Chapter 18: Everett

Chapter 18: Everett

I couldn’t rest until I heard back from Taylor. All night, I migrated around my house looking for something to do. In my office, I processed paperwork that I had set aside in favor of doting on Aislin the day before, and then I listened to the audio recordings from Hexen Manor, but found nothing that would indicate when Dalesbloom intended to attack. It was suddenly radio silence within the parlor where the bug was planted. In the early hours of the morning, I decided to stretch my legs outside. I left my clothes behind and stood in my yard naked, undergoing the transformation once more until in the place of my human body stood the towering grey beast of my wolf. Shaking out my pelt, I took off in a run, intending to check the perimeter.

Despite being Eastpeak’s Alpha, I didn’t do border patrols often. Usually, I left those responsibilities to my pack. Taylor often organized and distributed duties among my packmates while I managed our internal and external affairs and business with the lumber mill. I realized how unaccustomed I was to the border patrol when the scent markings signifying the edges of our territory were predominantly Taylor’s, or other packmates’, and not my own. Were a stranger to come to our borders, they might not even know that I was the Alpha. So I took care to stop every now and then, lift my leg, and mark a tree.

I traveled all the way around the eastern perimeter, ventured south, then hugged the western perimeter facing Grandbay, and then stopped as my territory curved up toward Dalesbloom in the north. The stench of dragons overpowered the area, while my packmates were all but absent. That meant the dragons had been pushing closer and closer to Eastpeak territory, past the neutral zone and toward our markers. That didn’t sit well with me. Even though there was no activity from them within my territory, I knew it meant that they were starting to close in, testing the limits of what we would tolerate before getting caught. I didn’t want to get ambushed either, so I headed back home. The sun was rising through the overcast when I returned to my yard, and I immediately went to my office where I left my phone, hoping to have heard from Taylor. Still, there was nothing.

Concerned, I called Sebastian. “I haven’t heard from Taylor all night,” I began. “He had gone into Dalesbloom to try to speak with one of their members.”

“You sent him into Dalesbloom?” Sebastian echoed incredulously back at me.

“He was going to be careful, and it wasn’t supposed to be for long,” I said.

“Did he drive?”

“Yeah.”

“Who did he go see?”

“This guy named Garett Roydon. I can get his address.”

“No,” said Sebastian, “I would advise against sending anybody else there. Have you gone out to look for him?”

“I just did a perimeter check… except the northern edge. The area was saturated with Inkscales.”

“Maybe that’s where you should look.”

“Do you think they found him and left him there?”

“If he got caught, possibly.”

I chewed on this while the dread in my stomach worsened. It was bad enough when I found Taylor after David had dragged him into the forest and beaten him up. I couldn’t imagine what they might have done to Taylor this time if they caught him—but the more time went on without hearing from him, the more I believed that was what happened. And if he was waiting for me on the northern perimeter, surrounded by dragons… there was no way I could go retrieve him myself. It reeked of a trap.

“I’m going to check it out,” I decided. “But I’ll need backup.”

“We can send some of the Mythguard to go with you. Will you bring your packmates?”

“Whoever will come with me.”

“Good,” said Sebastian. “Are you going now?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll have bodies at your place in ten minutes.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Another mass text was sent out to my packmates. They were less than thrilled about being rallied together for another potentially dangerous mission. This time, I only had four responses confirming they would be available, including Bree. Annoyed, I considered after this that I might have to hold a pack meeting and remind my packmates about the importance of reliability. Even if I had rarely urged them before, I still expected them to heed the call to action. Taylor could possibly be in danger—didn’t they care?

Fifteen minutes later, I had three members of the Mythguard armed with rifles plus Sebastian and my four packmates with me, making nine of us prepared to venture to the northern borders to search for Taylor. As long as we could pick out his scent among the miasma of the dragons, it wouldn’t take too long.

Five wolves stalked alongside the four humans, prowling uneasily through the morning mist. The clouds thinned away to reveal the sun glistening low on the horizon within a warm blue sky, shrouding the forest in a wispy, silver fog, and depositing drops of dew on the undergrowth. It was a beautiful morning if not for the omen of Taylor’s disappearance. With my ears forward and nose to the ground, I led the party in search of his scent, deep discomfort rising as the scent of the dragons filled in around us. All of us were on guard, our eyes peeled for movement among the trees. In the morning light, an ambush was less easy to execute, but I didn’t think that would stop them. Nothing seemed to move. There was no birdsong nor insects trilling through the dawn, just unnerving stillness. We walked in single file, waiting for something to break the silence.

Directly in the center of the northern perimeter, approaching the neutral zone, Taylor’s smell hit my nose. I stopped and raised my head, gesturing in the direction the wind brought it from. My packmates detected it a moment later, and from our body language, the Mythguard humans murmured among themselves that we had detected Taylor. But it wasn’t just my Beta’s scent… it was also the sick, sour stench of blood.

