Darius “We should stop.” Kieran morphed back into his wolf form, running to a stop while I stopped a few distance away from him, my wolf relinquing hold of me.
I stood at the edge of a cliff, overlooking the lands, some far away from where I stood, others close and finally, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Lyra would be found, that much I knew but until then, I was going to hold the forte and find out who was behind this in the first place.
“I don’t know but you seem much lighter than how we were before, like you are now in a happier mood because you are out here in the open.” Kieran said.
I indeed felt lighter but still, the ache within my heart from not seeing Lyra reguarly was never going to just leave.
“I guess I just needed to leave the house for a moment.” Kieran walked up to me, standing beside me as he scanned the view of the lands, no doubt proud over what we had built together.
“I don’t think Alpha Ronan is behind Lyra’s leaving.
I mean, given the fact that he’s her father, he will never kidnap her talk more of allowing her to enter into the human world when he knows how much the humans hate our kind.” he said.
I knew he was right but yet again, I wouldn’t put it past that man not to do something stupid simply because he thought he had every right to control her because he was her father.
Alpha Ronan had always had a grudge against me.
I had seen it in the way he looked at me during pack meetings, the way his jaw would tighten whenever Lyra so much as glanced in my direction.
He never trusted me, not from the very first day I claimed her as mine, my bride.
“Maybe not kidnapped,” I said, finally answering Kieran.
“But controlled and manipulated.
There’s a difference.” Kieran tilted his head, considering that.
“You think he pushed her to leave on her own?” “I think Alpha Ronan has a way of making his daughter believe things she wouldn’t normally believe.” I turned from the view, the wind carrying the scent of pine and something else, something like smoke, though there was no fire for miles.
“He did it before, he made her doubt the bond she had with her supposed mate, the bastard who fell for her sister and he made her doubt me.” “That was different, and you know it.” “Was it?” I snapped, more sharply than I meant to.
Kieran didn’t flinch and he never did, not with me, he’d known me too long for that.
“Darius.” His voice dropped low, steady, the way it always got when he was trying to pull me back from the edge of something.
“Whatever happened between you and Lyra before she left, none of that matters right now.
What matters is finding her before Kade does.” The name alone made my claws threaten to break through my skin.
Kade.
I hated how easily Lyra’s name and his sat in the same sentence lately, like they belonged there.
“He won’t touch her,” I said.
“You don’t know that.” “I know that if he does, there won’t be enough of him left for the council to bury.” Kieran huffed, something almost like a laugh, except there was no humor in it.
“That’s your wolf talking.” “Good.
My wolf is the only part of me still thinking straight.” We stood there a moment longer, the silence stretching between us, thick with everything neither of us wanted to say out loud.
Below, the lands rolled out gold and green, the borders of the pack territory blurring into hills that didn’t belong to us.
“There’s something else,” Kieran said finally, and something in his tone made the hair along my arms rise before he even finished the sentence.
“Something I didn’t want to say back at the house.” “Say it now.” He hesitated, which wasn’t like him.
Kieran didn’t hesitate…he charged into things headfirst, consequences be damned, that was half the reason I kept him close.
“One of the scouts came back an hour ago and said he picked up Lyra’s scent again.” My whole body went still.
“Where?” “Near the border but this time, closer to the human world.” The words didn’t make sense at first, my mind refusing to piece them together the way they were meant to.
“That’s impossible.
We combed that entire stretch of woods three times when my men surrounded the bus.
There was nothing.” “That’s the problem, Darius.” Kieran’s jaw tightened.
“There was nothing.
No trace of her anywhere in those woods, not a single print, not a hair, nothing until the border itself.
Its like she was never in the woods to begin with, like she went straight from wherever she was being kept, straight to the human world, without ever crossing the ground the rest of us were searching.” I felt the words settle into my chest like stones.
“That’s not possible…not unless…” “Unless someone carried her scent out for her and masked it or unless someone moved her in a way that left nothing behind for us to follow.” My claws threatened to break through my skin at the thought.
“The bus.
The one she supposedly boarded.” “That’s what I keep coming back to.” Kieran’s voice dropped lower, like he didn’t want the wind itself to hear him.
“If she got onto that bus on her own, we should have picked up her trail leading to it.
We didn’t, which means she wasn’t walking when she got there…” “Or someone else was there, someone not quite human masking her scent,” I finished, my stomach twisting.
“Someone who knew how to keep her scent from spreading across the ground and this person would most likely introduce themselves as a friend, comfortable enough for Lyra to befriend.” Kieran nodded slowly.
“No ordinary human could do that, not without training and definitely not without knowing exactly what we are and exactly how we track.” The implication settled between us, heavy and sharp.
“You’re saying whoever helped her isn’t human.” “I’m saying I don’t know what they are but nothing fully human walks through wolf territory and erases every trace of themselves as they go and nothing fully human would know to do that in the first place.” The wind shifted, carrying the scent of the lands below, and for the first time since Lyra disappeared, real fear cut through the anger I’d been carrying because if something else, something unknown, had taken her past our borders and into the human world without leaving a single trace behind, then everything I thought I understood about who was following her, and why, was wrong.
“Kieran.” My voice came out rougher than I intended.
“Get the scout, I want to hear exactly what he found, word for word.” “Darius…” “Now.” He didn’t argue.
He shifted and took off toward the pack house, leaving me alone at the cliff’s edge with the wind and the weight of what he’d just told me.
I turned back toward the view of the lands, the same view that had brought me a moment of peace only minutes ago, and now it felt like it was mocking me, vast and quiet and indifferent to the fact that somewhere out there, past the borders I could see and past the ones I couldn’t, something that wasn’t human and wasn’t wolf had gotten close enough to Lyra to erase her from the earth itself and then, carried faint on the wind from the direction of Alpha Ronan’s pack, I heard it.
It was a howl and it was not a call but a warning…something was already here.