Winter's Rage

He was screaming again, a great bellow that ripped through the caves we'd holed up in.

Not the ruby caves. Just the regular kind, carved about halfway up the side of a hill.

I stepped on the hem of my coat as I doubled back toward him, nearly tripping and striking my head on a sharp stone protruding from the cave wall. If not for Sasha's eyes, I would have. She whimpered and struggled in my arms to get back to her alpha where she'd sit and watch over him until whatever had haunted him in sleep had gone.

"Patience, sweet girl," I said into the especially soft spot between her ears. Careful of her bandaged back leg, I shifted her in my arms. "We're going."

Shortly after he started screaming, he stopped. This was how it'd been for the week we'd been here. Every time he had nightmares like this, though, the sound punched into my heart.

Sasha and I had wandered deep into the cave system, which was a maze of narrow tunnels and huge caverns, searching for food. Yesterday, I'd shot a white lizard, hardly enough to keep the three of us alive, and the day before, I tracked a long creature with too many legs, but it got away.

We burst in on Thomas in a small enclave tucked behind a large boulder near the cave's entrance. He was sitting up, his wide, muscular shoulders heaving underneath his coat while he caught his breath. His beard and unruly brown hair made him look like more wolf than man, but the scars cutting down his face balanced his ferociousness with beauty. Maybe that made no sense, but it did to me. I found him perfectly flawed. A fierce beast who genuinely cared in his own private way.

Sasha squirmed loose and limped slightly to sit in front of him, like always. By the angle of her view, I could tell her head was tilted. He ignored her, like always.

"Did you catch anything." His voice was hard and rough, a demand for an answer rather than a question.

"No," I said with a sigh. "We can go to Shay’s neighbor’s—"

"I'll look." He bent his knees, and with the help of the boulder beside him, he hauled himself to his feet, his movements stiff.

After he'd been shot in each leg, I'd done my best to care for the wounds, but even with swift wolf healing, they still looked jagged and raw. They'd thicken the patchwork of scars that already mottled him from head to toe. Sasha was doing well after being thrown in Faust’s game of Catch, Kill, Release, but I fussed over her constantly because she let me. Thomas, not so much.

He shifted, a man one instant and a huge gray and white wolf the next, and loped off deeper into the caves without a word.

I didn't ask him what his nightmares were about. I didn't have to. And when I snapped awake in the middle of the night doused in a cold sweat and feeling as though a thousand wolves sat on my chest, he didn't ask either. He knew.

Archer and Grady, both somewhere unknown. Both hopefully still alive.

Sasha whined softly after Thomas and then sniffed around the blanket the three of us used at night. It had been left here, as well as half a frozen canteen, an empty, rusted gun, and flint for a fire. It had been left here by a dead man named Lukas, if the name sewn into the blanket was accurate. We'd found him sitting against the boulder when we arrived, nothing left of him but his bones and simple belongings.

I shivered at the memory. I couldn't allow myself to think his death meant our deaths too. Yet if we didn’t eat soon…

Sasha sniffed out a path from the blanket and then around the boulder to the cave exit. Of course I followed, not wanting her to be more than two feet away from me.

Past the sleigh leaning near the cave's mouth, she stopped, an empty white void in front of her, and then released a heartbreaking little howl. Swallowing thickly, I squatted down next to her and put my hand on her back as she went on and on, each one scooping out part of my soul. She missed Archer. She missed Grady. She missed her sister, Ronin. I did too. I let her mourn her loss since the wind surely whipped all sound away and the falling snow blotted everything out, including us.

Grady, at least I hoped, would be easy to find since he was only about a mile away at Shay's neighbor's house. To get there, we could take the sleigh. The only reason we hadn't gone there yet was because the cave had been closer, and Thomas and Sasha hadn't been up for any more travel while injured. The way to the caves had taken what felt like hours because I'd been the one to pull the sleigh. Me, with my unimpressive muscles straining to pull Thomas, someone double, nearly triple, my size.

Sasha stopped howling then and peered through the thick veil of blowing snow for the shifters she loved the most.

"We'll get them back," I promised her, my heart cracking a little more. We'd get everyone who'd been torn away from us back, even Archer. I couldn't imagine what he might be going through while in Faust's clutches. I just couldn't do it.

"Nothing."

Thomas's voice right behind me made me leap out of my skin. I whirled, my stomach near my throat.

"If we leave now, we can get to Shay's neighbor's before nightfall."

