Page 26 of Moon Guardian
It wasn’t like I could turn back.
“Outcasts, remember?” she asked, pausing as she sniffed the air, then took us into a new direction into an even narrower tunnel. “Kane would never be welcome at the ceremony. His vision is different, one where territory is equally distributed and all alphas answer to the Moon Guardian instead of themselves.” She winked at me. “To you.”
Now I knew she had to be a little off her nut. Her alpha wanted to take orders fromme?
“You’ll meet him soon enough,” she promised. “He’s an excellent leader. Strong. Patient. Merciful. He has dreams for peace to be restored in this realm.”
I snorted. “That would require the storms to end. That this Goddess of yours stops shitting all over humanity and thinks of someone other than herself, for a change.”
She blinked at me as if confused, pausing our retreat. “But the stormscreatedyou, that was always their purpose. There will always be casualties in war, and a war of morality has been going on for quite some time. The wolves have grown arrogant and self-indulgent. That wasn’t the Goddess’s intent. Now that you are here, you can unite the packs and bring healing to the land.”
“Excuse me, what?” I snapped. Her statement made no sense, and I didnothave the energy to wrap my mind around a lunatic’s rhetoric right now.
A masculine rumble sounded, distant, but enough to warn us that we didn’t have much time.
She lifted her lips, showing her teeth, the motion seeming to be instinctive. “Come on. We’re almost there.” She shoved her way through an impossibly small crevice, making me raise an eyebrow.
“I’m not fitting through that,” I said, not even sure how she had managed it.
She stuck her hand through. “No complaints,” she insisted.
Sighing, I struggled my way through, getting stuck at least two times before I popped out on the other side.
She nodded at the crevice before turning. “That should slow them down.” She climbed the tunnel that went straight up, revealing moonlight on the other side.
“They won’t be able to fit through that, right?” I guessed. The wolves were huge, especially male alphas.
She snorted. “No, but it doesn’t mean they can’t break their way through.”
I tilted my head. Pissed off wolves rampaging through a sheet of rock sounded feasible based on what I’d seen. “Fair point.”
We entered onto rocky terrain scattered with trees. Instead of heading north, the direction I judged based on the moon’s current position, she backtracked south.
“Where are we going?” I asked, not sure if I should follow her. What if this was all some kind of elaborate trap?
She pointed at a river in the distance. “We need to cross water, and we need to stay downwind. We can evade them, but we’ll have to take the long route and hide our trail.”
She took off on a steady jog, not looking back to see if I followed.
Sighing, I matched her pace, finding the swift run easier than it should have been. Trees flashed by us, betraying how fast we were actually moving.
“I’ll never get used to this,” I murmured.
Crossing the water, we waded up to our thighs, effectively masking our scent as we scrambled up onto the other side. I peered back toward my village, relieved to see that the storms had dissipated.
A surreal sensation spread warmth through my chest.
Somehow, I had accomplished my mission. I had stopped the Moon Shadow Plague from taking my family.
Charlie might have died, but it hadn’t been in vain. Because of his sacrifice, I had found the courage to face the wolves, to do the impossible and interrupt their ceremony before their magic polluted the land to the point of no return.
Although, something that Althea had said didn’t settle well with me.
The storms created you.
That was always their purpose.
Did that make all of this my fault in the first place?
