Chapter 46: War
Stefan’s POV
I sat still, making my spine go rigid as I silently started begging whatever cosmic entity ran this System not to drop another Incubus Ascension quest on me right this second. My nerves couldn’t take a third countdown in one morning.
"Give a man a damn break. Please!"
"Hey," I muttered looking up in the direction where the system notification light was supposed to be, low enough that only I could hear it over the wind,
"You got any actual magic stashed away somewhere that could bring back that bird? Asking for a friend."
"Me. I’m the friend." I added.
I got nothing in response.
I tried again, silent this time, just thinking the question hard, figuring maybe it hadn’t caught the words over all this noise.
Still nothing.
Finally, after a pause that felt deliberately, personally cruel, the system notification dropped:
[Host is on his own to handle the situation]
"You’re a betrayer," I hissed under my breath. "You made me destroy that thing to complete a mission and now you’re just gonna leave me to figure out the fallout myself? Incredible. Truly incredible customer service."
The horse hit a rough patch of ground, and Belladonna leaned forward slightly to compensate for the jolt, and that was when I felt it - the full, heavy press of her chest against the back of my head, warm even through the leather binding across her armor, soft in a way that scrambled every thought currently trying to form in my skull.
I licked my lips before I could stop myself. *Succulent* was the only word that came to mind, and I immediately regretted thinking it in a moment this genuinely dangerous.
"Get a grip!" I gritted to myself or was it actually meant to my cock which seemed to twitch at that moment?
Okay, maybe.
"Move your head," Belladonna snapped, and used that exact same pressure to shove me forward again, spine straight, out of the contact entirely.
I nearly moaned. Who used breasts to shove someone?
I actually had to bite the moan back hard, my throat working around the sound before it could escape and get me killed for a reason completely unrelated to not being able to bring back the bird.
"Can’t wait for the real fun to start with this one," I thought, filing the sensation away carefully for later - assuming, of course, I survived long enough to have a later.
"Your hour is already running," Belladonna reminded me, her voice sharp enough to slice straight through whatever daydream I’d been quietly constructing.
"Start working your magic."
I gulped, my mouth already opening to stall for time I had no actual plan to fill.
But that was when the sound came.
A low, rolling growl, rising from somewhere behind us, guttural and layered, dozens of throats snarling in ragged unison, close enough that I felt it more than heard it, vibrating up through the saddle itself.
Belladonna’s head snapped around.
Then another growl answered from directly ahead, and my stomach dropped clean through the horse for what felt like the hundredth time that morning.
I turned as far as I could without falling and saw them properly for the first time - shapes breaking from the treeline on both sides of the path, massive, wolf-shaped, matted gray-brown fur bristling along raised hackles, easily fifty of them.
Their teeths bared long and yellow, their eyes catching the thin light filtering down through the space like dozens of tiny burning coals.
"Rogues," Belladonna snarled, the word dropping out of her low and venomous, like a curse she’d spat a hundred times before.
She pulled the horse to a hard stop, and behind us the ground shook as her warriors closed the gap at a full gallop, their weapons already drawn and glinting.
"I still have to face a war after the one I have been battling in my head since morning?" I groaned.
My conman skills weren’t capable of fighting a war. What would I do?
Before I could think of a way to protect myself, one wolf broke from the pack early, faster than the rest, its jaws stretched impossibly wide, aimed dead center at our horse’s exposed throat.
Belladonna’s arm shot back and grabbed a fistful of my collar.
"Wait, what are you trying to do?" My eyes widened in horror.
Belladonna didn’t say anything to me. Instead, she flung me sideways with a burst of words in that clipped growling language, the world spinning hard and fast around me.
"Is this how I’m going to die?" I thought frantically, my eyes widening to the fullest.
Then I braced for the ground, braced for the crack of bone, for pain, for an undignified end to whatever strange Chapter of my life this was supposed to be.
Instead I landed in a pair of arms. I looked up and saw whose arms those were.
Zinnia’s arms - steady, solid, catching my full weight mid-fall without so much as a stumble beneath the impact, like I weighed nothing at all. She caught me and didn’t wait for a second before breaking into a sprint, carrying me tucked against her chest at a dead run.
"Thanks heaven." I heaved a sigh of relief and allowed myself to be carried.
Zinnia deposited me without ceremony among the cluster of slaves who had finally caught up to the front of the column, breathless and wide-eyed.
She was gone again before I’d even fully registered her face, sprinting straight back toward the fight without a single backward glance.
I caught my breath, chest heaving hard, and looked around. The slaves had bunched together in a tight knot, a handful of warriors forming a loose perimeter around us, their blades already drawn, their eyes scanning the treeline for any wolf that broke through the main line.
I looked toward the front of the chaos.
The warriors had shifted.
Right in front of me, a woman I didn’t recognize dropped onto all fours mid-stride, and by the time she landed, she wasn’t a woman at all anymore - fur the color of dried copper rippling down her spine, a long bushy tail flaring out behind her, pointed ears sharpening to twin blades atop her skull. A fox, easily the size of a small horse, teeth bared, lunging straight into the fray.
Beside her, another shape dropped low and sleek, spotted fur rippling gold and black in complex rosette patterns, moving with a speed that blurred the eye - an ocelot, compact and lightning-fast, darting between two wolves and dragging one down by the throat before either could react. Jonquil. Had to be. Nobody else moved like that.
And then, towering over every single shape on that battlefield, unmistakable even through the chaos and the dust kicking up off the road -
Belladonna.
Her transformation hit different from the rest. Where the others shifted into sleek, fast predators, she became something closer to a mountain given claws - a massive jaguar, coat black as pitch except for faint rosettes visible only when the light caught her just right, muscles rolling like something out of a nightmare, jaw easily wide enough to take a wolf’s entire skull between her teeth.
She moved through the wolf-pack like water through cracked stone, tearing a path clean and brutal, warriors falling into formation behind her without needing a single spoken command.
I exhaled sharp and ragged, watching the whole thing unfold from my safe, thoroughly cowardly distance among the slaves.
"Please don’t let any of them get ’won over’." I thought, praying hard to absolutely nobody in particular, watching fur and claws and teeth blur together in the dust.
"I already don’t have a plan for the two we’ve got back on that carriage."