"Are you—" I stopped because of course he was sure. I didn't think he was healed enough, though. Despite the short trek, it would be rough, but I kept my mouth shut. With Grady, I could argue, was pretty much an expert at it. With Thomas… Well, I'd learned in the short time I'd known him that he met arguments with silence and a cold, hard stare then did whatever the hell he wanted. "I'll put out the fire."

Sasha stepped between my legs and blinked up at him from under the bottom hem of my coat. Even though he'd slept some, bruised pockets hung beneath his eyes. He seemed to hate sleep since it tortured him with dreams, but he couldn’t help succumbing to it.

I scooped up Sasha and slid by him, and as my shoulder brushed his arm, the air trembled around us. My breath caught as the connection I'd sensed between us when we’d first met flared with the physical contact. He had to have felt it, too, maybe even craved more of it like I did, because he reached out and took my wrist.

"Hurry, Aika. It’s probably going to take us several hours just to get down this hill, and night will be here soon."

Nodding, I pulled away, my fingers hooking into his and then slipping free.

Realization struck me as I walked away from him. This connection reminded me of what I'd felt when I first met Hellbreath. A kinship of sorts, like we'd suffered similar trauma and abuse, her with her scars, and now Thomas with his. It was a little different with him, though, sparked brighter with a simple touch, like I needed to feel his scars in order for him to know the true extent of my invisible ones.

While he slowly lugged the sleigh down the hill, I settled Sasha nearby and then snuffed out the fire. It felt wrong stealing a dead man's things, but I packed Lukas's items up anyway to take with us. They hadn't done him much good, but maybe they would us. Wherever he was, I hoped he agreed.

"Okay, Sasha girl." I peered up at myself through her to make sure all my buttons were done up on my coat and my scarf wasn't accidentally knotted in my hair. "We're going to get Grady."

She squeaked excitedly and crouched low, her whole body swinging with the force of her tail.

I chuckled as I carefully picked her up. "Sums up my feelings exactly. Let's go."

On the way toward the cave's mouth, I pulled up my spine and tried to steady my pulse. I didn't want to go out there again. I did, but I didn't. Winter made travel near impossible, doubly so when running for our lives, which we'd been doing too often lately. We had to do it, of course, but I dreaded it all the same.

A low groan came from the opening, and then Thomas's large hands hoisted the rest of him up. He looked spent already with sweat trickling down his temples and his shoulders heaving. He slumped against the cave wall to catch his breath.

"Will Faust be waiting out there?" I asked to give him a moment to rest. "Or do you think he sent some of his pack to hunt us?"

Thomas grunted. "He thinks I'm dead."

"That didn’t answer my questions."

"He has Archer. I doubt the novelty of that has worn off yet, so no. I don't think Faust will be waiting out there."

I flinched as my stomach soured. What would it mean if the novelty did wear off? I didn’t want to know.

"He knows that you have Gabriel at the church in Margin with my baba, doesn't he?"

"No,” Thomas said and ground his teeth. “All he knows is that Gabriel left to find me, and he knows what I did to Gabriel the last time I saw him."

"Which was what?" I asked, my voice cracking a little.

He turned his face to the void outside, remaining silent.

I tried another, hopefully less delicate route that wouldn't dead-end in silence. "Since Gabriel is Faust's second-in-command and you…did something to him, wouldn't Faust want to kill you himself? He seemed happy to have me do it for him."

"Faust's game is torture and slow, painful deaths.” He cut a glance at me then glared a hole into the opposite cave wall. “But he can't kill me himself."

"Why not?"

"A couple reasons. Partly because I'm his brother." He clambered out of the cave, leaving me to follow him out into the bitter nothingness or stand there with my jaw dangling free.

Questions hurled through my mind and stung like snowflakes against my skin. Faust and Thomas were brothers? The only glimpses of Faust I'd seen were through Sasha before we'd come here, and I'd been so focused on Ronin dangling from his fist that I hadn't really looked at the man.

Thomas’s brother.

But he can't kill me himself.

Can't? Or won't?

"They're not here."

Three simple words, but their meaning crashed into me and nearly undid the sliver of hope that had brought me to Shay’s neighbor’s cabin. We stood in the middle of the one-room house, which was hardly more than stacks of wood. The sounds of our voices lost themselves in the angry whistling through the cabin’s cracks. The place was freezing and smelled like old soup. On the way inside, I'd bumped into a small, rickety table against the wall and caused the full bowls to clatter and slop. Only two bowls. Not enough for Shay, Gibby, and Grady. Whoever had been eating from them had left in a hurry, and to leave perfectly good food behind… That was something I’d never imagined.

