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She was crying.

She wiped at her own cheeks with her free hand and attempted a smile. “Nothing. Only tired.”

He sighed – but fondly. “Lia, you don’t have to do all of this.”

It was a conversation they’d had a few times, now. He was proud of her, and told her so often…but worried, too. Had encouraged her to see to her own happiness. “And how can I – or anyone – be happy if the whole country falls to the Sels?” she’d reasoned, for which he hadn’t had an answer.

“I know,” she said, now, and turned her face away, because it was hard, sometimes, to rectify the Mal she’d known in life with this shade who wanted her to stop trying.

Across the plain, a stand of woods stood dark sentry, its pines tall and crowded, their trunks nearly black. A strip of forest that both beckoned and warned away, not unlike the Inglewood in its sheer formidability. She always swore something watched them from its shadows – but today something trulywaswatching.

Two wolves stood at the forest’s edge. Large wolves, with oddly light eyes visible even from a distance. Both were a dappled shade of gray that looked nearly golden in this strange, dreamland light. Both watched them with rapt, unblinking attention.

Amelia was so startled to see them there that she gasped.

Alpha had been licking between his claws, a habit all the drakes performed and which reminded her of a cat grooming its paws, but he lifted his head with a sharp inhale at the sound of her surprise. His nostrils flared, and he sniffed noisily. She could tell when he caught sight of the wolves because his tail coiled around her and Malcolm, a protective shield, and he ducked his head and rumbled a warning growl that would have sent any animal running for the hills.

But the paler of the two wolves cocked his head to the side and regarded them curiously. His companion nosed at him, turned, finally, and slipped back beneath the shade of the trees. After a beat, the curious one whirled and raced after, a flick of his bushy tail-tip the last glimpse of him.

“That was…odd,” Amelia said.

“I wonder–” Mal began.

Her vision filled with a rush of red, and the world seemed to tilt sideways in a now-familiar sequence that meant Alpha was – rather rudely – barging into her consciousness.

Yes, what is it?she thought, as her vision cleared into that odd, fuzzy-edged view he sometimes offered her. In those moments, she instinctively knew that she was seeing the world through his eyes – but that her own eyes weren’t built like a drake’s, and so everything was a little off and bowed-out looking on her end.

He responded with a growl.

There at the edge of the woods where the two wolves had stood, she saw one wolf and a man. A tall, strong-looking man in brown leather belted tight at his waist. His tunic was sleeveless, and his arms were heavily muscled. He was blond, and his hair fell well past his shoulders, lay in rippling plenty on his chest. Ornaments winked from the waves of it, small bits of silver or gems. She noted a strong jaw beneath a close-cropped beard, and the handle of a longsword sprouting over his shoulder. His blue eyes wereglowing.

He was…strikingly handsome. Not that it mattered; Drakewell was full of handsome men. But the sight of him, Alpha’s growl echoing in the back of her mind, sent a frisson of awareness through her. A tingling at the back of her neck, a tug in her gut.

The vision flickered: a man and a wolf, and then two wolves, man and then wolves. Amelia knew, somehow, that they were both. Men who couldbecomewolves. Then one was a man again, and solid. He swatted at the wolf’s side, turned, and trotted off into the forest. The wolf lingered a moment, and when he opened his mouth, he looked as though he was smiling. He turned, then, and darted after the man, the flick of his tail the last she saw before he was gone from sight.

Red again, and she was back in her own mind, Mal beside her, Alpha’s tail warm and solid across her knees. She blinked at the forest, at the place where the wolves – the men – had stood. Nothing stirred there, now.

She turned a glance up to Alpha, and he met it, great red-gold eyes narrowed. He sent her a warning, a sense of danger.

“Who were they?” she asked aloud.

“I don’t know,” Mal said.

Through their bond, Alpha again signaled danger, and something else:skinwalkers.

~*~

She was startled awake by the blare of trumpets, somewhere out in the yard. She rolled over and blinked at the water-spotted ceiling a moment while her vision cleared.

It wasn’t yet dawn, the light hinting at silver, its glow beginning to fill the room so that she could make out the hulking shape of the armoire, the washstand, the bed posts.

The trumpets repeated: two long blasts, unhurried, rote. New arrivals, then.

Amelia closed her eyes again, chasing the remnants of the dream. Usually when she did that, it was to recall Malcolm’s last smile, before he’d faded out. The feel of his hand on her face. But this time, it was the wolves that filled her mind. The man she’d seen one become. Alpha’s warning.

Who were they?

Why did she care?