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“Here,” I said, sitting down beside Aaron and placing a steaming cup of coffee in his hands. We’d gotten in the cars and driven to the next cache site, then decided to camp here tonight. He took a deep breath, breathing in the steam that curled on its surface before taking an experimental sip.

“Black with two sugars?” He smiled, his look at me almost coy. “You remembered.”

“I have to, Aaron. We haven’t had time to share much else, have we?”

He shook his head and then placed the cup down beside his boot, tugging me over and kissing my head. “Always worrying.”

“You can’t blame me. We haven’t?—”

“But we will. When this is over. When we’re home. When the shit dies down and it’s just us. When we’re all in the house together, a pack. Waking up to each other every morning, arguing over who burnt the bacon.”

“That’d be Slade.”

“Or Jack, too busy looking at his reflection in the glass.”

“He’s not that bad, really.”

“No, he’s not, and that’s just it. You have a good sense of us. Deep down, when all of this,” he tapped my scalp, “stops chattering, you’ve got our numbers. You know we all care about you.”

“Yeah…”

“You know we all want the best for you.”

“Of course, and I want that for you too.”

“Then, the rest will come. We’ve just got to get through this.

Which brings me to something important. The caches aren’t what we hoped.

Some look like they’ve been damaged by wildlife.

Others have been raided by humanoids. Maybe some of the exiles, maybe someone else.

We need to keep our eyes peeled, but this changes how we’ll proceed with the Volken. ”

I kept my eyes trained on the ground, hoping the stab of fear I felt wasn’t apparent, but his big hand came to rest on my shoulder blades, rubbing my back in big slow circles. He was right though—I did have a feel for him, as this gesture was a familiar, almost expected one.

“We’re going to have to go in covert and Jules…” I waited for it, knew what was about to come. “I want you to wait somewhere safe. We’ll get the guys out, come back to you, and then we can go home.”

It made sense, I knew that. I wasn’t a badass. I had the potential to be one, if I could get off my back for one second and actually train, rather than just be a core member of Sexapalooza. I scratched at my neck, my nails raking my skin. They were going to go into the wolf’s den without me.

“That would be ill-advised.”

We looked up to see Sylvan had come to sit by the fire, not tasked with setting up camp like the other guys. He frowned as he scanned the two of us.

“This isn’t up for discussion, not with someone like you,” Aaron snapped.

“No? Well, then I may as well make my way back to the gate to try again with a different pack. Covert or full-frontal assault, doing so without Julie is a mistake.”

“You showed us what was in that place. You expect that we’ll take the person most precious to us into that? You saw how they treat women. What would happen if she was caught?”

“She’d be sent to breeding quarters to pop out sons until she died. All the more reason to keep her safe.”

“We will keep her safe, away from Leifgart and your fucking people,” Aaron said, jerking to his feet.

“You’ve played the lot of us, and almost got Jules raped, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t accept your counsel.

You’ve proven yourself a manipulative cunt, done little other than cause chaos and given us the thumbs up occasionally.

If you know what’s going to happen, tell us, before I give my men a couple of pairs of pliers and a car battery to force the truth out of you.

” When he looked down at me, Aaron’s eyes were burning.

“It’ll be OK, Jules. We’ll make sure nothing happens to you. ”

“Oh, so honourable,” Sylvan said with a frown, as he watched Aaron march off. I just looked at the discarded cup of coffee.

“You said we were bonded, mated,” I said, tilting my head but not looking at the black wolf.

“Yes, of course. My venom was part of what?—”

His words were choked off as I leapt to my feet, slapping my hand down on his arm before he could think to run off.

For a second, I noted the widening of his eyes, and the flare of some emotion within.

Hope? Need? I couldn’t tell, but I soon would.

I listened to the rapid pant of his breath, felt the warmth of his skin, the cords of muscle there, felt the faint tremble in his body, then I was ripped away, my awareness of the world thrust to one side as I was caught up in the swirl of him as he pulled me down like a silken undertow.

