The Dragon's Rogue

Chapter 23

The wolf mouthed my hand, tugging hard enough to pinch the skin, but not enough to break it. His ears twitched nervously, but I did not follow, not yet. Something dark had settled in my chest. My Alpha, it would mean that the pack had been compromised. No. No. No. It didn't make sense, I removed the glyph, they should have been safe. I sacrificed my membership, my life, to ensure it.

Illaise's warning rang through my head, the urging to kill the Dragon Lord that had been bitten. What if one, or several of my pack had been injured before I lured the creatures away? But still, she had said it took time for the injury to progress. I had only been gone for two...or was it three? days now. The question was, was he out of his own mind already? It begged to reason that he was, what else would he be doing so deep in the forest...tracking the pack?

I should shoot him now, and hope that the poison would have enough effect to put him from his misery. And I intended to. I raised the dart shooter, tramping down the thought that I had done this before, with disastrous results. The feathery green fronds of a fern blocked my view, I pushed them away slightly with my free hand, prepared to fire...and froze. I couldn't do it, to sentence the man who was my Alpha to death...I shook my head, confused at what would be right in this situation.

In the end I lowered the dart launcher. He might be dying...or maybe the man that he was was already dead, but it wouldn't be by my hand.

The wolf tried once more, grasping my elbow in his jaw, on the verge of breaking skin, insisting I follow.

Trying not to feel defeated...and terrified about what this revelation meant for my pack...for mother, I lowered the launcher and followed.

I slipped behind the tree and watched the gray fur disappear beneath a tangle of thorny vines. Cissiac hydiacia in particular, the vine with the thorns that made a good poison base...I hoped. I still hadn't had a chance to test the creation I created for the Archon, the poison that would be...or would have been...placed on the weapons. With my concentration focused on an airborne method of distribution I hadn't managed to find a test subject for the poison goop. The thought that each and every one of my defenses was untried and possibly subject to failure was not a comfortable one. What if none of them worked? We would be running into the enemies camp basically unarmed.

With that grim thinking I pressed forward, following the hints of gray fur through the undergrowth. We pressed through a patch of swampy ground where mud sucked at my legs. The stench of bog gasses was enough to cover our scent, a planned move by my escort I was certain. I couldn't say I appreciated it though, not with the insects that swarmed my naked flesh. Half way through the mess of vines and mud I could have swore that something brushed my leg beneath the surface. It took a lot of inner strength, and the threat of certain death, to withhold the squeamish noises I felt like making. In general, slimy things didn't bother me, as evidenced by my willingness to work with the poisonous tree frogs, but slimy things I couldn't see...well, I had an active imagination and it was not being kind to me.

A breath of wind carried to me and stopped such thinking in a heartbeat. Who needed a dark imagination when the Quatori were out there, close enough to smell? These were true Quatori too, not the possessed creatures. These were impossible to see, but their smell, even to my human form's nose, was distinct. My guide sensed it too, he waited at the edge of the muddied ground, staring back into the trees behind me as though, if he looked hard enough, he might be able to spot the creatures.

With practiced silence I climbed from the mud, the feeling of being watched...stalked, urging me to hurry forward. A second wolf, this one a similar color to the gray, but with darker tips to his fur, joined us. And then a third. We maneuvered through a series of twisted trunks until a shadow fell across our procession.