Claimed by the vampire prince

Chapter 464: Chapter 464

By the time Ragnar reached his tent, a subtle unease had already begun to settle inside him. A persistent nudging against his instincts.

He lifted the flap and stepped inside, his eyes sweeping over the tent’s interior, scanning every detail. He checked his belongings one by one, his movements methodical. His sword rested exactly where he had left it. His pack remained undisturbed, the straps neatly secured. Nothing appeared out of place.

And yet, when his inspection ended, the feeling did not fade.

If anything, it deepened.

Though there was no evidence to prove it, he could not shake the certainty that someone had been inside his tent not long ago.

***

Ragnar and the rest of the hunters set out again at first light. They had been on the road for five days now, and the signs along the trail had grown clearer with each passing mile. They were closing in on the beast.

Only a day earlier, the group had decided to split in two to cover more ground. Ragnar had taken command of one half, while Dougol led the other in a different direction.

Ragnar had insisted on bringing three of the demon riders with him, ignoring Dougol’s visible dissatisfaction. The disagreement had not escalated into open conflict, but it had lingered in the air between them.

Since then, the journey had been mostly uneventful.

The hunters behaved civilly with each other and the newcomers.

For a time, it almost felt peaceful. But peace rarely lasted.

The forest had grown quieter as the hours passed, the usual sounds of wildlife fading into an unnatural stillness. Even the wind that moved through the trees seemed to halt.

Then, without warning, a deafening growl tore through the air.

It was deep, guttural, and powerful enough to send a sharp tremor through the ground beneath their mounts. The horses reacted instantly. Their ears flattening, muscles tensing, and some reared slightly in alarm.

The sound had not come from far away.

And whatever had made it was close.

"Brace yourselves!" Ragnar shouted, his voice cutting clean through the silence that had fallen over the group in the wake of that first growl.

The hunters needed no further prompting. Weapons were drawn in an instant as the men shifted their horses into defensive positions. They had already gone over the plan the night before, each man knowing exactly where he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do. Three flankers to drive the beast toward the center. Four archers at the rear to weaken it from a distance. Ragnar and the remaining hunters up front to deliver the killing blow once the creature had been sufficiently slowed.

It was a solid plan. A clean plan.

But plans rarely survived contact with the unexpected.

The growling grew louder, closer, reverberating through the trees like something enormous displacing the very air around it. Then the undergrowth ahead of them exploded outward and the beasts broke through.

Not one. Two.

Two fenrars came crashing into the open, each one bigger than the size of a draft horse, their thick lupine bodies rippling with muscle beneath coarse, matted fur. Their jaws hung open, strings of saliva swinging from their teeth as their eyes swept over the hunters with a hunger that was savage.

For a second nobody moved.

Then Ragnar drove his heels into his horse’s flanks and charged.

The hunters followed, and the careful plan they had constructed the night before began unraveling almost immediately. The two beasts split apart the moment the hunters closed in, each one peeling off in a different direction and forcing the group to divide its attention. The archers loosed their arrows but the fenrars moved fast, faster than anything that size had any right to move, and most of the shots fell wide or glanced off the thick hide without doing any meaningful damage.

One of the flanking hunters went down first. His horse screamed as a fenrar lunged and caught it by the neck, dragging both animal and rider to the ground in a single savage motion. The man didn’t get back up.

The second fenrar swung wide and came at the group from the left, catching one of the archers off his horse with a swipe of its claws that opened three deep lines across the man’s chest.

Ragnar dismounted before his horse could throw him, landing in a low crouch as the nearest beast turned its attention toward him. He let his shadows spill out from his hands, sending dark tendrils coiling through the air toward the creature, wrapping around its legs and neck to drag it down and hold it in place. The fenrar thrashed violently against the restraints, snarling, but the shadows held. The remaining hunters pressed in from the sides, blades driving into the soft flesh beneath its forelegs.

The beast howled.

Ragnar moved to the second one, shadows surging ahead of him to slow it down as one of the demon riders engaged it from the front, drawing its attention. The creature snapped at the rider and the rider dodged, giving Ragnar the opening he needed. He closed the distance fast, sword raised, and drove the blade into the beast’s flank with everything he had behind it. frёewebηovel.cѳm

The fenrar’s howl tore through the air.

Dark blood ran down the length of his sword and coated his hand to the wrist. The beast staggered but it didn’t fall. It twisted sharply, slashing at Ragnar as it turned, and its claws caught him across the side. The force of it knocked him sideways and he felt pain spreading under his ribs. He steadied himself and looked down only briefly. The cuts were deep but not deep enough to stop him. Not yet at least.

He reached for his shadows again to press the advantage.

Nothing came.

He stopped. Reached again, driving his focus inward toward that deep and familiar well that had always been there, that constant presence he had carried since childhood like a second heartbeat. freewēbnoveℓ.com

It was gone.

Not depleted, just gone. The connection had simply ceased to exist, as cleanly and completely as a candle being snuffed out between two fingers. No trace of it anywhere.

The shock of it hit him harder than any physical blow had. He stayed there for a second too long, his sword hand drooping slightly as his mind scrambled to make sense of it, to find some thread of his power to grab hold of.

The fenrar found him in that moment.

It hit him from the side with the full weight of its body behind it. He struck the ground hard, the back of his skull connecting with something solid beneath him and white fractured across his vision.

The breath was knocked out of him. He lay there with the sky tilting overhead, his sword still in his grip by instinct alone, and he couldn’t move, couldn’t draw air, but he could still hear the fight continuing around him as though it were happening somewhere distant.

The ground beneath his head was cold and wet and he could feel something warm spreading along his scalp. Above him, he could hear the fenrar moving.