different ways in her head—what if she'd been faster, what if she'd fought instead of fled, what if she hadn't looked back. Deep down she knew she'd done everything a pup could have done, and that staying would only have meant dying beside him. It never made the wishing stop. The only wolf she'd ever told about the nightmares was Owen—when they were small he used to curl up and hold her until she fell asleep, and it had helped, more than she ever let on. She wondered, standing at the dark glass, whether he was even still alive. She made herself stop wondering.

"Hey. What are you doing awake?"

She heard Riley's voice, thick and crackly with sleep, and turned to find him standing and stretching. She sniffed fast and wiped her eyes. She never cried in front of other wolves.

"I'm fine. Just wanted to look out the window. The east is really pretty." A lie. She didn't want him worrying about her—which of course did nothing at all to stop him.

"Nightmares again?" he said, finishing his stretch.

Erika kept her face to the glass. She didn't want to tell him. Telling him would make her cry. Riley couldn't have said what her nightmares were about—he had no idea—but he could tell that much was true, and that they were bad. She held her back to him a moment longer, getting her composure back before she'd face him.

"It's totally fine to not be fine," Riley said gently. "My mom used to say that."

She turned around then, and met his worried, open face.

"It's just…" Her voice dropped, sad. "It's hard. Having to live through your biggest mistakes again, every single time you close your eyes." She made herself add, "It's okay, though. I'll get back to sleep eventually. You don't have to worry."

Riley kept looking at her, and she kept her eyes off his—the way he usually did with her. She looked so sad that it ached in him. He wanted to help and didn't know how. He turned it over and over while she sat staring at the floor.

"Is there anything I can do?" he said softly.

Erika laughed without sound. She didn't think anything could help her at this point.

"Yeah. Stay awake and keep guard for nightmares," she said, going for a joke.

A small smile crossed Riley's face.

"Sounds good! I'll stay up and keep watch for nightmares. You deserve one peaceful night's sleep."

Erika laughed a little. Riley didn't always catch when she was joking.

"I was kidding, Riley. Let's just go back to sleep." Even saying it, she was scared to.

Riley stretched once more and looked back at her.

"When I was young, it really helped me when other wolves were awake while I slept. I felt safer, knowing somebody was watching out for me." A pause. "Even though back then it was just my imagination. But this time it wouldn't be."

Erika looked at him with a small smile. "You'd really do that?"

She could hardly believe he'd want to sit up all night with nothing to do.

"There isn't anything I wouldn't do for you, Erika."

He said it plainly, like a simple fact. Erika had never once heard that in her life. She'd never had anyone who would always be there—not even Taber, not even Owen. They'd loved her, but they'd had their limits, the way everyone did. Riley didn't seem to have any.

"Yeah," she said quietly, walking back over to him. "That would help. I think."

She lay down on the pillow and rested her head. Riley went to the window and looked out.

"I'll keep watch for the nightmares! They're not getting past this blue wolf, not tonight." He said it with such friendly conviction that she had to smile, her mane falling across her eyes. She brushed it away.

"Hey! I've got another idea to help you sleep—check it out!" He ran to the date supplies and came back with the music box. "Here. This might do it. Falling asleep to music's supposed to be soothing. Most wolves never even get to try it."

He turned to carry it to the window. Erika caught his paw and stopped him.

He looked back, surprised.

"Wait." Her voice went small. "There's another way you could help. Something that used to work, with the dreams."

Riley tilted his head and looked down at her paw resting on his.

"What is it?"

She choked on it a second, then sighed, and figured she might as well say it.

"Could you just… hold me? I don't want to feel alone."

Riley smiled at her, big and certain.

"Yeah! For sure! I know how much it sucks, feeling alone. Honestly—it'd help me too."

Erika smiled. She was so relieved he was here. Riley lay down beside her, glad past words that he could do this for her.

