Page 26 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

It isn’t true. She’ s spent her whole life pulling truth out of people who had no intention of handing it over. She’s standing close enough to smell the lie on me. She leaves it where it is.

We come up over the shoulder of the first spine. This is where the pack’s territory starts, marked the same way it’s always been marked: a stack of stone, waist high, set by hand, gray with weather. Nothing carved into it, nothing written on it, exactly the color it was when I was small enough to walk under the top of it. It says now what it said then - this ground has an owner. I am not it. I stop in front of the stone, put my hand on the top of the stack. The stone holds the cold the same as it always did, straight through my palm and into the bones of my wrist.

From here the switchback climbs two bends and turns out of sight behind the rock. Everything past that stays where it is until we walk into it.

I stand there long enough that she could ask me what’s wrong. She stays quiet, comes up on my left and stops a few inches off my shoulder. Her attention goes out to the switchback with mine. She waits it out beside me.

I start walking again. Past the marker, onto the ground that made me. Nobody up here ever let me keep one inch of it. She comes with me.

The pack that raised me is somewhere past that switchback. In a few minutes she’ll see the ground I grew up on and the people who never claimed me. I never gave her a reason for wanting to come up here without her.

She never asked me for one.

Chapter 16

Nyxiana

We cross the marker into the North Range side by side.

The wind hits first, cold and cutting straight down off the ridge above us. Underneath it runs the same cold, smoke-edged scent that met us on the crossing. Stone buildings sit low against the rock ahead, built directly into the ley line. Structural glyph-work runs along the load-bearing points of the walls, worn down by weather until the lines barely hold their pattern anymore. Smoke rises thin from a handful of chimneys. Nothing else about the buildings says anyone is inside them. They were standing here long before anyone breathing behind them was born.

Wolves stand at a distance in twos and threes, watching us without closing the distance. I count nine before I stop counting. Every one of them is empty-handed. Some are barely grown. Nobody speaks to us. They stand there and look, and not one of them looks away. The wind cuts sharp enough that I have to squint against it.

My read on this place comes back strange from the first step. Frequencies here run old and layered, generations of the same bloodline on the same rock long enough to leave a mark that has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with time. It sits denser than the reading I took off Briarstone, denser even than parts of Drakoria proper, a place that has never let an outsider’s signature settle into it. Underneath all of that, close enough to touch, sits Valen’s signature. It answers wrong. Not absent. Recognized. The ground knows him and hasn’t let him back in.

An older wolf breaks off from the rest and crosses to us. The others open a space around him as he comes, without a word. This is their Alpha. Gray runs through his hair. Weather sits deep in the lines of his face. He’s a man who’s spent decades being obeyed. He’s never had to raise his voice to be heard. He stops close enough for a proper greeting and lets silence sit there instead.

His eyes go over Valen slow, longer than a first meeting calls for. This man has never laid eyes on Valen before today, I’d stake my life on it. There’s recognition coming off him.

“We’re here for the founding ground.” Valen says it straight, no preamble, nothing softened around it.

The Alpha lets the question sit before he answers. “You don’t get to ask for that.”

He never uses Valen’s name and doesn’t need to. This isn’t ordinary wariness toward a stranger. It’s the kind doesn’t care who you are, only that you don’t belong. This one is aimed at Valen, and has a reason behind it. I give my name and my standing, the same opening that’s carried me through doors in three other realms this year alone. It gets me nothing. His eyes stay locked on Valen, fixed there like I haven’t spoken at all. I try a different angle anyway.

“What we’re trying to stop doesn’t stay in one realm. It’s already crossed into three others. It comes for you too, whether that ground opens or not.”

“Not my concern.”

“It should be.”

“It isn’t.” He doesn’t blink saying it. “That’s not my fight.”

I hold his eyes and let the silence after it run, the same tactic he used on us at the start. His face doesn’t change. I lay the actual request out, nothing wrapped around it this time. “We need access to the founding ground.”

“No.” The word comes down with finality.

He turns back to Valen. His face goes harder than it was a moment ago. “You’re the wolf who never shifted.” He lets it sit a beat. “The one who left.” His mouth curls around the last word like it’s bitter in his mouth.

Valen never told me any of this. Nobody gets called ‘the one who left’ unless he was theirs first. This pack raised him. He walked away and never came back. Valen lets it pass without a word. His eyes hold somewhere past the Alpha. There’s nothing there to look at. The gray light off the stone catches the silver threading through his hair. The line of his mouth doesn’t move, but nothing about holding it that way looks easy.

My read of him holds steady. It just stops keeping me at arm’s length the way it usually does. My weight goes forward onto the balls of my feet. I’ve done this before, for Kaspian, and my body hasn’t worked out yet that this is a different thing. Stepping in front of him here would take this off him. He needs them to watch him stand in it on his own. I hold where I am. My nails press half-moons into my palms, the only place I let the urge go.

“Come on, Valen. There has to be another way onto that ground.”

“No.” He doesn’t look away from it. “There isn’t.”

I read the Alpha again, past what he’s actually said this whole time. Fear reads differently from anger in a person’s frequency. Anger runs hot and forward, reaching toward whatever it’s aimed at. This runs the other way, pulled in tight and guarded, the exact signature of someone standing motionless because moving might bring something closer. I’ve read that same pattern on soldiers before a battle they already expect to lose. I’ve read it on parents standing over a child’s sickbed. I have never read it on a man refusing two strangers a stretch of empty ground.