Page 73 of As Darkness Fall
We whined, pawing gently at the ground–we didn’t want to mess up Alexi’s work–in question. Why was Aaron leaving the others here?
“Someone needs to guard our exit,” Aaron explained. “Ensure that when we get back here, we can get out easily.”
We nodded. Something scratched behind our ears, and we twitched in surprise. Looking back, we saw Dave smiling down at us. He winked.
“Don’t worry. We got this. Besides, we have the easy job. You get all the fun.”
We huffed a sigh and trotted off, following the group as we wandered through the landscape, heading more or less toward the mountains. Eventually, the rocks grew solid around us, revealing that we were on a path. Path’s led places. This was a good sign.
Until we came to a fork.
“Fred,” Aaron rumbled.
To our utter surprise,Fredstepped into the lead and guided us down the right-hand path. Now, why was Fred the one in the know? That bore some thinking about, but our wolf-human mesh wasn’t up to that much critical thinking.
We kept our eyes roving and our nose sniffing, staying wary. It seemed unlikely that in this, the most dangerous part of the plan, we wouldn’t be attacked again. In fact, our human mind expected a near-constant battle as we got nearer to Hades’s lair in the Pits of Tartarus.
Yet the more we walked, the more peaceful everything became. Our attack hadn’t set off any alarms, as far as we could tell.
In time, we began to think that maybe we could do this after all.
Chapter Thirty-Six
It took several hours for us to realize that something was bothering the others. So much of our attention had been focused outward, looking for potential enemies, that we hadn’t given much thought to our pack. They were there, and nobody had ordered us to do anything differently, so we simply trotted along at their side, a watchful guardian.
Now, however, as our attention swung almost unwillingly to Vir for a few moments, we could see the tightness of his face. The way the whiskers on his wolf face twitched and flowed backward was a dead giveaway. Again, he’d not reverted to his human form yet, though he was back to human-size. But he wore his golden armor and bracers and carried the spear at his side, horizontal, always ready for action.
Aaron, too, we noticed, was uncomfortable. His eyes constantly darted around, but the frown that had creased his face was growing deeper, the lines on his forehead and cheeks intensifying.
Could they detect something we were missing? It wasn’t impossible. They were both far more well-traveled than we. This was only the third realm we’d been to in our life.No, the fourth, we corrected, remembering we’d been to the Direen as well. For a shifter, that seemed like a lot, but to these men, a god and a vampire more ancient than we likely knew, it was probably nothing.
“Dani.”
As if he could sense we’d been thinking about him, Vir said our name. We looked up at him. He wasn’t looking at us. His attention was still on the rocky landscape around us. We didn’t like that. We wanted him to look at us. To stare at us and appreciate the beauty before him.
“You should probably come back now,” Vir said.
We looked around as well, wondering what prompted him to say that, but we saw no change. The rusty red rocks jutting up around us blocked our view, and the only way was forward or back. Nothing moved, nothing lived around us, which we figured was fine. This was the land of the dead, after all.
Whining, we tried to get the point across that welikedbeing in wolf form. It felt good. Natural. We could be of more help like this.
“Now,” Vir commanded in a tone we’d never heard him use before.
The words washed over us like an Alpha’s power, and we struggled not to immediately obey them. We angrily growled at him, announcing our dislike.
“Now is not the time for this, Dani,” Aaron added.
That got our attention. The two of them banding together? If they both wanted us to let the human have free reign, then there was probably a good reason for it. It wasn’t often something brought them together in such a unified decision.
We sighed, and I tore myself free from the meld.
I’m sorry,I told my wolf.Once this is over, I’ll let you run free more often. No more waiting for the Wild Moons. We’ll run under every type of moon. I promise.
My wolf couldn’t reply in words, but she managed to make it clear through emotions that if I didn’t, I could expect a full-on return of the she-bitch-from-hell that had dominated my early days post-Soulshift. Given our current location, it seemed somewhat like a prophetic threat.
We changed back. I gritted my teeth against the pain. Sometimes, it wasn’t so bad, but other times, it was like having an iron spike hammered into my skull. This one was the latter. During the fight, I’d had to shift so fast I had tuned out any pain, but here, now, shifting so reluctantly, I couldn’t quite suppress a groan as my body realigned itself, bones cracking and shrinking, or growing, depending on the place.
It was over in seconds, even if those seconds had been near torturous agony, and then we were standing naked on the plains of the Underworld.