The moment he settled, she nuzzled in close, until there was barely a sliver of space left between them. He rubbed his head against hers, and she smiled, and felt safe. His soft fur made a better pillow than the ones they'd been sleeping on. Her body pressed warm against his. She rested her head beside him and tucked herself a little closer, and Riley folded his front leg around her, and she held onto his paw, and for once in her life she felt okay. Riley looked down at her, so peaceful in that moment, and was simply happy he'd managed to do something right. He reached over and opened the music box. The melody spilled out and broke into slow drifting color all around them. Erika watched the lights a while, then closed her eyes, and slept.

— — —

Riley stayed awake all night and watched her.

She slept the whole way through, breathing slow and even instead of ragged, a small smile on her muzzle, her paw resting on his the entire time. There were stretches where his eyes grew so heavy he had to shake himself to keep them open. But he wanted to help her more than he wanted the rest, so he stayed up, and he kept his watch, the way he'd promised. He loved being curled up with her like this. It made something in his chest go warm and quiet, something that had ached and gone cold for as long as he could remember. He'd spent his whole life on the outside of the north, the wolf nobody sat with, the wolf who got chased and beaten and ignored. And now the fiercest, finest hunter in the clan was asleep against his side, holding his paw, trusting him to guard her dreams. Neither of them was alone anymore. Riley knew, lying there in the dark, that he would treasure this one night for the rest of his life, however long or short that turned out to be.

He had a great deal of time to think while he sat with her. He thought about the bad things, like Zane, and the good things, like Erika. His mind drifted to fighting—to how, in every scrape they'd been in, Erika did all the work while he hid or dodged or got thrown into a tree. He hated that. The road they were walking led straight to Zane, and Riley couldn't keep being something she had to protect. He needed to learn to fight. And he needed to learn fast.

He looked around the library, cuddled up against her, hunting for anything that might help. His eyes landed on the books. An idea took hold. If he stacked the books up and taught himself that hind-leg strike Erika did, the one that sent wolves flying, then maybe—maybe he could actually impress her. He waited until he was sure she was deeply asleep, an hour or two, watching her smile in a way he hadn't seen on her before. He couldn't know it, but for the first time in a long time, Erika was having a good dream.

Riley eased himself up slow, so as not to wake her. The second he did, she rolled over onto his warm spot on the pillows and mumbled something gibberish, still smiling. Riley got to his paws and started dragging books from all over the library. By the time he finished he had several tall stacks of them. Good enough, he figured. He stared down the first stack for a long, intense moment, then squared up to it.

"Here we go," he whispered. "Time to impress Erika."

He shut his eyes, focused, snapped them open, and tried to throw his hind legs out the way she did.

The instant his rear paws left the floor, his balance went, and he slid and crashed face-first into the stack of books. They went everywhere, sliding across the dusty floor. Riley lay tangled in them a second, then sighed, climbed out, and gathered them back up. He went to the second stack and tried again, picturing exactly how Erika planted her weight and snapped her legs out—and got the exact same result, paws skidding out from under him, chin meeting the floorboards. He went down a third time on the third stack. For a moment he just lay there with his head resting on a fallen book, breathing dust, staring sideways at nothing. He had no earthly idea how he was ever going to learn to fight like her. It had looked so simple when she did it. It looked like the easiest thing in the world. He turned his head and looked over at Erika, sound asleep and smiling. He wanted to stand beside her when they faced Zane—not behind her, not hidden in stolen armor, but beside her. And he knew he never could, not if he couldn't so much as keep his own paws under him. So he hauled himself up again, jaw set, restacked the books, and kept going. He was not going to quit. He spent the whole rest of the night at it, falling and rising and falling again, trying just to hold his balance through the motion, knowing he was a long, long way from fighting a single Semita soldier, let alone the wolf who'd burned down his home.

He didn't even notice the sun come up.

— — —

Erika blinked her eyes open onto a blurry library and found Riley across the room, reared back, about to fling himself at another stack of books.

"What are you doing?" she said, laughing under her breath.

Riley looked over and smiled. She looked calm. No more nightmares, he guessed.

