Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 12

Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 12 – The Fog Comes Early

The fog came in at 4 a.m., nine months and twenty days ahead of schedule.

I knew what it was before the alarms went up. I’d seen it before, from the other side of a knife wound.

I was standing on the northern wall of Silverpine – my province now, technically, whether they liked it or not – with

the Widowmakers on my hips and Rhys beside me and four hundred terrified wolves behind me who had booed me

eleven hours earlier.

“They won’t follow you,” Elder Marren said flatly. “You’re not their Alpha. Thorne is.”

“Thorne can’t shift,” I said. “Thorne is in a healer’s ward drooling on himself because I put rot in his blood, and

everyone here knows it.”

“Then they’ll follow no one, and they’ll die.”

I looked out at the fog, which was not fog – it never was – it’s what a Kaldrenn war-band’s ward smells like when

four thousand of them move under it.

Four thousand.

Against four hundred, half of them children.

“How long till the realm army reaches us?” I asked.

“Six hours,” Marren said. “If they come at all. The Council’s still debating whether the northern province is defensible.”

The northern province is expendable. That’s what they’d said last time. That’s exactly what they’d said last time, and Margo had died in a village eleven miles from where I stood.

“Give me the wall,” I said.

“What?”

“Give me the wall, Marren. Six hours. Then the army comes and I hand it back.”

The old woman looked at me for a long, long moment.

“There’s a name for what you’re asking for, girl,” she said. “It’s Alpha.”

“Then say the word or get off my wall.”

She said the word.

I’ll never forget the sound four hundred wolves make when they realize they’ve been given permission to fight.

Here’s what I did with six hours.

I could not kill four thousand wolves. Not with rot, not with daggers, not with a man who could crack a stadium’s

lights.

But I didn’t need to kill four thousand wolves.

I needed to break one thing.

At 5:10, I stood at the base of Blackthorn Tor, in the ring of standing stones, and looked up at nine thousand years of

chained silver god.

“YOU,” Vaelith seethed. “THIEF. COME TO ROB ME AGAIN?”

“No,” I said. “I came to make you an offer.”

The serpent laughed.

“Kaldrenn is coming over that ridge in ninety minutes,” I said. “Four thousand of them. They’ll go through my people

first, and then they’ll go south, and in twenty years there won’t be a soul left in Solvaine – and this seal, Vaelith, this

beautiful ward that’s held you nine thousand years?”

I put my palm against the golden wall.

“It was built by Solvaine’s first Council,” I said. “It’s maintained by their bloodline. Every one of them dies in that valley

today.”

Silence.

Terrible, ancient, calculating silence.

“You are proposing,” Vaelith said slowly, “that I preserve my own jailers.”

“I’m proposing something better.” I smiled up at it. “I can open this. Right now. Any lock, any chain, any ward – I’m the Breaker, and you’ve known it since the night I took your venom.”

The great head lowered until the eye filled my whole sky.

“Then open it.”

“On one condition.” My heart was hammering so hard I could taste it. “You take Kaldrenn. All four thousand. You don’t touch a single Solvaine wolf, and when it’s done you go north and never come back.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then you sit here another nine thousand years, and you sit here alone, and I’ll have died knowing I offered.”

Something enormous and cold moved behind that eye.

“Nine thousand years,” Vaelith whispered, “and no one has ever offered me anything at all.”

The serpent lowered its head to the sand.

“Open it, Hollowborn.”

I put both hands on the ward, and it fell apart like a rotten door.

You want to know what four thousand Kaldrenn warriors sound like when a nine-thousand-year-old god comes down

off a mountain into the middle of them?

I’m not going to tell you.

I stood on the northern wall of Silverpine with Rhys’s hand in mine and four hundred wolves howling behind me,

and I watched the fog turn silver, and then red, and I felt absolutely nothing but a cold, perfect satisfaction that I will

probably answer for someday.

At 8:40 a.m. the realm army finally arrived.

They found no battle. They found a ridge full of Kaldrenn dead and a girl standing on a wall.

And at 8:52, my phone buzzed.

REALM COUNCIL EMERGENCY SUMMONS: WREN CALLOWAY.

CHARGE: BREAKING THE NINTH SEAL.

PENALTY: DEATH.