Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 96: First Contact

~LYRA’S POV~

The attack came at dawn on the third day after the summit.

Silverclaw’s eastern supply line, the route the outer villages used to move provisions from the farming settlements to the main packhouse stores. Cade had identified it two days ago as a potential vulnerability in our expanded perimeter coverage, had flagged it for additional patrol, and had not yet finished implementing the increased rotation.

The Huntsmen moved through that gap.

Six warriors. The report reached us while the attack was still ongoing, which meant we had fighters on the road before it was over. I went with the response team, Ryland insisted on coming and I didn’t argue, because two Alphas plus a Moonborn in the field was better than one Alpha and a Moonborn on the road, and we reached the eastern route in time to see the last of it.

It was exactly as described. The spears were short and dark, silver-banded tips, moving with precision that had no right to exist in weapons thrown by human hands from the distances they were thrown from. The wolfsbane sealed the wounds from the outside the moment they hit. Warriors who had been struck were on the ground before they understood they’d been seriously injured.

We drove them back. Not cleanly, there was nothing clean about it, but we drove them back, and the Huntsmen withdrew in the specific ordered way that wasn’t a retreat so much as the next stage of a plan. They melted into the treeline at the edge of the supply route and were gone.

Six of ours were down.

—

The problem became clear when I tried to use what I had.

I extended the Moonborn light, not the full release, the directed application, the force push that had moved everything I’d ever pushed it against. It should have worked. It had worked against Selara’s creatures, against the soul-tethered wolves, against anything supernatural that had been in its path.

The two Huntsmen still on the near side of the treeline walked through it.

They didn’t stagger. They didn’t slow. They didn’t show any sign of having encountered something significant. They walked through the silver-white light the way you walked through a doorway, with complete indifference to what was between them and where they were going. ƒгeewebnovёl.com

One of them, one of the identical twins, though I couldn’t tell which, looked at my hands. At the light still blazing from my palms.

"We were made for this," he said. Completely casually. The same tone he’d used on the road after the Shadowfang visit. A statement of fact about a technical specification.

Then they were gone.

Eren was at my shoulder. "Back," he said. Not urgently, with the specific evenness of someone making a tactical assessment and communicating it immediately. "Strategic withdrawal. Now."

We withdrew.

Not a rout, there was no panic, no breaking of formation, nothing that looked like defeat to the people watching from the treeline. But we withdrew, and we brought our wounded with us, and six of our dead came back on pallets, and the supply line was closed for now.

—

The mood in Silverclaw that evening was dark in the specific way that was different from grief. Grief was familiar. This was the particular dark of people who had just discovered that the tools they’d been counting on might not work the way they’d been counting on them to work, and who were doing the private accounting of what that meant.

Ryland moved through the packhouse with the particular steadiness that cost him more than it showed. I could see the cost, the slight extra deliberateness in his movements, the way his jaw was set in the not-quite-visible way that only happened when something was landing harder than he was letting on. He was holding the packhouse’s composure steady by maintaining his own, which was Ryland’s specific form of leadership, and it was real, and it was working, and it was expensive.

Cade was in the operations room running analysis on the attack pattern, cross-referencing the wound data, pulling everything available.

Eren had gone directly to his books. I hadn’t needed to tell him, by the time we’d returned he’d already identified which questions needed answering and had gone to find the answers.

I went to the medical wing.

Not as the High Luna. I left the formal posture at the door and I went in as a person who had people to sit with. Mira had three beds occupied with seriously wounded warriors, two more with less critical injuries. I went to each one.

The young one, Pell, he told me when I asked, nineteen years old, from the northern outer village, had joined the warriors eight months ago, was trying not to show how much his arm was hurting him while Mira worked on the break. I sat down beside him and took the hand on the side Mira wasn’t on.

"Talk to me," I said. "About something that isn’t this."

He looked at me with the expression of someone not sure what was being asked.

"What do you want to do when this is over?" I said. "Not the war. After. When there’s an after."

He blinked. Thought about it. "I cook," he said. "I was apprenticed to a cook before I joined. I make bread."

"What kind?"

"Seed bread, mostly. There’s a place near the northern village that grows a specific grain." He shifted slightly as Mira found the right angle and started to set the bone. His jaw went tight. I held his hand harder and kept talking.

"What does it taste like?" frёewebηovel.cѳm

He exhaled through the pain. "Dense. Nutty. You can’t rush the rising or it doesn’t work. My teacher used to say the bread knows if you’re in a hurry."

"Your bread sounds better than anything I’ve eaten in the last six months," I said. "When this is over, you’re making it for me."

He looked at me for a moment. Then something in his face relaxed, not the injury, but the tension around the injury.

"Done," he said.

I moved through the rest of the beds the same way. Present. Asking questions. Listening to the answers. Not offering reassurances I couldn’t back up and not performing anything. Just there, which was what people needed when they were in pain that couldn’t be fixed right now, to not be alone in it.

I was on the last bed when I became aware of voices near the doorway. My hearing had sharpened considerably since Solene had fully settled, and without trying I caught what was being said.

Ryland’s voice, quiet: "She does this every time."

Cade’s voice, quieter: "She’s going to be extraordinary."

A pause.

Ryland: "She already is."

I kept my attention on the warrior in front of me and didn’t look toward the door, because that moment was theirs, and some things were better received as gifts than claimed as audience.

—

~EREN’S POV~

It was near midnight when Cade found me.

I was in the operations room rather than the archive, because the archive required time I didn’t currently have and the operations room had everything I needed close enough to reach. I’d been working through the attack pattern data for three hours and was somewhere between a framework and a conclusion when he came in with the specific quality of someone who had been running their own analysis and had arrived at something I needed to hear immediately.

"Every warrior killed across all three packs," Cade said. He set his notes down flat on the table and I recognised the placement, the particular controlled placement of someone who wanted me to understand they’d checked this several times before bringing it. "I cross-referenced the deaths from the past six weeks. Every single one of them. Time of death, location, which pack. All of it."

"And,"

"Every single one was killed in the same four-hour window," he said. "Repeated. Three days apart, to the hour." He looked at me steadily. "Across three different packs, across different locations, different patrol configurations, different weather. The window doesn’t shift. It doesn’t vary. It holds exactly."

The information assembled itself in the way information did when a pattern revealed itself, from multiple pieces into one coherent thing.

"They’re running military cycles,"

"Yes," Cade said. "This is not opportunistic. This is scheduled. They’re operating on a rotation." He paused. "Which means the pattern is predictable."

I looked at the notes.

"The next window,"

"Tomorrow," Cade said. "At dawn."