"I'm learning that kick you do! I wanted to surprise you—check it out!"

He turned to the stack, pushed up onto his front legs, and drove his hind legs out. He'd made progress, at least: he didn't fall this time when he lifted them. He also missed the books entirely and went down anyway.

Erika laughed and got up, and limped over to one of his stacks, and drove her hind legs into it. The books exploded across the room.

"Wow, I suck," Riley said, ears and head sinking. "Even with a bad leg you can do it."

Erika walked over and nudged his head back up. She knew he'd never trained a day in his life, and that he wanted, badly, to learn.

"It's all balance," she said. "You have to get out of your own instincts and fight with flexibility and power. It's hard, Riley. Don't beat yourself up for falling a few times. You'd better believe I did." She let go of his head. He kept it up, but his ears and tail stayed flat. "I wasn't always a good fighter, you know. I had a fantastic teacher, and a great place to train. You just have to believe you can do it. Then you will."

"That's the thing," he said quietly. "I don't believe I can do it."

"Well, I believe you can," Erika said.

And the strange part was that she meant it. Riley's ears lifted a little. He stayed quiet. She came over and set her paw on his shoulder.

"Hey. While you go do whatever you're doing today, I'll work on walking. Once I can actually move on this leg, I'll train you myself. I'll have you fighting like a north hunter in no time."

Riley's ears shot straight up, a huge grin breaking across his muzzle.

"That would be amazing! I'll be the best student, I swear. I'll listen to everything you say, I promise. I can't wait!"

She smiled. Something in him reminded her of herself, back when she'd first started training.

"I figured I'd keep hunting for the relic," Riley said. "I want to check Armano's quarters. I bet it's in there."

"Be careful. That's a risky plan." She worried about it—but she had faith in him, and it would buy her the time she needed to work the leg.

Riley ran to the armor and pulled it all on, every piece except the helmet, then headed for the door. He went to open it.

"I think you're forgetting something, dummy," Erika said.

Riley looked at her, confused, then down at the bare helmet on the floor.

"Oh! Right! Sorry, I'm just really excited." He slid it onto his head. Erika chuckled at him. He opened the door and looked back at her, and she sat there watching him with a smile.

"Good luck out there. Don't blow your cover. I don't feel like fighting the whole east clan on a bad leg."

"I'll be careful, I promise. See you in a bit, Erika!"

He shut the library door behind him and walked out. Erika got slowly to her paws and started pacing the room, working the leg, figuring movement was the best thing for it.

And the only thought in Riley's head as he stepped out into the silver morning was: *Erika actually believes in me.*

For the first time in his life, he felt something like confident.

— — —

Chapter 11: Argentum Bellator (The Silver Warrior)

Riley slipped out of the library, ducked behind the same building he always used, and walked back out slow, like he belonged there.

He started down the snowy streets of the east. The hunters glanced at him as he passed, and he kept his head forward and just kept walking, the way he'd learned to. He couldn't help admiring the place, though. The silver gleamed against the snow, throwing the light back soft and bright, and he thought it was about the prettiest thing he'd ever walked through. He was almost relaxed.

"Hey!"

Riley jumped half out of his fur. A hunter he didn't know was striding toward him.

"You're Riley White!"

Riley's mind went straight to every horrible thing the east would do to him if his cover broke. By the time the hunter reached him, he'd dissolved into stuttering.

"Riley White? Yeah—yep, that's me. Regular east hunter. How'd you, uh, how'd you know it was me? I'm just one of the guys, you know? Just an east hunter. One of the guys." He was trembling under the armor.

The hunter gave him a strange look that the helmet, thankfully, hid him from returning.

"Your tail's bright blue," the hunter said. "No other wolf in Epsilon has a bright blue tail."

Riley looked back. There it was, sticking straight out of the armor, waving in the air like a little flag of surrender.

"Yeah," Riley said weakly. "Guess it is. But I didn't do anything, I swear! I was just—you know—going for a walk. Yeah. That's all. Just a walk. Nothing suspicious about it whatsoever."

