The sulfur fog swallowed Gideon Drake’s silhouette in three heartbeats, but the heavy, rhythmic strike of iron-shod hooves against basalt provided a grim metronome through the gale.
Lyra sprinted after the sound, Brannoc’s oversized boots sliding violently over the frozen volcanic slag.
Each breath dragged sulfur and ice into her lungs, burning like ground glass. Her cracked ribs throbbed in sharp, agonizing syncopation with her pounding heart, but she didn't slow. Behind her, miles to the south, the Blackwood hunting horns had multiplied—no longer single blasts, but the frantic, hunting cadence of the Iron Reavers: Conlan’s personal execution squad.
Up ahead, the mist parted.
Gideon had reined the warhorse in at the mouth of a narrow gorge carved from red volcanic stone—a subterranean tear in the earth known as the Flayed Throat. The beast stood stone-still, hot steam pluming from its nostrils, armored barding clinking softly in the wind.
Gideon didn't look down as she skidded to a halt beside the stirrup, chest heaving, clutching the fur bedroll to her ribs.
"Behind me," he said, his voice flat, cutting through the blizzard.
"I can run," Lyra choked out between ragged gasps, her pride flaring hot despite the blood freezing on her lip.
"You can collapse," Gideon countered, not bothering to turn his head. "And I don't haul dead baggage across the Wastes. Up, before the wind strips the heat from your blood."
He didn't wait for her consent. Leaning down from the saddle, his massive, gauntleted hand hooked into the collar of Brannoc’s duster, hoisting her upward as if she weighed no more than an empty quiver.
Lyra let out a sharp gasp as her ribs compressed, but before she could strike out, she was deposited behind the high cantle of the war saddle.
"Hold the cantle ring," he commanded, his broad back an impenetrable wall of boiled leather and wolf-pelt that immediately blocked the biting teeth of the gale. "Touch my weapons, and you lose the fingers."
"I don't need your weapons," Lyra snapped, though her frostbitten fingers instantly knotted into the heavy iron ring welded behind his seat.
Gideon kicked the stallion into a ground-eating canter.
The descent into the Flayed Throat was a plunge into darkness. Towering walls of jagged basalt rose hundreds of feet on either side, blotting out the eclipsed moon and funneling the wind into a high, screaming whine. Here, the temperature shifted—not warm, but humid with the subterranean breath of volcanic fissures that glowed dull crimson deep beneath the stone floor.
As the horse settled into its punishing pace, Lyra’s senses began to reel.
Sitting this close to him was a terrifying paradox.
Physically, his presence was overwhelming. His shoulders were broader than any male she had ever seen in the Blackwood stronghold; the heat radiating through his heavy leather armor was an inferno that seeped through her damp trousers, thawing the ice in her joints. Every muscle in his back shifted with lethal, coiled power with each stride of the warhorse.
Yet to her ability—to her nose—he remained a bottomless, horrifying void.
She leaned forward slightly, testing the air near the nape of his neck, where dark hair was bound in tight leather thongs.
Nothing.
Not the smell of horse lather. Not the salt of his skin. Not the musk of an Alpha predator. It was like burying her face in the vacuum between the stars. The sensation made her inner beast whine—a high, confused pitch that clawed at her breastbone, desperate to understand why the colossal male shielding her from the storm registered as an empty grave.
Inverted. His words echoed through her skull.
What should taste like burning pine, wild cedar, and molten silver to you... registers as an absolute void.
"Stop sniffing me, little bird," Gideon’s rough voice rumbled over his shoulder, vibration traveling straight from his spine into her knees. "Your beast is confused enough without you courting a migraine."
Lyra jerked her head back, heat rushing to her cheeks. "I am not sniffing you. I'm trying to figure out what kind of monster you are."
"The kind that doesn't answer to the Northern Council," he replied. "Keep your eyes on the high ledges. The Reavers won't follow us into the Throat—even Conlan’s butchers fear the Red Silt—but the Scrappers hunt these corridors."
"Scrappers?"
"Exiled wolves who lost their minds to the silver-sickness," Gideon said, reaching back to loosen the strap holding his right claymore. "Creatures whose bonds were severed by force. They don't have packs. They have hunger."
