Page 61 of Renegade Kingdom
But he nodded.
“I’ll make sure they’re ready,” he said. “But if you don’t come out of that forest in two weeks, I’m coming in after you. Orders or no orders.”
I almost smiled. “I’d expect nothing less.”
He stepped back, and I turned to face the forest one last time.
Nymeria was still calling. I could feel her voice in my blood, in my bones, in the magic that pulsed through every cell of my body. She was waiting for me. Had been waiting for over a hundred years. And now, finally, I was going to answer.
I started walking.
The darkness swallowed me within three steps. The sounds of the camp faded behind me, replaced by the rustle of unseen creatures and the creak of ancient branches. The temperature dropped, the air growing thick and heavy with moisture and the scent of decay. Above me, the canopy was so dense that it blocked out the sky entirely, leaving only shadows and the faint suggestion of movement in the corners of my vision.
My mates were there. I could feel them through the bond, four steady flames burning at the edges of my awareness. Tank’s calm strength. Dean’s fierce protectiveness. Maddox’s warm heart. Ryder’s bright determination. And Damon, somewhere in the middle, his presence muted but unmistakably there. A fifth flame, waiting to be kindled.
I couldn’t see them. The forest had consumed us all, separating us into isolated pockets of darkness where each of us walked alone and together at the same time. But I could feel them, and that was enough. That would have to be enough.
I felt Fizzle’s weight on my shoulder, his talons steady, his presence a small but vital comfort. His tail was still wrapped around my neck, warm against my skin, and I was grateful for the contact. For the reminder that I wasn’t entirely alone in this darkness.
“Stay close,” I said, my voice swallowed almost immediately by the forest. “Stay together. And whatever happens, don’t stop moving.”
Nymeria’s call grew stronger with every step I took. It was a warmth in my chest, a light in the darkness, a thread that I could follow even when I couldn’t see my own feet beneath me. My mother was guiding me home. Whether that home would welcome me or destroy me remained to be seen.
Chapter Eighteen
Maddox
We’d been travelling for a little over three hours, and the forest had long since stopped feeling like a path and started feeling like a trap.
The Wildling Forest was nothing like the woods I’d known back in the human world, or even the forests near the Spring Court. This was something older. Something that had never been tamed, never been mapped, never been touched by anything resembling civilisation. The trees here were ancient beyond reckoning, their trunks so massive that it would take four men to circle them with linked arms, their bark covered in moss and lichen and strange, luminescent fungi that pulsed with a faint, sickly light.
The canopy above was so thick that it blocked out the sky entirely. I couldn’t tell if the sun was still up or if night had already fallen. We walked in a perpetual twilight that made my lion restless, his instincts screaming that this wasn’t natural, that nothing about this place was natural. The only saving grace had been that we’d all grown accustomed enough to the murky light that we could make each other out now. But that broughtits own level of danger because now the shadows seemed even more ominous than before and my eyes were straining into the darkness between them, swearing I’d just seen something move.
Fizzle kept assuring us that we were heading in the right direction, that he could sense the Fifth Court growing closer with every step. He’d fly ahead periodically, disappearing into the shadows between the trees, and then return to perch on Alyssa’s shoulder and offer cryptic assurances that we were on the right path. But I couldn’t understand how he could tell. To my eyes, it was just trees. Endless, identical trees stretching in every direction. The same twisted roots underfoot. The same drooping vines overhead. The same oppressive silence broken only by the sound of our footsteps and the occasional distant cry of something I didn’t want to identify.
Everything looked the same. Every direction looked like every other direction. We could have been walking in circles for all I knew, trapped in some endless loop that would keep us wandering until we dropped from exhaustion. If Fizzle abandoned us, we’d be lost within minutes. Lost in a forest that was very much alive and very much aware of our presence.
The ground beneath our feet was soft with centuries of fallen leaves, muffling our footsteps in a way that should have been reassuring but only made me more nervous. If we couldn’t hear ourselves walking, what else might be moving through this forest without making a sound?
We knew we had a full day of travelling through the forest ahead of us. That was Fizzle’s estimate, anyway, based on his knowledge of the old paths and his sense of how far we had to go. If everything went well, if we moved quickly and nothing went wrong, we might reach the Fifth Court before nightfall. That was the plan, anyway. That was what we were all silently hoping for, praying for, clinging to like a lifeline.
But hope felt thin in this place. The forest didn’t care about our plans. It didn’t care about our desperation or our determination. It was ancient and indifferent, and the things that lived in it were neither.
About an hour ago, my lion had alerted me to something in the shadows.
At first, I’d thought I was imagining it. A flicker of movement at the edge of my vision. A rustle in the undergrowth that didn’t match the rhythm of our footsteps. The faintest suggestion of eyes watching from between the trunks. My lion had gone still in my mind, every sense straining toward the darkness, his ears pricked forward, his nostrils flaring. And I’d known, with the certainty that came from trusting my beast, that it was real.
Something was following us.
And in the hour since I’d first noticed, whatever it was had grown.
It wasn’t just one creature anymore. It was a pack. I could feel them out there in the shadows, circling, watching, waiting. My lion tracked them instinctively, counting the presences, noting their positions. More of them joining with every passing minute. A gathering of predators that was slowly, inevitably surrounding us.
At first there had been perhaps half a dozen. Now there were at least twenty. Maybe more. They moved through the forest with a silence that was almost supernatural, never quite visible, never quite audible, but always there. Always present. A weight at the edge of perception that grew heavier with every step we took.
My lion was going mad with the tension of it. He wanted to roar, to challenge whatever was out there, to force the confrontation that we all knew was coming. But I held him back, kept him leashed, because I knew that’s exactly what they wanted. They were waiting for us to break. Waiting for panic to set in.
Tank moved to my side, his footsteps almost silent despite his size. His face was calm, but I could see the tension in his jaw, the way his eyes kept flicking to the trees. His bear was close to the surface too, I could feel it through the pack bond, a vast and dangerous presence straining against its chains.