The hunter's head tilted.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "I just wanted to ask how your date went. I'm the one who brought you the music box. Remember?"

The fear drained out of Riley all at once, and he sent a silent thank-you up to Alpha that the wolf wasn't here to kill him.

"Oh! Right. It went really well, actually!" The nerves flipped over into excitement. "We had dinner, and we danced together. It was amazing."

The hunter knocked his shoulder lightly against Riley's and laughed.

"Good to hear. So how was the kiss?"

The anxiety came roaring straight back, and this time Riley almost wished it were the killing kind. Kissing Erika—Erika would do far worse to him than the whole east clan combined if he ever tried something like that.

"Kiss? No—no, we aren't—it was, I don't, I mean it was just—we danced, though! I could've kissed her? Was I supposed to? No, I couldn't! I don't know what you mean!"

He rambled himself into a corner and stayed there. One of the hunter's ears dropped in confusion.

"Huh. Okay. Well, I just wanted to check. Glad it went well, anyway." He turned to go. "If you're ever looking for the alpha, by the way—he's usually in his quarters, not the camp. Just so you know for next time." He started off. "Glad your date went well. I think."

Riley watched him walk away, and then it clicked.

"Armano's quarters," he breathed. "That's gotta be where it is."

He took off toward the far end of the east, where he'd heard Armano lived. It wouldn't be hard to find, he figured—the alpha surely had the biggest house in the clan. He cut back through the center of town, admiring the stores as he went, and made a mental note to grab more food once he had the relic. If he got the relic.

He walked until a building rose up ahead of him unlike anything he'd seen in the east yet.

It was enormous. Two great statues of Armano flanked the doors, both struck in confident, cocky poses. The whole structure was worked in gold and silver together, and it shone so fiercely in the sun that Riley had to squint and look away. The doors were carved from fine dark wood, and the windows were crystal-clear glass without a flaw in them. He stood and stared. It must have taken years to build. As he crept closer he noticed something strange—there were no guards. Not one. He figured the east had to be very, very sure of itself, to leave the alpha's home standing open like that. He checked over both shoulders, eased a door open, and slipped inside.

The inside was even more incredible than the outside.

A fountain stood in the middle of a wide silver hall, ringed with armor—dozens of suits, all different, prototypes of one another. Carvings of old east battles ran along every wall, and in some of them the armored wolves wore a strange cannon mounted on their backs. Riley turned in a slow circle, taking it all in, until he spotted a grand staircase sweeping up the far end of the room. He hurried across and climbed it, and found a bedroom at the top—marvelous, royal, exactly the sort of room he'd have guessed for Armano. The bed was dressed in fine threaded sheets like nothing he'd ever seen. The walls were lined with colored paintings of a single wolf, and Riley knew at once who it had to be: the east brother, the relic shining at his throat in every portrait. A statue of the same wolf stood in the center of the room, tall and proud, with a strange mechanism built onto the back of his armor.

Riley set about searching the whole room. He still wasn't entirely sure what he was hunting for. He knew the relic was a necklace, and that was about all he knew. He looked under the bed, around the statue, in the little side fountains, everywhere he could think of. After a while he sighed and sat down, beaten.

Then he saw the lever on the back of the statue.

He padded over and grabbed it and hauled on it with everything he had. The wall behind him let out a loud grinding noise, and Riley shrieked and fell flat to the floor. The wall slid open, revealing a hidden silver room. He scrambled up, knocked the helmet back out of his eyes, and looked at what sat inside—and what he saw, he had no words for.

It was a suit of armor more advanced than anything in Epsilon.

