by Skye Malone
But she’d been kidding herself. Her life ended when she was twelve years old; she just hadn’t understood it then. And now there was nothing except this.
She turned away from the manor. The people here would survive, and her family would too. She’d get to Minneapolis, and she’d find her dad and brother. They wouldn’t be out there alone, unprotected from the draugar and the Order and the whole damn world. This ulfhednar bunker near Mariposa was the safest place on earth now, so this was where they needed to be. She’d get them here where Hayden’s defenses would protect them, and after that, it didn’t matter. She’d leave. Throw herself off a cliff, if she had to. She’d do whatever was necessary to make sure the curse couldn’t hurt anyone else when it took her, and then…
She’d die knowing the people she loved would be okay. That was the important thing.
A shuddering breath entered her lungs, and she forced herself to focus. Silence had served her so far; now came the time for speed. The wolves would hear her start the car no matter how quiet she tried to be, so now the only thing that mattered was getting out of here before they realized what she was doing and tried to stop her from leaving.
Swinging into the vehicle and ignoring the crunch of old wrappers beneath her, she cranked the engine and then shoved the gearshift into drive. With a foot to the pedal and her hands clenched tight on the wheel, she floored it away from the manor as quickly as the old jalopy could carry her.
2
Wes
“Yes, I know it’s crowded underground, but you still can’t be out here.” Wes struggled to hold his voice level as the little human boy glared up at him. “And I know you know why.”
“But my uncle says those bad things can’t get us here.”
Wes glanced at the forest in spite of himself. The seidr defending the manor and its surroundings wasn’t visible like it had been in town. No glistening shield of defense shone in the forest now. But their resident crazy woman—or seer, as she called herself—Ingrid assured them that the power their alpha’s mate, Hayden, controlled was still keeping this place safe.
As much as it could be, anyway, given that there were now nearly two hundred humans filling what had been the wolves’ sanctuary. There weren’t a lot of places left in the world where the ulfhednar could know they were safe from humans—or that humans were safe from them. Now even the manor was gone.
Everything was gone.
“Your uncle needs to be more careful too, then,” Wes said to the boy. “Letting down your guard gets people hurt.”
The kid blinked, blood seeming to drain from his face. Wes struggled to hold in a grimace. He sucked at this. Reassuring kids. Talking to kids. Hell, even just talking to humans. And now it was only worse, considering that the outright fear that all those humans should have felt around his kind was gone.
Didn’t they understand how dangerous this was for them? Being near the ulfhednar, staying with his kind? Sure, the fact that the world was now full of undead monsters—monsters only the ulfhednar could destroy—probably contributed to the trust they were all suddenly displaying in wolves they most likely would have slaughtered less than a month ago, but…
Still. It was reckless. Foolish. Yes, the other wolves were safe enough to be around. He trusted his pack implicitly and knew they’d never harm a single human soul.
Unlike him, they hadn’t been made into an ulfhednar by a monster.
“Go back inside,” he continued to the kid. “All of you.“
He included the boy’s friends in his pointed look and was rewarded a moment later by the children glancing at each other and then retreating toward the manor at top speed.
Thank the gods.
Watching the kids until they were safely through the door, he drew a breath of air and then cleared his throat uncomfortably, regretting leaving his mask back in the bunker. But if there was a threat out here, he wanted to be able to smell it coming, for everyone’s sake.
“That go okay?” Marrok asked when Wes walked back into the garage. Arranging the last box of food stores safely on a cart, the large wolf eyed Wes.
“Yeah, fine.”
He could feel Marrok’s suspicion, but the male didn’t say anything more. His pack shared his discomfort at their sudden proximity to humans, if not all of his reasons for it. They knew he hated this, even if he understood how their options had been limited.
Leave the humans to die or bring them back to the manor.
Forget limited. Those options were shit.
Beyond the garage, he heard an engine start, followed a moment later by the sound of a vehicle driving away. He tossed Marrok a questioning look, only to find confusion on his pack brother’s face.
“You remember anyone saying they were heading out?” he asked Marrok.
The male shook his head.
Wes walked back outside and peered around the corner of the building. The courtyard was an expanse of cobblestones that led down to a long drive away from the manor. Whoever had been there, they were long gone.
Trepidation prickled through him, and the wolf inside him stirred. Major Rolston and the ROTC kids who’d survived the fires wouldn’t have left without warning, and the rest of the humans certainly hadn’t seemed in any rush to leave, considering the manor and the bunker below it were the most secure places they’d seen in weeks. And the pack bond that let him feel where his friends were wasn’t giving him any indication some of the wolves were gone.
That left one option, and it wasn’t good.
He strode back toward the manor. “You okay to keep watch out here for a moment?” he called to Marrok.
His friend nodded.
Wes continued toward the bunker entrance on the far side of the garage. They’d done their best to guarantee Allegiants weren’t among the survivors—checking the wrists of anyone Hayden couldn’t vouch for in search of those damned tattoos—but short of commanding every human to pull a full-blown strip search, there was only so much the wolves could do.
