Page 8 of Blood of Ancients

I FELT AN INTENSE NEEDto protect Ravinica. Did she need my protection? Probably not. She would get it anyway, because it was in my nature to safeguard what I loved.

Damon Halldan was a nuisance, nothing more. For now. She was right—there were more important things to worry about. But the new initiate from Selby Village was playing with fire. He parted ways with Ravinica when she was a bog-blood. She had grown in their time apart.

Did Damon not realize she had no less thanfivestalwart defenders ready to take up arms in her name? Did he not realize the odds were sorely stacked against him, and any of us would kill in a moment’s notice if we felt she was truly threatened by him?

It was a fool’s game, played by children and ignorant whelps who didn’t know what they were doing. Vikingrune Academy was not Selby Village. They were not kids anymore, though Damon insisted on acting like one.

As I’d told her, he would need to be dealt with if this shit didn’t stop soon. And while I would not act on my own without say-so from Ravinica first, I could not guarantee others in her pack would resist.

Namely, Magnus Feldraug. The dead man scared evenme, with his soulless eyes and unreadable demeanor and body full of self-inflicted scars. He had already killed two students at Vikingrune. Two women, no less, which showed he did not discriminate in his violence or loathing.

What if Feldraug learned of the blood-bucket debacle? Surely he would take action, as he had against Astrid Dahlmyrr and her minion when they put Ravinica in Eir Wing.

Granted, that situation was different. Astrid’s gang had physically harmed and tried to make a statement with my little menace. The only statement it ended up making was that Ravinica was not to be trifled with, or you’d end up with a snapped neck or a bloodless shell of a body.

Had Magnus been punished for those actions? Hardly. Hel below, the bastard boy had been given a promotion! He’d been namedDrengrof the first-year initiates, a warrior, just this past week. It was a controversial move for the academy, giving the highest honor of the initiate class to a known killer. Many students hated it.

Making Magnus Drengr would embolden others to do despicable things they normally wouldn’t.

I wondered if that wasn’t Gothi Sigmund’s plan. With the elven portal now open, by Ravinica, and the gates of Vikingrune closed, we were reaching a new era of martial law.

Survival of the fittest was no longer a way of teaching. It was a necessity. Sigmund was priming us for a potential war with the elves, which meant breeding killers out us. Magnus Feldraug was a shining example of how to leverage those violent traits to become something “great.”

I shivered at the thought as I made my way toward Hersir Axel Osfen’s hovel in the northwest quadrant of the underground tunnels. His location was buried below Tyr Meadow and Gharvold Hall, the garrison. In that region, thehalls and tunnels opened into a wide expanse—a vast cave system in the mountains with attached pillars and hills.

The cave under Gharvold had likely taken centuries to carve out by our predecessors. The cave-plain was a marvel of ingenuity, geology, and even architecture.

I didn’t have much to report to Osfen. My scouting duty, which had lasted two days and nights out in the bitter freeze, had come up fruitless. No sightings of elves near the academy aboveground. The snow fell like a tsunami from the sky, nearly drowning and suffocating me multiple times with its unbearable layers.

In my mind, these “scouting missions” could end until the snows let up in a couple weeks. What kind of creature would try to traverse such wretched climes? Certainly not humans, which meant elves weren’t foolish enough to, either.

Perhaps that’s why we’re doing the missions,I thought blithely as I made my way through the tight halls near the classroom and initiate hovels.Because the elves will know the human defenses aboveground are miniscule this time of season. Itisthe perfect opportunity to travel undetected through the Isle for anyone who knows the way humans interact with the climate here.

With that thought in mind, I meandered into the central part of the academy, passing the underground river that fed the entire cave system.

I thought about Ravinica again, smiling at how I’d ravaged her. It never got tiring. Quite the opposite, she invigorated me like nothing else. We fucked hard and rolled around like maniacs, quenching each other’s insatiable thirst.

I would never let her go.

The rushing black river to my right was loud enough to drown my thoughts. It annoyed me, so I started to move awayfrom it, deeper into a cavern I knew spit me out in the same direction I was going.

I stopped in a carved archway, eyes narrowing. There was a calmness that shouldn’t exist here. Fungi dotted the seeping walls, and the quietness was eerie. There were usually students all over the central riverbend.Why is no one—

Fast footsteps had me spinning on my heels, toward the river.

A figure leapt over a narrow section of the waterway, black and blurry, jumping too far for a human. It landed on four legs, bounding right for me, snarling with glinting yellow eyes.

A wolf with dark fur. Unrelated to me, I knew, because I knew my brothers and sister better than anyone. Judging by the wolf’s speed, and the deadly snarl on his face, he was not coming for an idle chat.

A second wolf joined him from an entry to the south.

My eyes flashed wide. I began shifting as I spun around to get deeper into the cave. My clothes fell to the ground, and I darted away in my shifted form.

The pads of my paws hardly touched the ground as I sprinted. Low howls and yips carried on every side, through the window-like apertures of the sparse tunnels to my left and right.

At least four wolves tailed me.

An ambush. What the fuck is this?

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