It was bright silver, lined with gold, and it covered the entire body from snout to tail. Gears and overlapping plates ran across every inch of it, fine and intricate, fitted together so cleanly that Riley couldn't tell where one piece ended and the next began. The helmet had dark, shaded eye holes that gave nothing away. A great cannon rode the back of it, and two long guns lay folded against either side, waiting. The whole thing seemed to hum, very faintly, as though some part of it were always awake. Riley walked up and poked it—and yanked his paw back with a yelp. The thing was wrapped in a shield, a thin skin of crackling energy that bit him the instant he touched it. He shook the sting out of his paw and stared. It wasn't the relic. But it was, without a doubt, the most incredible thing he had ever laid eyes on in his life.

"Amazing, isn't it, Riley White?"

Riley screamed and fell over. He spun around to find Armano standing alone in the doorway, watching him with a grin. Riley shot up and fixed his helmet and started scrabbling for excuses.

"Armano! I was just—waxing your statue. Or this thing. I found it by accident, I was only looking for you, I didn't know wh—"

Armano raised a paw, and Riley shut up instantly. The alpha crossed the room, set his paw on the suit's helmet, and gazed at it with open pride.

"You are quite curious. And quite brave." He didn't look away from the armor. "I would normally be furious with a wolf who broke into my chambers. But you are a friend. So it is all right. I show you nothing but trust, Riley White."

Riley looked down, and something twisted in his chest. He'd eventually have to betray a wolf who'd just called him a friend—and a wolf calling anyone a friend, in Epsilon, was a rare thing indeed.

"This is the armor designed by the alphas of the east," Armano said. "We have been building it since the days of ancient Epsilon. It was first worn by Permensio—our first alpha. The east brother." He smiled at it. "I was the one to finish it. I call it the Silver Guardian."

Riley stared at the suit, awed.

"Wow. You must be so proud. It's the coolest thing I've ever seen."

Armano gave him that cocky grin. "It is unique. Almost as strong as the relics themselves—though I wouldn't expect a simple guard to know about those."

"Yeah, um—what's a relic?" Riley fixed his helmet and laughed nervously. "I mean, no clue. I'm just a guard."

Armano opened his muzzle to answer—and a howl tore through the whole clan.

A guard came pounding up the stairs, and Riley jumped back in fear. Armano's whole face changed, the cockiness gone, replaced by something hard and old.

"Report, soldier. What is happening?"

"We're under attack, sir." The guard stood at attention, professional, though the fear bled through. "A full frontal siege—the entrance and the center both. They've pushed into the central town. We're holding them, but we need assistance."

Armano looked at Riley, who was busy hyperventilating. The last thing Riley wanted was for the fighting to reach the library—for Erika to be found, or worse, to drag herself into a battle on a half-healed leg.

"Riley White." Armano's voice was quiet and certain. "Perhaps your coming to my chambers was a sign. I cannot fight the way I once did. But I believe you can." He looked at the suit. "I wish for you to wear the Silver Guardian."

Riley tilted his head. "Wait—what?"

"You have proven you can be trusted. So I will return the favor." Armano set a paw on his shoulder. "Wield this suit. You will be the first ever to do so. I know you will protect your clan, soldier. Do not let me down." He gestured to the hidden room. "Step in beside the armor, and it will morph itself around you. It is the most advanced suit ever made. Use it with the pride of the east." And with that he turned and followed the guard out, fast, leaving Riley alone.

Riley swallowed hard, and turned, and walked into the secret room.

The moment he stepped onto the platform, it began to sink into the floor. Riley yelped and went still beside the armor. As the platform descended into the dark, the suit came alive. Gears spun and mechanical arms unfolded from the walls, and piece by piece the Silver Guardian began to craft itself around his body. He felt the cold silver climb up over his legs and his flanks and lock into place, snug and exact, like it had been built for him and no one else. Plates slid across his chest and sealed. The two guns rose and settled into the slots along his back with a heavy double click. By the time the platform touched the bottom, the helmet folded itself down over his head, and a small display flickered to life across the inside of the eye holes—a targeting system, thin glowing lines and markers that slid and locked over everything he looked at. Riley turned his head, and the markers chased his gaze. He flexed a paw, and the whole suit answered the motion instantly, light as his own fur despite all that metal. It was, without a single doubt, the coolest thing he had ever done in his life. He figured the relic had to have played some part in building a wonder like this.

