REBORN ALPHA

The War Fire

"She took it while I was sleeping," I said. "No. While I was thinking."

Save the guilt for later, Rowan said. Run.

I was already running.

I made it halfway across the camp before a hand like an iron hook caught my arm. Maren. Behind her, the outcasts were waking, wolves rising from their blankets with weapons in their hands, drawn by the red glow on the horizon.

"The girl went to die," Maren said. "And you'll go after her alone, with no pack, in a borrowed skin."

"Let go."

"Or you can ask." Her blind-white eyes held mine. "Alpha."

The word landed in my chest like a stone dropped into water.

Do it, Rowan whispered. They've been waiting for someone to ask.

I turned to face them. Thirty wolves. Forty. Mothers, boys, old men with scarred hands, every one of them cast out by a pack that should have protected them.

I didn't have a speech. I had only the truth.

"Draven killed me," I said. "I came back wearing a dead boy's face. My Luna-to-be just walked into the Alpha hall to finish something that was never hers to finish. I can't win this alone."

No one moved.

"I'm not asking you to follow a stranger," I said. "I'm asking you to follow the Alpha whose borders never turned any of you away."

A boy stepped forward, barely sixteen, with a hunting knife too big for his hand. "I remember you," he said. "You gave my father bread the winter the Ashfang burned our farm."

Then another wolf lowered to one knee. Then another.

The sound they made as they shifted, forty bodies cracking and reforming, was the sound of a war horn.

We hit the Alpha hall at noon.

It looked exactly as I remembered: gray stone, tall black gates, the great carved moon above the doors. But the lawn was crowded with wolves, hundreds of them, from every pack in the territory, ringed around a pyre as tall as a house. The war fire. Draven's summons.

They're here for the full moon, Rowan said. All of them. He's going to make it a coronation.

Then we crash the ceremony.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

You're welcome to a better idea.

...No.

I let out a howl. The outcasts answered.

We came out of the treeline like a landslide. The first line of guards never saw us coming. We crashed into them, teeth and claws and fury, and the lawn erupted. I tore through the gates with Maren's boy at my flank, shifting in mid-stride, my black wolf twice the size of anything in the courtyard.

A hundred heads turned toward me.

"Alpha?" someone gasped.

I heard it ripple through the crowd, whisper to whisper. Kael. Kael. It's Kael. Some wolves froze. Some wept. Some ran.

Some, those loyal to Draven, lunged.

I fought toward the doors. A wolf caught my shoulder and I shook him off. Another slammed my ribs, and I felt Rowan wince through every nerve. Left, Kael. Left! I rolled, and a spear whistled past my ear.

Then I was through.

The hall was nearly empty. Torches lit the long stone corridor. Footprints, small and bare, led toward the stairs that went down to the vault, and beside them, drops of blood glowing faintly silver.

She's bleeding, Rowan said. The mark is eating her faster.

I took the stairs three at a time.

The vault door stood open.

Sable was inside, on her knees before a stone pedestal, the rusted key still in her hand. On the pedestal sat the Moon Stone, a sphere of pale light the size of a fist, humming softly, bathing the room in cold white.

"Sable!"

She didn't turn.

"I'm so close," she whispered. "I can hear it, Kael. It's calling me."

Don't touch it, Rowan said sharply. Sab, don't.

"It's showing me things." Her voice sounded distant. "It's showing me how to end all of this. All I have to do is..."

"Sable, stop!"

I reached her as her hand closed around the Stone.

The room exploded in silver.

Heat and light slammed into me and threw me against the wall. Through the glare I saw Sable rise, lifted a few inches off the floor, hair streaming, the silver veins blazing across her chest and throat and cheeks like cracks in a mask.

She turned her head and looked at me, and her eyes were no longer hers.

"Don't come closer, Kael," she said, in two voices at once, hers and something older. "The Stone doesn't want to be destroyed. It wants a Luna."

The vault doors slammed shut behind me.

And from the top of the stairs, slow and unhurried, came the sound of applause.

"Beautiful," said Draven. "Brother, you're just in time for the coronation."