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16
“Do you remember how I thought this was a terrible idea? Well, now that we’ve seen the bastard, I can unequivocally say it’s afucking terribleidea,” Reggie said, two hours later.
They’d left the forest for the adjacent field, and set up a temporary camp from the few packhorses the ground troops had brought along. The sun was setting, and her own tent had been converted into a sick ward, the injured wolves being looked over by one of the men who claimed to have a bit of physician training. Through its open flaps, she could see the two wounded resting on cots, both sitting upright, conscious in a way that no human should have been, given their injuries, with Prince Leif standing watch over the proceedings, thick arms folded over his chest, gaze as stern as that of any barbarian in the storybooks she’d read as a child. Even from a distance, the sight of him left goosebumps prickling on her arms that she hastily chafed away before turning to Reggie.
“They can most likely hear you, you know.”
He made a face. “No, they can’t.” Then: “Can they?”
They both glanced over, and slowly, Leif’s head turned, piercing blue gaze resting on them a moment before he turned back to his men.
“Gods,” Reggie breathed. “That’s bloody uncanny.”
“Wolf hearing,” she said, and then shook her head like that might help to clear it.
She was…struggling. Fuzzy-headed in an uncharacteristic way, as though she’d drunk too much wine; or like that time she’d fallen from a tree as a girl and cracked her head a rock.
She hadn’t seen any of the skinwalkers shift, the way Connor, Reggie, and the others had, but she didn’t need to. Though she didn’t share a bond with any of them, the way she did with Alpha, she’d been able to sense their magic. A humming in her mind; the lifting of all the fine hairs on her arms. Something unspoken and indefinable for anyone who wasn’t magically inclined; a sense ofknowing. They weren’t the same, but they had tread some of the same paths; could reach a plane that other humans couldn’t. She’d known that they were shifters, and what that meant physically; she hadn’t counted on the way it would feel to be in their presence.
Reggie or Connor would have said it was all the same: drakes, men who could turn to wolves, any other sort of magic. But for her, it was all quite different. She was a Drake, a descendant of the first dragon-riders. She could bond with them, communicate with them. Sheknewthem. Not to mention she’d spent her whole life cultivating relationships with horses, more than a few as difficult as her own Shadow. Though the mental link was new, the same principles applied to the drakes: a strong bond built on trust, mutual understanding, and fairness. Riding was riding, it turned out, once you stripped off the more fantastical elements.
But she knewnothingof the wolves. Of Leif and his…pack, she supposed. Yes, they would be a pack, and not a party. He’d called them that, his injured two:my packmates. His voice had been gruff – even deeper than she remembered from the dream – and his tone matter-of-fact, but she’d found it shockingly intimate, that phrase:my packmates. It implied something beyond friendship, beyond brothers-in-arms. Brothers, she’d heard some of the soldiers call one another. That was this, yes…but she’d heard them communicating, even in their man-shapes, in a series of low growls, and huffs, and inquisitive whines. Looks passed between them, meaningful and intense; the sorts of looks she didn’t feel she ought to be privy to.
Amelia understood animals – or, at least, she thought she did. But how did one understand an animal who was also a man?
“You’re not even listening to me,” Reggie accused, and she realized, belatedly, that her gaze had wandered back through the open tent flaps, resting somewhere in the region of Leif’s impossibly broad shoulders, currently rolled forward, as he leaned over the cot and spoke to the man – the wolf? – who’d fainted before. Who’d spat blood all over her boots. The equally big, handsome skinwalker with the sun lines, and the sharp smile, and the same blue eyes, but with hair a shade darker, wilder, and braided up with the dull ivory of old bone. He wore a necklace of animal teeth…and currently held Leif’s undivided attention, leaning not-so-subtly into the hand Leif had rested on his good shoulder, while Amelia’s man tended to the wound in the back of the other.
“That must be Ragnar,” she murmured. “The cousin.”
“What?” Reggie said, and then shifted to stand beside her, rather than across from her, joining her in looking. “Who? That other blond?”
“Mmhm. Oliver warned me about him.” Even in the dimness of the tent, she could see the wink of bright silver at his throat, the torq of which Oliver had spoken in his letter, preventing him from shifting, binding him to Leif.
Leif’s head whipped around, hair fanning, gaze landing on them, and Amelia hastily turned away, dragging Reggie along with a grip on his sleeve.
“And here you were warningmeto be quiet,” he muttered, as she marched him across the field toward the patch of flattened grass where Alpha had stretched out to soak up the day’s last, slanted sun rays.
He cracked one sleepy eye and whuffed a greeting, before closing it again. Amelia steered Reggie around to the far side of him, and used Alpha’s broad side as a shield.
“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s hard to remember.”
“Told you.” They finally stopped, and Reggie folded his arms and squared off from her again, head tilted at a superior angle. “Just as I told you–”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said, and his lips pressed closed in an unhappy line. “You said it was a bad idea, yes, and Connor, too, and I said we need them, and we do. None of that has changed.”
His brows shot up. “Seeing them be bloody great wolves doesn’t change anything?”
“No,” she insisted, even if her stomach was quivery, and her breath unsteady. Technically, it wasn’t the wolf thing that made her unsteady, but the wholebloody greatsight of Leif. That crackle of electricity and wildness he put into the air.
“They nearly killed us,” he said, growing serious.
“But they didn’t. And we nearly killed them.” She frowned. “After I expressly told everyone to be on the lookout for them.”
He shook his head. “They came out of nowhere. We didn’t hear them – not even Connor, who knows these woods and its creatures like the back of his hand.”
“Not even Connor, huh?” she couldn’t help but tease, gratified by his instant blush. “Gotten familiar with his hands, have you?”
“Fuck off.”
