Chapter 125
Terrell’s POV
"ANGEL!"
My voice went into the fog and the fog took it and gave me nothing back.
I was on my knees at the cliff edge. My hands were on the stone. The generals were behind me and the dead horse was behind them and none of that mattered because Angel had gone over this edge and I could not hear her and the fog was telling me nothing.
"ANGEL!"
Nothing.
I looked at the horse.
It was dead. Not from the run - from whatever had been done to it before the run. I could see it now with the cold clarity of fury making things sharp: the way it had gone, the specific direction it had chosen, the cliff it had known was there. Not a spooked animal. Not a freak accident.
Someone had done this.
Someone had sent my wife over a cliff.
Gareth and Bellick and Kade had gone to find who. They had come back empty. Which meant whoever it was had prepared their escape as carefully as they had prepared everything else, and right now that information was the least important thing available to me because Angel was below and I couldn’t hear her and the bond...
I pressed my hand to my chest.
Still there.
Faint. She was alive. She was alive and she was somewhere below this cliff and she was alive and I was going to reach her.
I stood.
I removed my coat.
My boots.
Kade appeared at my side. "Alpha..."
"Don’t try to stop me."
"The cliff is..."
"No." I turned to look at him with everything I had. "She is down there. I am going down."
"You can’t survive..."
"I can survive things you can’t," I said. "That’s what I am." I looked at all three of them. "Stay here. If I’m not back in two hours, send for Kane and a garrison of soldiers."
Gareth looked like he was going to argue. Then he looked at my face and decided, with the wisdom of a man who had known me long enough, that the argument was already over.
I walked to the edge.
I shifted.
The change came the way it always came - my body reorganizing itself into what it actually was underneath the clothes, the title and the human world. The black wolf. Larger than the others, always had been, and I stood at the cliff edge and looked down into the fog.
I went over.
The cliff wall was the only reference point I had.
I used it - jumping, catching, the impact of each landing absorbed and released, the wolf’s body designed for exactly this kind of punishment, made for terrain that broke other things. Stone tore at my paws. The speed of each descent tore at everything else. I didn’t slow. I didn’t consider the pain. I simply went down, the fog thickening around me as I went, and I kept going until there was no more wall and there was only air and I fell the remaining distance and hit the ground.
The impact was excruciating.
I lay on the ground and let my body do what it did - the repair, the patient systematic reconstruction of everything the fall had broken, which was several things and took longer than I would have preferred. I lay on the ground at the bottom of the cliff in the fog and I looked at what was around me while I waited.
Bones.
Old ones, newer ones, the grim record of a cliff that had been receiving things for a very long time. The smell of decay. The smell of old blood, long dried. The particular silence of somewhere that things came to and did not leave.
I got up.
She was not here.
I moved through the ground methodically - my wolf’s nose doing what the wolf’s nose did, sorting through the layers of old and older and oldest, looking for something recent, something alive, something that was her...
Nothing.
No trace. No blood. No scent.
She had not reached the bottom.
Which meant she was somewhere in between, which meant she was alive, which meant there was hope.
The sound from the trees.
I turned.
Five wolves came out of the forest line, looking extremely confident in their numbers. They were large, but not the largest I had seen. I assessed them, trying to gauge where they belonged.
The one in the middle - this one thinks he’s in charge.
Through the linked voice, the wolf spoke with the satisfaction of someone who has been waiting for exactly this: The black wolf. From Black Wolf territory.
I said nothing.
This one is not like the others, another said. He is bigger.
From a noble family, maybe, a third offered.
A noble? It’ll be reckless for a noble to be here, the middle one said.
Movement from behind them.
The actual leader came through.
I had identified him before he appeared - the shift in the others, the way they adjusted without being told, the quality of deference that could not be faked. He was bigger than the rest by a margin that was meaningful, and he moved with the unhurried certainty of something that had not needed to prove itself in a long time.
He looked at me.
Idiots, he said, with the tired contempt of a man surrounded by people who couldn’t identify what was standing in front of them. Do you not know the Alpha of Black Wolf pack?
The others went quiet in the way things went quiet when they had made an error.
The Alpha, one said. Why would he...
Because he’s a stupid bastard, the leader said. And he came alone. He directed his voice at me then, and the contempt in it was the kind that was built on real grievance. Welcome to your doom, Terrell of Black Wolf. You destroyed our villages. You took our people. And you have the guts to walk down here alone. A pause. We’ll keep you. We’ll spend however long it takes making you understand what you took from us. And when you beg us to end your life, we won’t.
He turned.
Bring him, he said to the others. Alive.
Then hewalked back into the forest.