Page 23 of Forbidden Wolf

“Radar, any chance of getting us eyes in there?” I nodded toward where we were supposed to be liaising with the rest of the lycan troops. It had taken us what felt like forever to forge through this mud.

He earned his name because there wasn’t anything technical that he couldn’t hack or piece together. His radio transmissions were unbreakable code that only we could access. It stopped the vamps tracking us.

“I dunno, Levi. There seems to be a strange electromagnetic frequency out here that I haven’t recorded before.”

“We’ll skirt around the periphery and see if we can get a better view of what’s happening, and you can try and figure out whatever this shit is.”

We moved with stealth in a wide arc to allow Radar to take readings.

“There are stronger patches of the EMF, especially where the helicopter went down. I can try and use it to create a path for us.” Radar continued to type on one of his devices he’d created. He flashed the screen under my nose. It contained black and grey patches.

“Okay, let’s go.” Anything was better than standing in cold slime as it permeated into my clothes and between my freezing toes.

“What the fuck was that?” Radar demanded, practically crawling up my back.

I spun and glared at him, pushing him back. He was the best tech operator I’d met, but he wasn’t the bravest lycan in the world. “What?”

“Something touched my leg!”

“You probably walked into one of the dead that are sinking into this mess.”

“I didn’t walk.”

“Let’s go, Radar.” He would have all of us seeing ghosts and monsters where they didn’t exist. In his spare time, he created probes to hunt for the Loch Ness monster. Give him a few minutes and he would be seeing Nessie out here.

The sky was dark and starless, the terrain that had once been green fields and orchards was now barren under the black slime and ash that had submerged it. The hairs on the back of my neck started to rise and my wolf’s hackles went up. Something out here was watching us, and we’d gone from being the predators to the prey. My skin tightened as my wolf prepared to emerge, the tips of my ears elongating into points.

Since Radar was still typing and analysing around us, I discretely moved behind him, trying to detect what was hunting us. My night sight allowed me to see all around us and nothing moved, yet something was there.

A step at a time, I watched for any ripple in the mud we trudged through, my wolf senses on red alert. Nothing.

Bare trees were skeletons of their former selves, nothing left but the trunks and branches. Whatever was happening out here, it affected all life, destroying everything in its path. The swampland we tracked through bore no resemblance to the land that was here ten years ago when I was first conscripted into the military.

Something brushed past my leg and I froze, every nerve in my body alert. I’d told Radar that what touched him was probably a limb from a dead lycan or vamp. It certainly didn’t feel that way when it moved against me. My nails elongated into claws, and my canines lowered in my mouth.

“You okay, Levi?” Radar stopped and turned to me.

“What’s your EMF showing?” I didn’t want to alarm him if I was just tired and starting to see monsters in the dark.

“We’re navigating through one of the high-level areas. I was trying to take us to this pale grey area over here to try and launch a few probes.”

The black areas could represent creatures or an enemy of some type lurking in this mud. The strange viscous soup never made sense to me, but what if the land was converted for a habitat for something else to live in? Fucking hell, we could be walking through their lair like idiots.

Maintaining a steady pace, I kept my blaster angled down. Our troops would be trying to fight an enemy with two legs and around the same height as them. None of them had weapons to fight what could be swimming at our feet.

Every movement toward the lighter grey area made my heart beat double time in my chest as my adrenalin spiked ready for a fight. My muscles bunched and my wolf howled in my head in frustration. Before I took my team into a fight, I always researched all the variables to ensure their safety. We were sitting prey out here.

“Radar, can we send that map to the rest of our team and tell them to stay away from the black areas?”

“Sure. It’ll take me a few minutes.”

“We’ll take a break at that line of dead trees over there. I could do with climbing out of this sludge for a while.” It would give me time to study the topography of the land and determine what the hell was going on.

The trees were dead but still supported our weight sitting in their branches. My gaze scanned the area in the distance that was black on the map, hunting for any sign of disturbance in the stillness.

“That’s odd,” Radar said to himself. “Watching the scanner, the black areas fluctuate.”

“I was afraid of that,” I muttered.

---