As if summoned by his words, the horse let out a low, vibrating snort, its ears pinning flat against its armored crest.
Lyra’s head snapped upward.
High above, perched on the narrow basalt shelves lining the gorge, shadows were shifting.
Then, her ability violently flared.
It hit her like a punch to the solar plexus: the taste of rotting honey, curdled copper, and burned fat.
Threads.
Dozens of them. But these were not the clean, singing silver-red cords she had tracked in the Blackwood hall. These threads were blackened, frayed, snapping like rotten rope in the wind, leaking oily black ichor that smelled of madness and ancient slaughter.
"Gideon," she whispered, her voice tightening. "Above us. Four... no, six."
The stallion surged forward, but from sixty feet up, the first shadow dropped.
It wasn't a wolf in four-legged form, nor was it fully human. It was a grotesque, elongated bipedal nightmare—wiry grey hide stretched tight over protruding ribs, jaws distended with jagged yellow fangs, black drool freezing on its chin as it fell.
The creature hit the canyon floor ten paces ahead with a sickening slap, righting itself instantly with a screech that tore through the stone passage.
From the ledges above, five more dropped into the crimson gloom, encircling the horse.
"Hold on," Gideon growled.
He didn't draw the claymores. He reached into a sheath at the horse's flank and ripped free a heavy, single-edged war-cleaver forged from jagged black volcanic iron.
The lead Scrapper lunged, claws extended to rip the warhorse’s throat.
Gideon swung from the saddle. The heavy blade cleaved the creature clean through the collarbone, splitting its torso down to the sternum in a fountain of black, curdled blood. Gideon didn't pause; with a fluid twist of his hips that nearly unseated Lyra, he reversed the blade, catching a second beast in the side of the skull, smashing it into the rock wall with a concussive crunch.
The third beast scrambled up the stallion's armored flank, yellow fangs snapping inches from Lyra’s thigh.
Panic spiked, but Lyra’s instincts moved faster than fear.
She didn't scream. She drew the antler-handled skinning knife from her rope belt, leaned out from behind Gideon’s back, and drove the five-inch iron blade straight through the creature's protruding yellow eye, driving it deep into the socket until the hilt hit the bone.
The Scrapper shrieked, thrashing violently as black, necrotic blood sprayed across her hands.
Lyra wrenched the blade sideways, tearing the eyeball free, and kicked the beast squarely in the snout with Brannoc’s steel-toed boot, sending it tumbling under the hooves of the charging stallion.
Gideon glanced over his shoulder, his amber eyes catching the bloody knife in her grip, a savage, predatory gleam lighting his scarred face.
"Not bad for a cellar rat," he rumbled.
"Drive the horse," she spat back, wiping black gore from her cheek with the back of her sleeve. "Two more on the left!"
Gideon spurred the stallion, the massive beast flattening the remaining two creatures beneath its iron shoes as they broke through the ambush into the open basin of the Wastes.
Ahead, the gorge opened into a vast, terrifying plain of cracked obsidian, lit from below by rivers of slow-moving magma and crowned by a towering, ruined fortress carved directly into the heart of a volcanic mountain.
Gideon sheathed his cleaver, slowing the horse to an easy trot as the sulfur smoke thinned.
"Welcome to the Ash Cleft," Gideon said, pointing toward the colossal ruined stronghold. "Where the dead rest, and the wolves who broke the world come to hide."
Lyra stared at the fortress.
High above the ruined battlements, carved into the stone face of the caldera, was a massive, weathered relief that made her heart stop.
A crowned wolf skull wreathed in black thorns.
Weeping seven silver tears.
The exact crest from the bone cylinder in her pocket.
Lyra touched the scar at her neck, feeling the sudden, violent vibration beneath her skin match the pulse of the mountain before them.
"This was my home," she whispered, the realization hitting her like a physical blow.
Gideon turned in the saddle, his amber gaze burning into hers with a solemn, brutal truth.
"It was your throne, Lyra," he said. "Before they slaughtered your mother and put you in a cage."