Chapter 73: The Wolf in the Trees

The howl faded, and nobody moved. Lucien, Liam, and the rest of the group had followed the search party’s trail and now stood bunched at the lip of the ravine, and every one of them had gone rigid. Kai stepped half a pace in front of Roxanne without seeming to think about it, and she moved up beside him before he could settle there. "Don’t," she said quietly.

He glanced at her. "I wasn’t going to stop you," he said, and something in her chest eased. It was a small exchange, but it showed how far the two of them had come. Lucien told everyone in a low voice to stay together, and Roshan stood with his head tilted, listening to every layer of the forest. Liam, who never went quiet, whispered the truth aloud. "That wasn’t a student."

Something shifted between the trees. Several of the students changed on instinct, claws sliding out and shoulders hunching, and the air filled with the sound of quick breathing. Then two pale eyes opened in the darkness beyond the trunks, steady and unblinking. The creature didn’t attack, and it didn’t move at all. It only watched.

Roxanne studied the eyes, and she noticed something the others had missed. "It’s not looking at us," she said. Kai turned to her. "Then what is it looking at?" She lifted her chin toward the injured boy, who was propped against a rock with his splinted leg stretched out. The pale eyes had settled on him and stayed there.

The boy saw it too, and he made a thin, terrified sound and tried to drag himself backward. The creature surged forward at once. Kai and Lucien threw themselves into a defensive line, and Roxanne grabbed the boy under the arms and hauled him behind them, his good heel scraping through the dirt. Her instinct told her to fight, but she made herself watch the wolf’s movement instead. It wasn’t charging. It was circling, swinging wide and low around the edge of the group, and she understood that it was herding them away from something deeper in the forest.

"Wait," she said, and Kai stopped with his weight already forward. "What?" he asked. "It doesn’t want us," Roxanne said. Before he could argue, the wolf wheeled and vanished into the trees, leaving only the sound of branches settling behind it.

The silence broke into argument. Some of the students insisted the creature was gone and that the danger had passed, while others wanted to leave immediately. The trouble was that the official extraction route lay in the same direction the wolf had come from, so they couldn’t simply walk back to the academy. Lucien proposed moving as one group, and Roxanne agreed with him at once, because splitting up was the last thing any of them could afford. They had barely started organizing when another howl rose, this time from the opposite side of the ravine. They were surrounded. ℴ

Students crouched into fighting stances all around her. Roxanne closed her eyes and let the panic pass through her without holding on to it. She thought about the sensory field and the bells and the crushed mint, and she remembered the rule Roshan had given her, one scent, one sound, one thing at a time. She filtered out the crashing heartbeats and the rustle of clothing until she could hear only the forest itself. There weren’t two wolves out there, she realized, but only one, and it was moving incredibly fast, its footfalls landing so quickly and so far apart that they sounded like separate animals.

She opened her eyes and told Roshan what she had found. He understood before she finished. "It’s circling us," he said, and Roxanne nodded. The brothers didn’t question her, and Lucien simply began adjusting the formation to face the moving sound.

The wolf broke through the trees a moment later, a blur of dark fur and speed, and everyone reacted at once. Roxanne ran after it before she could think. Kai followed, and they tore through the forest together, ducking under branches and leaping over roots. She noticed quickly that the wolf kept just ahead of them, always in sight and never out of reach, as if it were waiting for them to keep up. Kai caught her arm. "Roxanne!" he shouted, and she skidded to a halt.

"It’s taking us somewhere," she said, breathing hard, and Kai frowned at the trees. "How do you know?" he asked. "Because it could have attacked us already," she said, and he looked at her for a long moment. Then he studied the darkness ahead, his jaw set. "Then we find out why," he said, and they went on together, side by side, with the sound of their own footsteps loud in the quiet.

The wolf disappeared at the edge of a small clearing. Roxanne stepped into it and found nothing at all except an old academy trial marker standing crooked in the middle of the grass. It had been ripped out of the ground and dropped there, its base still crusted with dirt. Roshan arrived a few moments later and knelt to examine it, and Lucien recognized the academy insignia on its face at once. "This shouldn’t be here," he said.

Liam looked around the empty clearing with his hands on his hips. "That’s becoming a very popular sentence," he said, and nobody laughed.

Roxanne noticed something carved into the wooden base. It wasn’t a message, and it wasn’t a symbol she knew, only four long vertical claw marks cut deep into the grain. She reached out and touched them before she could stop herself. Her wolf reacted violently, surging against her ribs so hard that she yanked her hand away and staggered a step. Kai noticed immediately. "What happened?" he asked.

Roxanne looked down at her palm, which looked perfectly ordinary. "It’s nothing," she said, but her voice wasn’t convincing, and Kai’s eyes stayed on her face a beat too long, and he didn’t ask again.

Behind them, the injured boy spoke in a thin voice. He had been half carried into the clearing by two of the other students, and he was staring past the marker into the dark. "That’s where I heard my name," he said. Everyone turned to look at him. He raised a shaking arm and pointed at the darkness beyond the marker. "Someone was standing there."

Roxanne looked into the trees. For one brief second she saw the outline of a person standing between the trunks, tall and perfectly still. She blinked, and it was gone.

Then the academy’s extraction horn finally sounded, one long, clear blast that rolled across the forest. Nobody moved, because they were standing nowhere near the official extraction point, and the horn had come from somewhere behind them.