AURORA
As we walked back to Hades’s kingdom to turn in for the night, the forest around us became deathly quiet. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about seeing Mars in that vision—or whatever that was. Yet it made me smile, knowing that he was still here with me.
Even if it was just a part of him.
I inhaled sharply and stopped along with Ares, who scanned the forest cautiously. Branches snapped about fifty meters to the northeast. With the rest of the pack behind us, I closed my eyes and listened for more noise. There had to be an entire pack of creatures lurking in the night for us to find, yet they were slow and didn’t seem that menacing.
Still, before I could stop him, Ares shifted into a wild beast on all fours, his claws digging into the dirt and his golden eyes glowing deep through the darkness. The tree leaves and branches almost hid the sky above, hanging close to the ground. Ares growled ferociously and stepped under the branches.
“Ares,” I whispered through the mind link.
Where is he going? What is he doing?
More branches snapped, and leaves crunched. Whoever it was … it sounded like they were approaching us and that there were many of them, maybe fifty or more. Yet, still, not even with my wolf senses could I hear their breath or smell their scents.
“Be careful,” I said again. “It could be the hounds. Fenris maybe.”
He lowered into a fighting stance, as if he was about to leap out into the forest and kill the first monster that appeared in our vision. Tail shifting back and forth slightly and saliva dripping from his canines, he growled again.
When the first hound walked out from the darkness and into the slight light that flickered through between the trees, I froze. Whispers broke out among the warriors, yet nobody moved. They hadn’t seen us yet.
“The hounds,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, eyes growing wide as more skeleton and half-eaten bodies emerged from the woods, walking in a straight path somewhere else. “They’re here, but they look so … so broken, so weak.”
Acesca moved closer to me. “Alpha Vulcan told our pack that you and Ares found Fenris doing some magic on a bunch of dead wolves—wolves that we’d all buried at some point or another. And that when he tried to raise the dead, he was unsuccessful for some wolves. Do you think that they are those wolves?”
I scanned the forest, looking from each undead to the next and trying desperately to remember if I had seen any of them before. But honestly, most looked like skeletons, not like normal hounds with flesh and fur.
“Should we attack them?” someone asked.
“Wait,” I ordered. It would be stupid to pounce on a large group without knowing how many more walked alongside them, but we wouldn’t let them go free. We needed to do something to stop Hella from growing her army of the dead. “Let’s see how many there are.”
More and more continued to walk out behind the initial group of hounds, their movements slower and their bodies frailer and smaller than the typical hounds that attacked us in the Sanguine Wilds.
Then, suddenly, the group dwindled down, the last few hounds scurrying behind them. And the man in charge of it all brought up the rear. Fenris walked behind the group of undead, beside a fleshless and brittle skeleton body.
Ares froze, his ears perking up and his golden eyes growing wide as he looked at Fenris’s companion.
“What is it?” I asked him through the mind link.
He let out another ferocious growl. “Mom.”