CHAPTER ONE — The Wrong Kind of Prey (2)

The woman didn't blink. "You're on the wrong side of the mountain."

"See, that's what I was afraid of." Kellen laughed — a real laugh, because his brain had clearly been replaced with a slot machine. "I came for the blackstone. I got the black wolves. Which one are you, by the way? Please say the nice one."

She walked toward him. Her footsteps made no sound. That was somehow worse than the wolves.

"The blackstone," she repeated, and her voice was low and cold and did something to his spine that he refused to acknowledge. "You're a digger. A grave thief."

"I'm an influencer. It's a gray area."

Her blade came up. The edge caught the moonlight, and Kellen realized, with the detached calm of a man who has accepted his fate, that she was going to kill him.

"Look," he said, holding up both hands, blood dripping from a gash in his arm, grinning like an idiot because dying with dignity was for people who hadn't just watched a woman murder three nightmares with one hand. "If you're going to kill me, gorgeous — at least let me film it. Six hundred followers would riot. It'd be the greatest content of my life. Better than the moose."

The blade stopped at his throat.

The woman stared at him. For a long, terrible, beautiful moment, something moved behind her eyes — something that wasn't law, and wasn't mercy, and didn't know what to call itself.

Then, far down the pass, a horn sounded.

Low. Long. A hunting horn.

Her gaze flicked to the horizon, then back to him, and Kellen saw the exact second she made a decision she was going to hate herself for.

"You saw nothing," she said. "You were never here."

She turned and walked away.

And Kellen Blake, bleeding out in the mud, did the only thing a sensible man would do.

He followed her.

"Wait — wait, hold on. Where are you going? There's a horn. A horn, like the scary kind. You can't just leave me here with the murder wolves and the existential dread, that's not — "

She spun. Her hand closed around his collar, and he went weightless, and then the mountain was moving past him in gray streaks and he was being dragged through the mist by a woman who ran like the dark was her personal chauffeur.

"You," she hissed, "are the most annoying thing to ever set foot on this mountain. And if you make one more sound, I will let the wraithwolves have you."

"Deal," Kellen gasped, "but for the record — this is the best first date I've ever been on."

The horn sounded again. Closer.

And Isola Vane, the perfect blade of the Umbra Tribe, the woman who had never once broken a rule in her life, dragged a living human deeper into the forbidden mountain instead of killing him.

She told herself it was strategy. Evidence disposal. Containment.

She told herself that all night long, while the blood of a stranger dried on her hands, and the mountain hummed around her like a wound.

Rules are dead men's chains, she thought, and then she stopped thinking, because the thought was a door she had promised her sister she would never open.

The human was still talking.

"— and honestly, the moose was scarier. The moose had attitude. This was more like a — ow, is that a cave? Please tell me that's a cave. I have a thing about caves. I have a good thing about caves — "

"Shut up."

"See, that's the thing about you," he said cheerfully, "you've got the whole 'silent guardian' thing down. Very intimidating. But I've watched the movies. The silent ones always fall first."

She dumped him on the stone floor of the hidden shrine and stood over him, blade out, breathing hard.

"You have one night," she said. "Tomorrow, I decide if you live."

He looked up at her from the floor, mud in his hair, blood on his lips, grinning like a man who had just won the lottery by accident.

"Bold of you to assume I'm not already dead," he said. "Of happiness."

The blade in her hand trembled.

It was the first time in her life that her hand had ever betrayed her.