AURORA
One quiet and almost-meek hound stood fifty feet away from our pack borders, staring at our prepared guards with dull, dead eyes. I furrowed my brows as Ares and I advanced from the east with caution. So far, the forest near the property line looked empty and clear of any other hounds.
Why was this one alone? And what was he doing here?
This could be a setup.
“Don’t attack,” I ordered through the mind link.
It was too weird to not only see one hound without his pack, but to also have that same hound not be aggressive toward other wolves. Hounds were undead beasts who attacked anything and everything they could find. To my knowledge, nobody knew the reason for their aggression. But maybe, just maybe, Jeremy had been onto something with all that divine revenge talk.
When we approached the guards, Ares growled and bared his teeth at the hound. The hound fixed his gaze on me and walked forward—slowly, steadily, and calculatingly. Though he looked harmless, something about him told me to be careful. This wasn’t a typical hound who would’ve tried to kill me already. And he certainly wasn’t a Jeremy-like hound.
Wolves whispered behind me, arguing about how to capture him without anyone dying.
“Stay back. This is a setup. It has to be.”
Just as the words left my mind, the hound bolted toward me, slashing his claws through the air with a whoosh, growling deep into the night, and baring his blunt, blood-and-saliva-glazed teeth at me.
Ares shifted into his wolf midair, latched his canines into the wolf’s neck, and jerked him side to side like a dog would a rag doll. The hound slammed against the forest floor over and over, the intensity making the tree branches above us shake. I stepped forward toward my warring mate, grasped the hound’s neck, and snapped it myself with my bare hands.
Adrenaline pumped through every bloody vessel of my body. I backed up and glared around the forest with the hound’s foul scent smeared all over my hands. I waited for more hounds to attack because they rarely fought alone. There had to be more.
And that was when my gaze landed on two piercing gold eyes deep in the woods.
The man who had raised wolves from the dead stood hundreds of yards away from us, staring at me. My heart raced, and I swallowed hard, unable to pull my gaze away. He was watching me fight, not Ares. It was extremely unsettling.
Without losing sight of him, I growled low. “The hound who raped your mother is here,” I said to Ares through the mind link, not knowing how else to refer to him. I didn’t know his name, and I didn’t think that Ares did either. “North. Hidden behind that big pine tree.”
Muscles swollen, mouth bloodied, eyes dark under the night sky, Ares growled and looked north. As soon as he made eye contact, the hound sprinted away through the woods.
Ares went to follow, but I grabbed his hind leg and yanked him back. “Don’t attack. He might be up to something that we don’t know about.”
Ares ripped his leg away from me and took off through the dark and foggy woods. Though I knew he was tired of the hound taunting him, something else was up with that man. I couldn’t let Ares thrust himself into war and get killed.
I sprinted after Ares, jumped forward, and snatched his back leg again, landing flat on my stomach. For a moment, Ares dragged me through the woods and against the fallen leaves and twigs. Ares stumbled a bit, his claws digging into the dirt, and stopped.
“Let go of me, Aurora.” Ares seethed through the mind link. “I’m going to kill that fucker. I’m done with his games.”
Instead of letting go, I wrapped both my hands around his hind leg and pulled him back with all my strength. “You’re not going,” I said through clenched teeth. I crawled to my knees and pinned him to the ground. “Shift now.”
Canines dripping with saliva, Ares shifted under me and wiggled out of my hold. “What was that? I could’ve killed him. This would be over with by now. We could’ve stopped a war before it started.”
Crossing my arms, I refused to let him talk down to me. “He would’ve killed you. You don’t know how many hounds he has in that forest, waiting to attack.” I stepped closer to him and stared up into those wolfish golden eyes. “And I’m not about to let you get killed.”
It would destroy me to lose my mate. I had already lost so many family and pack members. But Ares … he didn’t just have a special place in my heart. He owned my heart. Losing him would be like losing a piece of myself.
“We need to amp up our security, so this doesn’t happen again.” I placed my hands flat on his chest and curled my fingers into the bare muscle. “Please, calm down and think things through before you react. We have a pack to protect.”
Vein pulsing wildly in his neck, he looked as if he wanted to rip that man piece by piece. And one day, I’d turn Ares loose, so he could do just that. That man deserved more than just death. But Ares couldn’t do anything now. I wouldn’t let him put himself in senseless danger.
“Fuck!” Ares hurled his fist into a tree next to us. It snapped and fell, the impact shaking the trees surrounding it.
Everyone stayed quiet, and Ares turned back to me, his eyes golden with a red tint to them. I sucked in a breath.
Though stories plagued Sanguine Wilds of Ares being a god, of his eyes blazing red when fury controlled his body, I had never seen it. After meeting him, I never thought the rumors were true. But maybe, just maybe, I was seeing things.
Most gods, besides our Moon Goddess, were myths created by wolves before us.
Ares wasn’t immortal. He suffered wounds, had scars, lived life like everyday could be his last. But those eyes … they were more vicious and terrifying than any hound I had met, and I loved them more than I thought I should. Something about them seemed so familiar, yet … I couldn’t place it. I didn’t know where I had seen them before because it definitely wasn’t in this lifetime. I’d remember it if it was.
Storming to a house at the border, where we kept spare clothes, Ares grumbled to himself and tugged on some pants. He snatched up my hand and led us in the opposite direction, toward Pink Moon Tavern. “I’m meeting with Alpha Vulcan about the necromancer in the south. He’d better have fucking information about this shit because I don’t want to fucking wait.”
“Hopefully.” I picked up my pace, trying to keep up with his long strides.
“We are going to my father’s for dinner,” Ares said to me. “I need to figure out why they’re targeting the lunas of this pack. They targeted my mother, and now, they want my mate. And I will never let them have you.”
I swallowed hard, believing that there was more than just that. The hounds were planning something; we just had to figure out what that something was. It wasn’t like hounds to ever have a plan. They were ruthless. They were volatile. They were like Ares—personified into demonic hell-dogs. They didn’t think before they acted …
But the hound who rose the dead seemed to have a plan. He’d waited and watched as I killed one of his minions. He was calculating, researching, trying to understand … me.