Fear rose up—much, much greater than anything I’d ever been able to inspire with my own anxiety spirals, which just added to the conflagration.

I was buffeted and tossed through a chaotic environment, red throbbing cells spinning, the massive boom of a heartbeat smashing into my ears every half second.

My own heart started to keep time, the two bass notes thundering faster and faster.

I heard the rapid rasp of breath—mine, his?

I couldn’t tell, and then it all fell away.

I heard my own lungs labour as my mental field of vision was filled with alien scenes.

I watched black fur-clad men toting crystal tipped spears file into a valley, their movements jerky and stuttering, as if the recording of them doing so was speeding up and slowing down at random moments.

The men created a loose semicircle around a massive temple complex.

Tall menhirs marked the procession way towards the huge temple doorway, the neatly arranged bleached bones of human skeletons marking the spaces between the huge stones.

The view jerked forward to the men holding up the spears as the points started to shine with a reddish light, then back again to the tossing of several bodies of dead men at the end of the path, carelessly dumped on top of each other.

Flashes of rumbles shook the ground, spear tips sent out a net of scarlet light, and the Great Black Wolf stepped out of the temple gloom into the sunlight.

It all got faster and more garbled after that.

Teeth slicing human bodies into chunks in a single snap, disappearing down a night dark throat.

The kneeling of all the crystal spear toting warriors as the Great Wolf stood before him, rays of red light radiating from each spear point, then back to the wolf.

Hundreds of slave men brought to the site, and being worked to death by the Volken, digging up and carrying endless wheelbarrows of dirt to the temple and burying it.

The creation of a settlement, then increasingly a city on the top of this great man-made plateau.

The mass execution of those surplus slaves once the settlement was complete—dragging them down into the depths of the embankment, the spasmodic recording of their attempts to escape and howls of protest all silenced as the Great Wolf crept from its cave, its mouth open and ready to consume its due.

Crystals—on spears, in rooms to light them, held in braziers and offerings burned to them, worn on armour, bestowed on boy children at their birth.

Men, always men—fighting, talking, cooking, organising, leading, hunting, building and inventing.

Slaves did everything else. Men swarming out of the city to attack interlopers, banding together on horseback to swoop in and eradicate whole villages.

Then the subsequent raping of the women, thankfully swept over this time.

It all became a blur of the same, over and over, until her.

It felt like the camera of Sylvan’s mind wanted to gloss over this, move on to something else, so it was no surprise when the story shifted to the first of us, the white Tirian.

Her emergence out of the filth is documented, cold and starving, heavy with child, but transformed with the aid of the strange green-eyed woman.

I could see her now, the shadowy outline of the Great White Wolf regarding the process.

Then it galloped forward, skimming over what must have been years of frustration for the Volken.

The appearance of the first girl children at their door, those initial ones brutalised so thoroughly, I found myself closing my eyes, seeing only their bodies dragged away when I opened them.

Then over and over, the hordes of girl children arriving at their door, with only a few male children amongst them, shifting into Tirian form at the first sign of violence, attacking with snapping jaws and heads held low.

The begrudging acceptance of the females into their midst, the corralling of them in simple pens initially, then considerably more opulent seraglios as new generations were spawned, until the women were all ensconced in the prettiest of cages.

Then, it shifted again. I watched the halting words of a young boy, with ragged black hair and eyes like iced water, be recorded by much larger men.

There was some conferring between them as they considered what he said, then a nod, and his fate was sealed.

The boy was schooled and trained mercilessly, a swagger stick slapping the boy’s knuckles each time he faltered in what was asked of him, fists driven into his side over and over.

The never-ending requests for information, often specific details about upcoming events, the twist of ever-present fear winding that much tighter as he knew he had nothing to give.

His later astute prophecies delivered more from his observations as to how the Volken operated than any god touched vision, borne as much for a desire not to be beaten further.

His relief when what he predicted ended up coming true, that guilty slinking flush of pleasure twisting up tightly with the fear that next time, he would not be able to deliver.