by DG Wood
Darkly hit the water and sank. Shock gave way to panic. Panic to despair, and the woman who tasted death surrendered to her own doom in the form of a rip current that would carry her out into the Thames Estuary, the sea, and then oblivion.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Darkly looked up at the Milky Way stretched across the sky. She felt the coolness of the black water against her body. It was not as cold as it should have been, she thought. She must be numb, but she was treading water. Sleep swimming? Was that a thing? The lights of London were growing smaller and smaller up river. How long had she been in the water? How had she survived?
The current was moving quickly, and a foreboding structure was rushing to meet her. A ship? Darkly reached out to touch it. It was concrete. There was a building in the middle of the river! If she didn’t act immediately, the building would be behind her in seconds. She kicked out her legs and threw her arms up the side of the structure, desperately searching blindly for something to grab hold of. Thankfully, the concrete was rough and weathered with imperfections.
Darkly dug her nails into the pockmarks in the cement and held on. Stationary, she felt just how strong the undertow was. It carried her feet farther down river, until she climbed out of the water. She pulled herself up to a railing and slinked underneath it onto a platform. Her body was awfully lithe for being submerged in cold water, she thought. She should be stiff as a board. Darkly looked out at a row of what looked like small aircraft hangers that stretched the width of The Thames. This must be the famed Thames Barrier, that prevented London’s center being periodically drowned by the North Sea.
There was a dim light above a door that must lead to the interior of the structure. Darkly walked under the light and leapt back as though she had stepped on hot coals. What had she just seen? With mixed trepidation and elation, Darkly slid her foot forward again under the light.
Buck had told Darkly she was special, that her bloodline was ancient. The rules that applied to other wolves may not apply to her. She may be cured of the curse, or she may not be. She closed her eyes tightly, took a seat under the lightbulb and reopened her eyes to peer down at a pool of collected rain water. A wolf looked back at her. Jet black fur and eyes of steel gray. She placed her paw in the middle of the reflection and looked up at the moon in the sky.
Darkly understood in that moment just how special she was. There was no clouding of her mind. She was perfectly lucid. The primitive and intuitive had not supplanted the rational. She knew exactly who and what she was. She was Darkly Stewart…Mountie…and Werewolf. Darkly, the werewolf, threw back her head and howled for all that was lost to her and now found.
EPILOGUE
Becoming queen was not something Eluned had looked forward to. Beyond the duty and weight of decision-making, she was the sacrificial lamb, embodying all the terrible consequences of her decisions for generations to come. Half a century from now, wolves would be cursing her name and defiling her grave, if history was anything to go by.
But, the alphas had gathered. Like a conclave of cardinals, they had gathered and prayed. And Eluned was who God revealed to the majority. If she did not accept her divine responsibility, she would be required to give up her life to make way for another. Regardless, every queen becomes queen the way every alpha becomes alpha. Power most be usurped. With an alpha, exile had become the more civilized sentence on the defeated. But, for a new queen, an alpha must die, and Eluned assume the emptied authority ordinarily occupied by a man.
So, on the eve after she accepted the silver mail, Eluned stood above the young Alpha of Edinburgh, the point of a silver sword hovering over his heart. He was a young man, not yet thirty. Two children and a wife. They would be exalted above all but Eluned. The young alpha faced his death with courage because of this knowledge.
Eluned ran him through, and the conclave howled in unison.
Next book in THE DARKLY STEWART MYSTERIES…
RAVEN IN A WOLF’S WOOD
To the lawless forests of the near east, where the legends of Europe’s monsters were born, Darkly escapes…in search of allies. Romania is a place where shapeshifters take flight, and where Darkly uncovers a remnant of her family line.
THE AUTHOR
DG Wood lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Wendy, daughter, Audrey, and little werewolf, Simon. He is currently hard at work on adapting The Darkly Stewart Series for television. When not writing or working in film and television production, Wood gives talks on the art of enjoying whisky. He is a graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and a voting member of the British Academy of Film & Television Arts.