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And you used your dreamglide to see all this?
Yes, until Sandrine found me out.
Even telepathically, she heard Fergus offer up a frustrated wolf grunt. Wait a minute. Are you saying she knew you were there?
She did, so I left.
Okay, whatever you do, don’t go back. I’ll come get you personally at nightfall, that is, if you want to come to me. Is that what you want?
Absolutely. There was no doubt in her mind. Whatever her life was supposed to be, it would include Fergus and Savage Territory. Whether they would become a couple remained to be seen, but she was meant to be at the Gordion Compound, at least for the immediate future.
Fergus ended the telepathic conversation shortly afterward. He would need to quickly pull all the pack alphas together in order to counteract Sydon’s plans for Savage.
But as she sat on the couch, something nagged at her about Sydon’s HQ. She was certain about the location. That wasn’t the problem. Instead, her fae senses told her she’d missed something critical, a piece of information Fergus would need as he put together his battle plan.
She felt a profound compulsion to go back. But returning to Sydon’s HQ, even in the dreamglide, would put her in harm’s way. Sandrine would be on the lookout for her and might have enough power to attack her through the veil of the dream-world reality.
Mary felt dizzy. She’d never faced a situation like this before. She had a choice, a real one. And Fergus had already told her not to return.
Yet if she didn’t go back, she sensed hundreds of wolves would die.
She thought about contacting him again, but she already knew he would never allow her to put herself in danger. The decision had to be hers.
But it only took her another minute of deliberation. She didn’t fully understand why her life had taken such a profound turn over the past couple of nights, yet it had, and she could never simply resume her former life. That meant doing what needed to be done where the coming attack was concerned.
She would return to Sydon’s headquarters and if she was clever enough, she might even survive whatever the witch threw at her.
She didn’t leave right away, however. Instead, she forced herself to grow very calm since her instincts told her something else. The longer she waited to return, the greater her chances of survival.
~ ~ ~
Fergus showered and dressed for the night in fresh leathers and a black tank trimmed with amber and bearing the Gordion logo patch. As he put on his boots, a weight settled on his shoulders, something he’d never experienced before because it felt very fae.
Mary’s news had confirmed his own growing concerns for Savage. He just never imagined the plot against the territory would be as involved as it was. But it definitely explained the uneasy sensation he’d had for days that Savage was on the brink of war. And if he hadn’t been sharing powers with Mary, he wouldn’t have had a clue that anything was wrong since it was his faeness that warned him of the looming disaster.
As soon as Mary had described the monitors, the war room containing the digital relief map, and that Harley was contacting Sydon’s wolves one after the other, he understood the scope of Sydon’s plans.
Savage was a hotbed of reactionary wolves. When Elena had killed herself, some of his wolves had gone berserk with rage and had attacked Sydon’s forces without weaponry of any kind. They’d been slaughtered as a result. But it was this kind of erratic, impulsive, and completely irrational behavior that occurred when war broke out, only on a much larger scale.
Wolves only had to get their blood up and mayhem and death would follow. Mary’s sister, Alicia, had gotten killed as a result of wild, uncontrollable wolf reactions.
A direct attack at the front of each pack compound would incite every pack to battle and violence. Blind instinct would follow and Fergus firmly believed an all-out war would ensue, which appeared to by Sydon’s ultimate goal.
He’d seen it before when he’d first become alpha. A full territory war had broken out and had lasted for weeks. In the end the hellish conflict and had taken the lives of nearly a hundred Gordion wolves. The last thing he wanted was another similar, chaotic battle, each pack out for its own. Wolves from all the packs would get worked up beyond reason and indiscriminate killing would follow. The resulting death toll would be catastrophic across the board. He had no doubt hundreds of wolves would die, maybe thousands.
What happened next was on him. But he needed to act fast and at the same time he had to be thorough.
Mary’s safety was his first concern so he’d keep one eye on the arrival of dusk to make sure he was at her door the moment he could leave the compound. His next priority was to contact each of the pack alphas and to coordinate counter measures with them.
Leaving his private rooms, he headed to the compound’s main entrance hall. With all the exterior windows shuttered against the bright June sunlight, he called his most powerful betas together, each of them an alpha-in-training.
Fergus took a couple of minutes to engage his men individually. The alpha wolf in him demanded the contact. He either shook the beta’s hand or clapped him on the shoulder. He looked into each pair of eyes and let his new fae senses roll. He needed to know right now if he had enemies in the compound. The fate of Savage depended on the loyalty of his pack.
Fortunately, what returned to him was that he could trust all the wolves in front of him. He sensed the depth of their loyalty to the Gordion pack, equal to his own.
He also knew he had to act fast and get his bridges built by the time the sun set in the west. By his estimation, he had forty-five minutes.
Ryan spoke up. “Where’s Harley?”
