Page 6 of Of Nine So Bold

But then, I suspected he’d be helping Ruhl if he could.

Which was the problem. Somehow, Casimir could no longer shift like a vampire, changing to a smoky, ephemeral form that could have followed Ruhl beneath the water. I gathered it’d happened as a result of the wounds Roan’s demon inflicted when he took me. But it wasn’t going away.

“It’s working,” Ozias said in a low rumble, jerking his chin at the water.

I pulled my attention back to the river, watching Clay as he extended his hands toward the tumbling water again.

The flow started to churn against itself.

“Oz?” Clay called.

My mate tossed the rope holding the soldier to Dex and then awkwardly urged his horse closer to the river. Like most of my giants, he clearly wasn’t comfortable on horseback, and he held the reins with a tight grip as he glared at the water.

Or, more likely, the riverbed beneath it.

A shiver went through the ground beneath me, making my mount skitter to the side before I calmed the dark brown gelding as best I could. The horse didn’t like me any more than most of my men liked their rides. But in my case, I suspected it was because I was a vampire.

The horse stilled, but I could feel how it trembled a bit even now.

Ahead, the quivering in the ground grew stronger, and then suddenly, the earth began to crest above the water. Before my eyes, a bridge of land rose, arching across the river while leaving an empty space beneath it for the water to pass through.

With a small grunt, Clay lowered his hands carefully. The tumbling, churning water flowed forward again. But Clay was still in command of it, even now. Instead of surging forward like a dam breaking, the water released a little at a time, keeping it from moving at a speed that would be fast enough to do any damage to the bridge.

Air rushed from Clay as he finally let his hands drop completely. “Anyone see the wolf?”

As if summoned—though that was definitely not the case—Ruhl flowed up from the river like a sentient cloud of smoke. Taking wolf form, he shook himself hard, just like a dog trying to remove water from his fur. The look he gave us all seemed to ask why we weren’t moving already.

In spite of everything, a smile tugged at my lips. I had no idea what Ruhl really was, where he came from, or anything about his goals at all. He was definitely more than a wolf, that much I knew. Back at Lord Thomas’s castle, he’d somehow shown me his memories, though they were made more of emotion than sight or sound. Someone had sent him here—orderedhim and his fellow wolves to come here, more specifically—and the shadow wolves were looking for something.

But what that was, I couldn’t be sure. In the meantime, however, Ruhl had decided to join us, while the rest of his pack were back at Casimir’s home in Zenirya, somehow keeping the deranged magic of the Wild Lands from swallowing the castle whole. Given how many times Ruhl had saved our lives, I had no reason to distrust him.

Even if there were always more questions than answers around the wolf.

“Okay, then,” Dex said, eyeing Ruhl with a touch of respect and amusement too. “Let’s get?—”

The sound of pounding hoofbeats made me whirl, and he cut off.

“What is it?” he asked cautiously.

“Horses,” Ozias said. Like me and Casimir, his hearing exceeded that of any Erenlian or human.

“Great.” Clay drew his sword. “Anyone expecting guests?”

No one answered as half a dozen people crested the rise behind us and continued on at high speed.

Surprise shot through me when I spotted the one in the lead.

Lars seemed equally shocked. “Is that?—”

“Lord Thomas’s bodyguard, yes,” Casimir filled in, suspicion thick in his voice. “But how they followed us here…”

My horse turned skittish beneath me as my vampire side suddenly fought the urge to let my fangs out. My men had chased Roan’s demon across the prairie in an entirely different direction than we now traveled. There was no way Valeria and her people should have known to follow us here.

Moreover, during all our hard riding to chase down the ones who’d taken Niko, I’d heard bits and pieces of what’d passed between my men and the Lord of Sinaria. After the Voidborn attacked the city and Roan’s demon kidnapped me, my men had had no choice but to reveal to Lord Thomas that they wereErenlian—my people’s sworn enemies, owing to the supposed assassination of my mother, the queen, by agents of Erenelle.

Never mind that it’d all been a lie. My stepmother was the one who’d killed Queen Eira. But Aneira still started a war to avenge her.

Yet, instead of imprisoning them as enemies of the crown, Lord Thomassupportedthem.

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