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“I no longer feel like I’ve been held in a box for weeks and had my bones broken,” Elrick said with a grin. “I would say that was progress, wouldn’t you?”
“My heart is sore that this happened to you,” Tove told him gently.
“There are casualties of war, Tove, and there are survivors. I am a survivor.”
“You are,” she said honestly. “And a father,” she added with a sly smile to lighten the mood.
Elrick’s whole face split in a grin. “I have twins,” he said with pride. “And an alpha,” he added in awe. “I always knew Misty was too good for me,” he confided in the alpha’s Second.
Tove laughed at his conspiratorial wink and playfully shoved at him. “You know no such thing!” she said as she made herself more comfortable. “She will be eager to have you back in the pack lands.”
Elrick nodded and looked away from Tove. “I am eager to be home,” he admitted. “But I know I am needed here, beside the alpha. This war is more than me and my wife,” Elrick said as he looked back at Tove.
“No, Elrick, the fight is over for you, you have given enough.”
Elrick shook his head angrily. “No, this fight is over,” he said as he pointed at his eye. “But thewaris not. The alpha needs me, he needs the help of all the pack lands, and I will make sure as Arflyn’s grace that he will get it.”
“Elrick, your pups,” Tove protested.
“Will always be my pups, but how can I go back with my tail between my legs because I was wounded? That is not the leadership my pack needs.”
Tove watched him as he looked at her in earnest. “You are too good,” she murmured.
Elrick huffed lightly, and they sat in silence for a few moments. “I have remembered more of where I was held, I was hoping to tell Marcus,” he said after a while. “I am fuzzy on some of it, I am not trained as a Sentinel, but I have been trying to recall as much as I could.”
Tove reached into her pocket and pulled out a notebook. “Care to share with a friend?”
“Of course.” He leaned back in his pillows. “How does this work?”
“You tell me everything you can remember, and then I ask you questions,” Tove said as she opened the notebook. “It’s very tedious for you, tiring too, but needed.”
“I am ready.” Elrick began to retell what happened to him. He had received word that the Drakhyn had set up a den west of his pack, and he had been sending out small scouting parties to survey the land and their actions. But each scout came back with no information, they couldn’t find the Drakhyn, and there were no signs of them in the woods. But they could smell their taint on the wind, so Elrick knew they were near.
He had joined the scouting parties, the search area widening more and more, and still nothing. Then word had come that the Principal Elder’s daughter had been taken. The Drakhyn had her and were heading north. North to the pack lands, and his pack of the Seven Woods would be the closest to intercept them.
Despite not having come across any Drakhyn, he and a small band of his best fighters had joined forces with his neighbouring pack led by Taras. They had hunted the woods, but no Drakhyn were to be found.
The Lycans had struggled though, because they could smell the Drakhyn and they could smell blood, spilled Akrhyn blood, but where it was coming from, they could not determine. Elrick had his pack spread out even further, and he learned that the alpha himself was coming to their aid with a pack of Elite Sentinels, all who were Lycan. Spurred into doing more, Elrick had gone further from his own pack, irrespective of the fact his wife was due to birth any day or that he was leaving his pack vulnerable.
He knew what happened to the packs that could not defend themselves, which is why he left more than half his best Lycans behind.
On his hunt to find the Drakhyn, he had quite literally stumbled among a pack of the free. Free packs were Lycans who preferred to live more like wolves and did not wholly conform to the ways of the Great Council. They identified more with their inner wolf than other Lycans. In days gone past, some free packs had stepped too far away from the Great Council rule and had turned their backs on Akrhyn society. Elrick’s own pack had been like that, the females used for birthing and hunting, the old alphas lazy, mean and cruel.
His wife had changed his pack the day she brought Marcus to their den. Marcus had been hunting traitors and found them in Elrick’s pack. Over the course of only a few days, his pack had been turned on its head. For the better.
The only issue with the pack that was left was that there was no alpha male. Elrick was only a beta and had been the alpha’s Second, but one of the killed females had recently birthed twins, and Marcus had identified that the male babe was an alpha. Misty and Elrick had agreed to raise the twins as their own. The pack would have an alpha when he was old enough, and until then, Elrick would be the pack leader.
His pack had been sheltered from the way of the Akrhyn for too long, but with the help of Tove and others, they had turned their downtrodden pack into one to be proud of.
Which is why Elrick was so adamant he would find the Drakhyn. His debt to the alpha was huge, and if he could help him, he would.
When he had come across the free Lycans, he thought he had found aid. He did not know until they attacked him that they were protecting the Drakhyn and disguising their scent with their own. Lycans and Drakhyn were enemies, and for the days they held Elrick captive and tortured him for no other reason than sport, he had been at a loss to know why they were working together.
Until the night he saw the Drakhyn leader for the first time. The malice and hate that the Drakhyn had for his fellow Drakhyn and even more for the Lycans was a heavy taint in the air. But it was not the puppet that drew Elrick’s eye. It was its Master.
“You saw it?” Tove asked as she leaned forward in her seat. “The Darkness?”
“I did, and he saw that I did.”
