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Prologue
Soren
I’m not worried about staying quiet as I search for my pack’s missing Omega. Stealth stopped mattering days ago, once we passed the forty-eight-hour mark without finding her.
My paws pound across the forest floor. Twigs and kindling snap like broken bones beneath my heavy tread. There’s a light mist sneaking through the canopy of new spring leaves, shimmering in the setting sun, throwing tiny rainbows across tree trunks older than me.
As the sun sets over the horizon, the light dims until the Mother appears from behind rain-filled clouds, blessing the world with her guidance. My silver coat glints in her moonlight, but for once, the Mother’s presence does little to soothe my anxiety.
My overwhelming, crushing sense of failure grows with each day that passes without finding our missing pack member.
My father, our pack Alpha, says I’m too hard on myself—that our missing Omega isn’t my fault.
I disagree.
I’m the Heir. It’s my job to protect every member of our pack, and I take my job seriously. Each wolven life is precious, but especially the lives of our females and pups. In the eighty-plus years I’ve been alive, a female has never gone missing from our pack.
Our Elders say I’m still young—and compared to the centuries they’ve lived, maybe I am—but I still know what it means when a trail goes cold, same as any good hunter.
Disappearances don’t just occur. Our pack is large—in the thousands—but close. We function as a family, as the Mother intended. We look out for each other. Protect one another.
No one runs off to the big city for a “better life.”
Cities are full of pollution and noise and humans living so close together they have to fight for oxygen. Nothing about that appeals to wolven.
Not to mention, unlike the vampires, we don’t blend in with humans. We’re too big. Too primal. Even in our two-legged form, there’s always something about us that humans can sense. It makes them nervous. Makes them smell like prey.
Still, some believe Saline wanted a life in the city. I know better. I’ve never been close with the Omega, but I know she’d never leave voluntarily.
She wanted to explore the world, yes, but she loves her home. She loves her pack and family. She’s spent the last four years training with one of our most gifted healers and often talks about finding her mate and settling down in a cottage of her own.
When her mentor became too sick to travel and missed the next supply run, Saline came to my father for permission to take her place.
My father allowed it.
By all accounts, everything was fine right up until she visited the apothecary to purchase herbs, tinctures, and a few rare ingredients we can’t grow on pack lands.
Her guards waited outside the store. After thirty minutes, they started to get nervous. After forty, they went to find her and instead discovered she was missing.
I was with my father when he got the call, and I haven’t stopped hunting for her since. My search has expanded gradually with each passing day, stretching mile after mile further away from where she went missing.
This morning, I stumbled across a forested area I didn’t even realize was here. It’s secluded—about twenty miles away from the nearest human town—and, if I’m not mistaken, some human’s personal property.
It’s peaceful, but nothing out of the ordinary, until—
I still, claws digging into the dirt and leaves. Every one of my senses dials up to a thousand, going on high alert. My nostrils flare, searching for confirmation of what I know I just smelled, even if my brain struggles to make sense of it.
There’s something here. Something that shouldn’t exist.
My nostrils flare, but the scent doesn’t change. This isn’t a false alarm or my mind playing tricks on me. I’m not so sleep-deprived that my senses are losing touch with reality.
Against all odds, there’s a fucking panther out here.
And unless I’m losing my mind, its scent is… not normal.
It makes no sense. Unless it escaped from a zoo, there’s no logical reason for a panther to be in these woods. Panthers aren’t even indigenous to the area, for Fate's sake.
Even if they were, a panther shouldn’t smell like woodsmoke and lightning. Its scent wouldn’t make my teeth hum and my bones vibrate.