The door slid open, and Riley leapt out into the silver morning.

He could see the chaos in the distance—smoke rising over the rooftops, the flash of movement, the noise of it carrying all the way across the clan. The guns on his back armed with a sharp mechanical whir, and the whole suit thrummed to life around him, a low power building under the plates. Riley ran. And he had never run like this in his life. The silver feet drove him forward faster than any wolf on the field, the buildings blurring past, the wind that should have torn at him simply sliding off the armor. He reached the war zone in seconds, skidding to a stop in the middle of it.

It was bedlam. Hooded wolves were tearing into the east guards, who were giving ground but still fighting hard, snapping and lunging in a losing line. Riley swept his gaze across the square—and the targeting display caught and locked onto two small pups crouched against a wrecked store, frozen with terror, as three hooded wolves stalked toward them with their teeth bared.

Something in Riley went hard and certain. The fear that usually ran his whole body simply wasn't there.

"Oh, this is gonna be awesome," he said.

He primed the cannon on his back and fired.

A massive round screamed across the square and slammed into the three wolves, blowing them clean off their paws and killing them where they stood. The pups stared for half a second, then bolted for safety. Riley cheered out loud inside the helmet—he'd actually done it, he'd actually saved someone—and threw himself into the battle. And for the first time in his entire life, he was not afraid to fight. He wanted to. He charged a knot of four hooded wolves and drove a foreleg into one so hard the suit launched it clear across the field. Then he reared and slammed a paw down against the ground—and a shockwave rolled out from the point of impact and knocked every wolf nearby flat onto their backs.

"Sorry, guys! Didn't know that was gonna happen!" Riley called to the east hunters scattered by the blast, before charging the next attacker.

He squared up and drove his hind legs out the way Erika did—the move he'd failed a hundred times in the library—and this time, with the suit behind it, it landed clean and cracked the wolf's skull and launched him away. Riley laughed, delighted, and went to work, picking off the raiders with the turrets on his shoulders, having a strange and slightly horrified kind of fun. One attacker lunged to bite him; the energy shield flared, and the wolf reeled back yelping, holding a cracked tooth. Riley winced inside the helmet.

"Ohhh. That looks like it hurt. I'm actually really sorry—here, I'll just—I'll kill you quick so you don't have to keep feeling that, okay? Sorry." He struck the wolf and sent it sailing into a ruined storefront.

Two more leapt onto his back and tried to pin him down. Riley simply rolled, and the weight of the suit crushed them flat beneath him. The east wolves rallied around him and began to drive the attackers back toward the entrance.

"Guys, I got this," Riley said, in a cocky tone that didn't suit him in the slightest.

He stepped out ahead of the east line and primed both turrets. A storm of fire tore out of them and ripped through the attackers' ranks like they were wet paper. They scattered, tried to dodge, and didn't. Then a long howl rolled out of the distance, and the hooded wolves broke and ran. A handful of east hunters tore after them, chasing them all the way out.

The east hunters threw back their heads and howled, cheering, as Riley stood tall in the center of it with the guns smoking on his back. He felt, for once in his life, like an absolute badass. The hunters crowded around him, praising him, calling him a true east hunter and an incredible display. Riley found the way they talked equal parts flattering and strange.

Then a deep howl sounded from somewhere within the east, and every hunter near him turned and ran for the camp. Riley looked around, lost. The guard who'd warned Armano jogged up and set a paw against the suit.

"That was marvelous. Armano will be proud." There was real pride in his voice. "He's instructed me to tell you to return the armor and meet us at the camp."

Riley's ears dropped.

"What? But I wanted to play with it a little longer. Shoot some targets. Maybe some birds. You know, stuff like that."

"Return the armor and report to the camp now, hunter." The guard turned and headed off.