They all suspected the Order of Nidhogg would make another move eventually. Yes, the wolves stopped one guy, but those bastards were everywhere.
Wes had just hoped they’d have more time to prepare.
He reached the bunker entrance and pressed his palm to the panel on the wall. The door opened and quickly, he hurried inside, pausing only long enough to tug the thick metal closed behind him before jogging down the steps. Connor and Hayden were on the opposite end of the bunker, most likely still helping the humans get sorted into their various barracks and rooms.
Weaving through the crowds and the halls, he cursed the minutes it took him to make his way through the complex. The place was huge, but now that every surviving human for miles around filled the bunker, it was enough to make him claustrophobic, and he found his pulse flying from more than nerves about the Order.
Gods, he could barely breathe down here.
By the time he reached the area they’d taken to calling the front room, if only because it led straight up into the manor above, it was all he could do not to start shoving past the humans. Over the heads of the survivors, he caught sight of Connor with Hayden beside him. Recently elevated to alpha of the Thorsen pack, Connor had taken to the leadership position with aplomb.
But even he had a harried edge to his expression now.
“—in the western barracks.” Connor pointed, and the human couple near him looked toward the hall. “That way. Last door on the left.”
“Yes, security has already checked the rooms,” Hayden assured a young girl clinging to her arm. “I promise no draugar are there.”
“Connor!” Wes shouted over the crowd.
His friend looked toward him, concern flashing across his face. “What is it?”
“Can I borrow you for a sec?”
Connor glanced at Hayden, who nodded quickly and then returned to reassuring the human girl who had yet to let her arm go. Maneuvering through the throng, Connor walked up to him. “What?”
Wes eyed the humans warily,
and he kept his voice low as he said, “We might have a problem. Anyone mention to you that they were heading out of here?”
Connor gave him a skeptical look. “No…”
“Someone took a car. Drove away pretty damn fast too. It wasn’t any of us, and Levi didn’t mention the soldiers planned on leaving, so…”
“Shit.”
Wes nodded.
Connor scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Okay, head upstairs. Find Tyson. He was working on a few of the cameras. Ask him if any of them caught a glimpse—”
“Hayden!”
Wes turned. A gray-haired human woman rushed through the crowd, a frantic look on her face.
Hayden hurried toward her. “Johanna, what’s wrong?”
Pushing a folded bit of paper into Hayden’s hands, Johanna seemed on the verge of tears. “I went to check on her because she seemed… I knew something was off earlier, but I didn’t want to pry and— Oh, sweetie! She left!”
Blinking, Hayden took the note. “What?” Horror spread through her expression as she read the contents. “Oh my God.” She looked at Connor. “Lindy.”
Chills shot through Wes while, inside him, his wolf went utterly still. Lindy was… what was she? Human. Intriguing, beautiful, unbelievably attractive, and… human.
Also known as off-limits to him. In the two decades since a sick bastard attacked Wes and turned him into an ulfhednar, he and the rabid wolf inside him had come to an uneasy truce. Wes would accept what he was, could shift and live in the pack and cautiously be all the things that the wolf could be, but only if the wolf accepted there were rules—the cardinal one of which was he never got involved with a human. He couldn’t risk it. If even a trace of that bastard’s corruption had become a part of Wes when he’d been bitten, it meant Wes might be driven to do that to someone else. The ulfhednar doctors swore they didn’t think such a thing was possible, but that didn’t equal rock-solid certainty, not in his book. And while Wes had worked hard to control the wolf inside him, if that control slipped… if the wolf bit a human and did to them what had been done to him as a child…
His stomach twisted. It would be hell, and not just for him. With that one bite, he would have stolen everything. Their life as they’d known it. Their dreams and anything they might have been in the human world. Now, they would only be a wolf, forever outside society, forever at risk of being killed by humans who would never understand what he’d forced his victim to become.
He couldn’t do that to someone. Take everything they were out of pure selfishness, just for the sake of companionship or sex or even some half-assed attempt at a relationship. It wasn’t an option.
So stay away from humans was the number one rule.
And yet, right at this moment, his wolf didn’t give a shit about the rules. Adrenaline flooded through his body in an instant, screaming for him to race out the door after her. The damn creature pushed at his skin, wanting him to shift if only to move faster. His wolf had been drawn to Lindy since the moment Wes first laid eyes on her—one little apocalypse and a couple of weeks ago in the flower shop where she’d worked with Hayden. And sure, he’d tried to play it cool ever since. Kept all their subsequent interactions to a minimum and never so much as hinted at how his cock hardened just at the sight of the gorgeous, feisty woman with honey-brown hair and dark, sharp eyes that he suspected saw a lot more than she let on.
“What about Lindy?” he managed with a flash of pride for how neutral his voice sounded.
Connor glanced at him sharply, curiosity in his eyes.
Fuck.
Speechless, Hayden extended the paper scrap to her mate and then glanced at Johanna. “Go find my parents. See if she said anything to them, okay?”
Johanna nodded and hurried away.
Ignoring them, Connor read the message quickly and then offered the note to Wes, a guarded expression on his face.
Wes unfolded it and skimmed the neat, curving letters in blue ink.