Immediately disturbed, I made a beeline for the smell, ignoring the dense presence of dragons around us. I would plunge into the pits of Hell to retrieve Taylor if I had to. My feet moved swiftly through the grass, dew clinging to my fur, but I felt nothing except my heart slamming in my ribcage. In the back of my mind, I was grateful Aislin had gotten her lungs healed, because I was already struggling to breathe—and I didn’t know if I could endure this while choking on the sensations of a collapsed lung too.

What I saw may as well have collapsed both of my lungs.

Where the scents were strongest, there was a wolf’s body crumpled in the grass, abandoned in between a growth of leaning birch trees. Blood slicked his fur and seeped into the ground. His legs lay limp to one side and his head was reeled back, his neck twisted unnaturally in the opposite direction. The only movement around him was the breeze tickling his fur. It was Taylor… lifeless.

A desperate cry escaped me as I charged toward him, but no matter how fast I ran, I was already too late. I dropped to the ground beside him, my eyes wide in horror at the scene, and a thousand emotions welled up out of my throat. I couldn’t even process what I was seeing. My oldest and closest friend was strewn before me, his body devastated with a broken neck and innards dripping out of his abdomen. Pieces of him were all over the clearing, a horrific mirror of my own fate had I not escaped the dragons. This was what they could do to a wolf who intruded on their territory.

Beside me, Bree uttered a strangled, mournful wail, collapsing into the dirt. She buried her face in her boyfriend’s ruff and her body trembled. Her pain radiated through all of us. The humans spoke nothing to us, only sharing words among themselves, but I didn’t care what they had to say. Time had fallen still as I gazed on the aftermath of my foolish mistake. I did this, sending Taylor into Dalesbloom. I sent him to his death. He was loyal to me to the very end and it killed him.

My packmates moved in around us, circling Taylor’s body as we shared our grief. I was stunned by what we’d found, but I knew we couldn’t stay here long. The dragons might be on us any moment. We couldn’t even take Taylor’s body back, because turning human would leave us vulnerable, and it just wasn’t practical for all of us to try to haul a wolf body back on foot. I couldn’t stomach that fact. Even as I began to urge my packmates to retreat, Bree looked up at me with scalding anguish, refusing to part from Taylor. I understood how she felt. I didn’t want to leave him either, but we had to.

Eventually, all my packmates had gotten back to their feet, but Bree didn’t move. It would cost her life if we abandoned her. I stood above her and gently tugged at her shoulder until she snapped with a flash of fangs portraying the anger she felt purely for me. My Alpha instincts warred against my empathy to snarl and drag her away. There was too much hurt and I couldn’t let it rule me, yet… I stepped away from Bree all the same, leaving her to mourn over Taylor. I could only hope that the Inkscales and Dalesbloom would leave her to mourn in peace. The rest of my packmates had to get back to safety.

The walk through the forest was one of the worst I’d ever made. The dragons remained a constant, oppressive presence, as though they roared in from Dalesbloom and swept through our home like a tsunami. The stench persisted even as we delved beyond the borders, back into territory that was supposed to be safe. A mile into our home, it was clear that the dragons had come this way, but somehow evaded us. It couldn’t be that they’d been unable to find us. We made no effort to hide ourselves, knowing—expecting—that they would strike. That didn’t seem to be the case. They had merely passed us by, knowing that we were stalled around the corpse of our dead friend. My dread intensified as we approached the town, which sat silent in the morning mist and undisturbed. Beyond the town and on the mountainside, where my packmates usually hunted, the scent of blood returned.

I had been expecting the dragons to ambush us. I wasn’t expecting them to strike the ones I had left safely ensconced within my territory, the ones who stayed behind specifically to keep out of danger.

We came upon our usual hunting grounds to find a massacre.

My own packmates had been treated like prey, run down by tides of the vicious Inkscale dragons and the Dalesbloom wolves. Bodies were spread along the slope, some of them horrifically dismembered, others bled out, most of them dead—it was the worst thing I’d ever faced. My heart dropped into my stomach and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, just perceive the catastrophe that had been delivered to me by my own idiocy. The perpetrators were already gone, leaving behind just the aftermath of the genocide. None of us had heard it. We were too far away on the northern perimeter to hear the violent clash breaking out, but anybody else nearby would have been drawn to the sound of one wolf being attacked, then the next, and more as they rushed in to aid one another. I wanted to believe that this was a nightmare and that I’d shake myself awake, screaming and crying, but the longer I stared, the stronger the stench of blood became, lodging in my throat and suffocating me.

I’d made a critical error in sending Taylor to Dalesbloom. David must have decided right then that Eastpeak would be the first target of his unrestrained wrath, openly challenging the Mythguard… and I had the foreboding feeling that the silence I heard on the audio recordings was evidence that he had found our bug. This was the consequence of my scheming. This was my plan, backfired. All of my packmates had paid the price for what I thought was the wisest choice, meddling from afar, as if keeping my distance would be safest for everyone. I was obviously very wrong.

Of my nineteen packmates, my Beta and seven more wolves were slaughtered… and it was all my fault.