Riley sighed and trudged back to Armano's house. He stepped into the hidden room, and the Silver Guardian peeled itself off of him, gears retracting it back into place, and left him standing there in his boring old stolen armor. He sighed again and started for the camp, turning over what this meeting could possibly be about, and not liking any of the answers.

— — —

He reached the hunter camp and found it in complete chaos.

Wolves were arming up and forming into packs, readying themselves to move out into the unknown. The armor racks were being stripped bare. Every hunter in the place had the look of a soldier preparing for war, and the sight of it dropped a stone into Riley's stomach. If a full war broke out, he'd never have a prayer of uniting the clans. He figured Armano had to be in the command station, so he hurried through the rows of hunters toward it. To his relief no one stopped him—they were all far too focused on the coming fight to notice one more armored wolf.

He pushed through the silver doors and found Armano bent over a great map of Epsilon, ringed by armored wolves. The alpha wore a cannon on his back, like the Silver Guardian's but cruder, older. The wolves around the map traded war tactics, each one worse than the last to Riley's ears. Armano looked up, saw him, and grinned.

"Riley White! Just the wolf I wished to see. We have plotted a course, and we are ready to launch our counterstrike against the west clan. We identified them by their ridiculous hoods—they're the only fools who wear them." His tone had gone harder than Riley had ever heard it.

Riley started to hyperventilate. He knew, with sick certainty, that Armano would wipe the entire west clan off the map in retaliation unless he did something.

"Why are we fighting them?" Riley blurted. "We should negotiate! Find out why they decided to attack first!"

Armano ignored him completely, walked up, and stared him down.

"We have a plan of attack, Riley. That is what we will do. That is the east way." His lip curled. "In fact, I was going to let you lead the assault. But a suggestion like that tells me you don't have the stomach to finish a fight, or to dismember our enemies. The plan is a full assault, with every soldier we have. We will stop the west clan from drawing breath. For good."

Riley cowered back. Armano shoved past him and headed for the door, off to give his army its orders. Riley's mind raced. He thought of the west clan, wolves he'd never met, going about their day with no idea that the most powerful army in Epsilon was about to fall on them for a crime they hadn't committed. There had to be another way. And then, out of nowhere, an idea caught.

"Wait! I know what to do!"

Armano stopped. So did every other wolf in the room. Riley reached back into his memory for something Erika had told him once—the plan she'd built for Zane's siege of the north.

"We need to focus on defense!" he said, anxious, forcing a confidence he didn't feel. "Pull all the squads back. Get every civilian inside the walls. Keep all our hunters here to defend the clan. That—yeah. That's the plan."

The wolves looked to Armano. He thought about it for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and laid a paw on Riley's shoulder.

"That is brilliant. You're right. We must ensure the safety of our own clan before we ever launch an assault. Our citizens come first—that is our priority." He turned to his commanders. "Issue this new plan to every hunter. Hold the borders, protect the center of town. With heavy fortification at the front, the rear will be safe." The commanders bolted out to spread the word.

Riley stood there shaking, hating every second of this—but knowing, underneath it, that he had just barely saved an entire clan from slaughter.

"You are brilliant, Riley White. A genius point." Armano's voice dropped, sad. "Our people come first. I am only afraid of what will happen if the west attacks us again."

Riley looked down.

"Trust me," he said, thinking of Zane. "There are bigger problems out there than the west."

"No matter. I must deal with the threat in front of me." Armano gestured to the door. "Get some rest, Riley White. I hope to see you soon. Now if you'll excuse me—I have a great deal of work to do to prepare our defenses."

Riley walked out, awkward, through the camp. As he went he caught the commanders relaying the orders to the hunters—defend, not attack—and the sound of it eased him, a little. Once he was clear of the camp, he broke into a dead sprint for the library.

— — —

He reached it as the sun was setting, the last light throwing a long shadow across the old building, which sat quiet and untouched. He shoved through the great doors and found Erika reading calmly, her mane fallen across half the page. She kept grunting and huffing it out of the way, and it kept drifting back over the exact line she was trying to read. She looked up and smiled when she saw him.