I’ll be back if I can. I’m sorry. - Lindy
He looked up at Hayden, shivers racing through him. “What the hell is this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would she leave?” Connor asked.
Hayden floundered. “I…” She turned away, running a hand over her hair. “I mean, I don’t… I told her no one would hurt her here. She…” Her eyes went back to her mate. “I have to go after her. She—”
“You can’t,” Connor told her, a strained note of apology in his voice. “Without you at the manor, the defenses on this place won’t hold. We can try to send some of the soldiers—”
“And if the draugar are out there?” Hayden countered. “No, it has to be a wolf and—”
“I’ll go.”
Connor and Hayden both turned to Wes, appearing alarmed and relieved in turns.
“Alone?” Connor replied.
Wes shrugged. “What other option is there?”
His friend grimaced. Wes knew what he said was true, though, even without his wolf pacing back and forth like a neurotic windup toy in his brain. Their pack brother Tyson was repairing the cameras and technology-based security of this place. Kirsi was working with the human soldiers on guard rotations, and Marrok would be furious if asked to leave her. Luna was helping the doctors with the wounded while all the other wolves of the larger Thorsen pack were busy getting the humans settled into this place.
And that left him, the one guy who could go.
The one guy who really shouldn’t.
“She’s not been gone very long,” he made himself continue. “I’ll find her, figure out what’s going on, and then we’ll head back here. Okay?”
Hayden smiled at him. “Thank you.”
Connor sighed. “Do you have any idea where she would have gone?” He addressed the question to his mate.
Hayden’s brow shrugged. “No. I mean…” She paused. “Her family. They’re all the way in Minneapolis, though. Surely, she wouldn’t…” The disbelief on her face faded into nausea. “Oh, God.”
Wes’s wolf strained inside him like a rabid dog on a leash. Northeast was good. Better than good. He needed to be heading that way sooner than yesterday, ripping with teeth and claw through every damn thing that blocked his path to her, so why the hell was he still standing here?
He shoved the feeling aside, trying to focus. The damn creature was delusional and would latch on to anything that might lead to the human woman. “I’ll start in that direction, then.”
“Hayden?” her mother cried, hurrying through the crowd with Hayden’s father on her heels. “What’s this about Lindy being gone?”
“Did she say anything to you?” Hayden asked.
Her mother shook her head, and Hayden’s father did the same.
Good enough for him. “I’ll be back soon,” Wes said, starting for the door.
Connor caught his arm. “We won’t have any way to reach you out there. Tyson and the others are trying to get the radios working, but even shortwave is barely functional. You’ll be on your own.”
“Then the sooner I get going, the better.”
Connor stared at him for a heartbeat and then exhaled, releasing him. “Take extra gas, food, and some blankets, just in case. We don’t know what the roads are like beyond town.”
Wes gave his friend a nod. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
3
Lindy
The apocalypse didn’t make for the best driving conditions.
Gripping the steering wheel of the brown jalopy, Lindy wove through the abandoned cars on the highway, silently begging the old tires to hold on to the icy road despite her speed. The fire that had poured from the gashes in the sky weeks ago seemed to have reached here as well, turning the snow that used to cover the terrain into a muddy sludge that had frozen in the bitter cold. It had burned the cars too, charring the vehicles around her into blackened sculptures of twisted metal with corpses inside.
They’d tried to flee, the passengers. Scrambled toward
the windows or shoved open doors. Whether anyone had survived was impossible to tell, but she doubted it. If the fire here had been anything like Mariposa, there wouldn’t have been time to escape, let alone anywhere safe to go.
Memories of screaming flickered through her mind. That day had been the first time she’d used that much seidr in years, and even then, her defensive spell had barely held. In a shimmering bubble of light around her and Hayden’s parents, she’d channeled all the magic she could while fire fell from the gashes in the sky and killed everyone in the neighborhood around her, burning them alive in their homes.
And afterward, the decade-old tattoo on her wrist scorched her like a brand, warning of the cost.
Of the curse whose time had come.
She shifted on the uncomfortably hard seat. If nothing else, the blackened bodies around her were motionless, and as horrible as it was, for that she was grateful. The zombie-like draugar weren’t created by a virus or bacteria, though a bite could still be a problem if the person died. But they were creatures of myth—similar, in a way, to the ulfhednar. Except while werewolves had lived in secret for centuries, no one had seen anything like the draugar in over a millennium.
That was the thing about Ragnarok. There was no telling what all it might have brought out to play.
She eyed a charred minivan as she sped past, its side door standing open with at least three bodies inside. Apocalypse or not, myth typically held that greed, discontent in life, envy, or other such things were responsible for making a body rise and return as a draug after death. There was no firm estimation on how long that took—days, weeks, months? Anything was fair game—but the ancients had employed all kinds of rituals to make sure the dead stayed dead. And while dying bloody in a burning car probably discontented someone a fair bit, apparently these corpses were so sufficiently turned to charcoal that they couldn’t rise even if they wanted to.
A blackened hand stretched past the shattered window of a pickup truck ahead of her, clawing feebly at the air.