Page 32 of Through Battle and Blades (The Wolf Queen 2)

“Draw your bows!” an officer shouted, but I didn’t pay much attention to that. Instead, my ears were trained on the sudden rumbling sound.

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Their feet, I realised as I held my bow at the ready, not a tremor in my arms as I did so. My mouth kissed the string, my focus narrowed down on the shaft of the arrow and where it would go. I shifted my aim as dark shapes began to mass at the treeline and that’s when I heard it. A long, drawn out howl, strident in its tone.

“A challenge, is it?” Selene said, the excitement clear in her voice and that was infectious. She heard the Reaver wolf’s declaration, and she was sure she was up to meeting it. I took my eyes off the arrow for just a second to meet hers, and she grinned. “This is what we were born to do. No matter how the battle goes, we go forth with purpose. We do this for Strelae.”

“For Strelae!” the Maidens all shouted, the men joining in belatedly.

“She’ll have them all battle mad before the fighting begins,” Weyland grumbled.

“You know what to do,” Pepin told me in a much quieter voice, not bothering to draw her weapon. “We can prevail, if you can find the strength inside you.”

I just blinked for a second, unable to decipher her words and then there was no time to. My focus snapped back to my arrow, my body feeling like it was filled with a strange kind of energy. Everything else dropped away, the shouts, the men, the Maidens, even my pack. I was right back on the moors, eyeing off a stag I was about to take down. But this time I felt a certainty that I hadn’t possessed then.

As I watched the beasts come racing towards us, I saw something else overlaid upon them. The muddy footprints leading into Wildeford, the doll crushed in the muck, the mass of limbs, humans turned to meat, and then them. Jan and Del, the bite he’d left upon my shoulder aching as I held the bow steady with what felt like little effort. All the other solutions we’d come up with for the Reaver problem had felt messy, weak compared to this. I watched the wolves as they came closer, tracking their every move, and when the first one came into range, I let my arrow fly.

Perhaps I should’ve paused for a second. These Reavers might be monsters, but they were men as well, and I’d been taught that every life was sacred to the gods. But I sent up no prayer for their soul, not when the arrow sliced through the air, its aim true, and definitely not when it went slamming into the wolf’s chest, the animal’s legs giving out seconds later as it fell to the ground in a messy tumble. No, it was a dark prayer to the goddess herself that I muttered under my breath as I reached for the arrow, Pepin’s eyes sliding sideways even as she drew her own bow.

Which was probably what summoned her.

Her eyes widened just for a second, but I didn’t pause to see why. I grabbed another arrow, nocked it and then shot again. I wasn’t a woman, a person, two souled. I was just an eye and a set of hands and a bow. Nordred had told me over and over about this state, but when it came, I was completely unprepared for it.

A golden light filled me, driving out all thought, all feeling, just this. I was a machine made for taking out obstacles and I did. Reaver after Reaver went tumbling into the dirt as a result of my shots, my arrows cutting through their flesh with ease, but I just kept reaching for more arrows, shooting, shooting until finally… My fingers searched my quiver for more but found none, and that’s when I knew it was time to transition.

When I tossed my bow and quiver aside, I felt strangely lighter. As I drew my sword, I heard the silvery sound of so many doing the same, letting me know I wasn’t alone, but it was the feel of my men clustering closer that brought me back to the battle.

“Keep Darcy safe!” Dane snapped, all of his alpha bark in his voice. “No matter what happens, we keep her from harm!”

And just like that, their shields went up, forming a wall in front of me, one I stood behind with my swords hanging uselessly at my sides.

“We’ll keep the bastards back, lass,” Axe said with a roguish grin. “Don’t you worry.”

Worry? What was inside me, it didn’t have time for worry. My body thrummed with a strange energy, one that was itching to be deployed, something the Maidens seemed to understand.

I saw Selene step up further down the line, Axe and Weyland cursing as she did.

“Don’t do it…” Weyland muttered, his eyes on the woman, but whatever she did, it didn’t seem to make him happy. My eyes flicked back towards the battlefield, catching the moment the wolves stopped and transformed into the half wolf, half man form Reavers apparently favoured. “They’ll go berserk, just like them.”

But when my focus flicked back, I found I couldn’t look away, despite the Reavers increasingly loud howls. Fur sprinkled across her body and she seemed to grow somehow as a result. That golden light inside me, it flared harder, brighter as Selene loomed above us, a picture of glorious strength.

“Don’t do it, lass.” My eyes jerked sideways to see Gael at my shoulder, his shield raised to cover the both of us. “Don’t get caught up in their bullshit. You’ll get lost in battle fever and you won’t come back.”

Was that what this was? This seductive golden light that seemed to fill every crack inside me, having me grinning despite the fact we were fighting a war. He frowned at that, then started to say something, but Selene’s voice cut across it all.

“Selene, stand down!” Dane ordered. “If you and your pack turn rabid, you’ll kill us just as easily as them!”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do, princeling,” she growled, her voice now so much deeper. “You don’t know. You men have lost your way, but not us.” But her head jerked around to the rest of the Maidens, because they were her true focus. Each one had shifted now, into the half wolf form, each woman now wearing the head of their beast. “What does a wolf do?” she asked them, the question holding a ceremonial weight.

“She hunts!” came the cries of the other Maidens and somehow my mouth formed the same words, knowing them somehow.

“And what does she hunt for?”

“The throats of her enemies!” we all said, smacking our swords against our shields. Gael was protesting, Weyland was saying something else, but I couldn’t seem to hear it, not now.

“Well, you wolves better be bloody hungry, because there’s more prey here than we need, strictly speaking,” she said with a wild grin. “But my pack will take these bastards down, every single one of them.” That light inside me glowed all the fiercer, swelling, swelling at the sound of her voice. “No child dies today, not while we stand. No mother and no wife. The Wolf Maidens protect. That’s what we do.”

“Incoming!” Gael snapped.

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