"Hey there. How'd the fight go? I heard it from in here." She said it easy and warm. "Sorry I couldn't join you—I got wrapped up in this book. And, you know. The leg. But hey—it feels so much better."

Riley smiled back, and for the first time in a long, stressful day, something in him settled. He walked over and sat down beside her. She looked so peaceful that it made him happy just to see it.

"What's the book about?" he asked. It had to be good, to keep Erika out of a fight.

"It's called Cirilla, the First Hunter." She brightened. "It's the tale of the north brother's daughter. She faces impossible odds with a team she builds herself, all to save Epsilon." She glanced at him with a small smile. "Reminds me of us."

Riley looked at her, and laid his head on her shoulder for a second—then jerked straight back up.

"Sorry! I didn't mean to do that, it's just been a weird day, please don't hurt me!"

Erika gave him a look, then laughed. "I'll hurt you if you don't quit acting so weird. If it helps, it helps, dummy. Just relax."

Riley settled back in and buried his head in her fur for a minute, letting himself calm down. She read on in silence. After a while he lifted his head and just watched her, hoping she wouldn't notice. He loved seeing her this calm—she was always so wound up, and he was glad she'd found something that quieted her.

"So—the west attacked the clan," he said. "And now the east is getting ready to go to war with them. I actually used that strategy you told me about, to get them to defend the clan instead of marching on the west."

Erika looked up, puzzled, and turned the plan over in her head. She was quietly pleased it had worked—even on the east, the so-called superior clan.

Then her face changed.

"Riley, that's impossible. The west is a pacifist clan." She frowned. "They've never attacked anyone, not once in their history. They even helped Owen and me, years ago. We ran out of food to carry home, and they gave us some of theirs."

Riley tilted his head, the whole thing turning strange in his mind.

"Then who attacked? They weren't Semita—they had the hoods, but they weren't covered head to tail in blood like the Semita are."

Erika let out a long yawn and looked back at him.

"I don't know. Just one more mystery we get to solve. In the morning, though. I'm exhausted." She stretched. "I'm gonna sleep. I'll finish the book tomorrow. And hey—my leg's feeling a whole lot better. You know what that means."

Riley's ears shot up.

"Training time?"

"Training time." Erika smiled. She was honestly happy he was so excited to learn to fight. She didn't want to get his hopes too high—but something told her he'd pick it up fast. She got up and crossed to the pile of pillows and lay down, rolling over to face the wall.

"We start tomorrow. The sooner we get you fighting like a north hunter, the better. And quit worrying about my leg, it's fine." A pause. "Goodnight, Riley."

Riley walked to the bed of pages and lay down too—but he just stared at her. He wished she'd come over the way she had the night before. Sleeping beside her had been the best night of his life. He'd felt safe. He stared at her for what must have been an hour, fighting to keep his eyes open as the sun sank and the library filled up with dark. Then Erika rolled over and looked him dead in the eye, and he snapped his eyes shut and pretended to be asleep.

"If you want to sleep together, you can just say so." She was smiling. "It's just me."

Riley cracked one eye open, hope flooding into it.

"Yeah—I'd really like that. But only if you want to! I know you probably don't, and I'm weird, and I don't wa—"

"Shut up," Erika said, laughing. She pushed herself up slowly and walked over to him, and lay down at his side, and closed her eyes, smiling where he couldn't see. He set his head down. She looked up at him.

"Get closer to me. It helps." She said it awkwardly. She wasn't about to admit out loud that she liked being held.

Riley grinned wide and curled himself around her. She nuzzled in close, settling into the warmth of him, and he rubbed his head gently against her mane before resting it against hers. They lay there peaceful on the bed of pages, just glad of each other's company.

"Goodnight, Riley," Erika said, easing a little closer.

She would never admit it to a living soul. But she had never once slept better than she did now, curled against him through the long, fearful dark that the north had always simply called nightfall.

— — —