"Do you think they ever made it here?" I whispered, my throat too constricted with worry to do much else.

Sasha padded around the tabletop and sniffed loudly at the bowls while keeping an eye on her alpha.

"I don't know.” Thomas absently picked up a spoon while his brown eyes narrowed on the rest of the cabin, crinkling the scars at the corners. “The snow covered up all tracks."

"Are we at the wrong cabin?"

"No. The only other house around here for miles is Shay's."

And we'd burned that one to the ground to trick Lager, Shay's husband, unbeknownst to Shay.

"Where else, then?" I asked.

Thomas let the spoon fall with a loud clatter. "We hole up here for a while. Check to see if they had time to clear the cupboards. I’ll look for a cellar."

Another non-answer, which meant he didn't know and would never admit to it. But where had they gone? When we left them, we'd been chased by Faust's wolves and had to separate, leaving them in Shay’s carriage. What if we hadn't diverted all of the wolves and they'd caught up to the carriage?

Thomas started toward the door, his movements stiff and purposeful, then stopped. "Grady knows what he's doing."

"I know. But every minute he and Archer aren't right by my side is another minute I'm worrying myself to an early grave."

A long pause in which he might’ve turned back, but Sasha was too busy sticking her tongue into a bowl for me to see. "They feel the same way about you. Get an arrow ready in case we're not really alone."

I nodded, and as soon as he closed the door behind him, I let myself break a little more. The top of Sasha's head smothered most of my sobs as I searched the cupboards, and she pressed her head back a little against my lips as if to help quiet the sound. Or maybe to offer comfort or warmth. Whatever the case, she seemed used to my breakdowns by now.

I laid all I could find out on the table—five hard biscuits, flour, and half a sack of potatoes.

With a heavy sigh, I slumped into a seat and settled Sasha on the table in front of me.

"Just one for now, okay?" I said, breaking off a piece of biscuit for her.

She whined, and I almost did too. Everything that could possibly be wrong, was. We were hungry, and very few of those I loved were where they were supposed to be—with me.

"We won't give up, will we, girl?" I angled my chair so she could see over my shoulder but so I could still protect her with my body. I'd learned that lesson the hard way. "Right now in this moment, a tiny part of us might feel like giving up, but we won't. We're sad. We're starving. We're worried more than we've ever been worried before, but you know what that does? It makes you stronger, braver, and for a girl of any species living in this world, that's what matters the most. Strength. Bravery. Never giving up. And also letting me cry into your fur night after night."

She tilted her head one way and then the other, studying me.

"Okay, and you crying into my hair too. But when the crying's done and we still haven't given up?"

Thomas entered again with hardly a sound, his arms filled with pickled vegetables, jams, a large sack of dried beans, and a bunch of firewood. Snow speckled his windblown hair and beard and dropped in large chunks to the floor from his boots.

"Rage."

I shivered farther into my coat at the fierce way he said it. "You're right. Rage is all that's left."

He stalked closer to unburden himself onto the table, mindful of Sasha but not risking a look at her. "This is all there is except a shelf full of dust."

"Whoever lives here wouldn't have made it through winter with that."

"They might not make it anyway if they plan on coming back."

"I don't think Grady and Shay ever got here. If they had, they would've taken everything whether they were in a hurry to leave or not. These people, whoever they are, they ran without a plan."

"I agree." He crossed with the firewood toward the fireplace on the left wall.

"So what were they running from?" I swallowed thickly. "And will it be coming back?"

"They're human. I can smell it. If it was Faust’s wolves, they wouldn't have had time to run."

"Something else, then." Thank goodness I didn't have the mental energy to imagine what it might be.

While Sasha and I gnawed on our biscuits—they were more like rocks, really—Thomas quickly got a fire going. It spread a surprising amount of warmth throughout the cabin despite all its cracks. Still, I couldn’t stop shivering.

"I'll take first watch,” he said, standing in front of the fire. “You sleep."

I rose on tired legs. "I'll make something for us to eat first."

"These pickles will do just fine for tonight." He crossed to the table and opened the jar one-handed with a quick jerk of the lid.

I sank down again, grateful. "It takes all my energy to try to get warm, and I'm still frozen no matter what. I fucking hate winter."

"I prefer it." He strode toward the bed behind the table and whipped the checkered blanket off the top. Then he draped it over my shoulders, his hands lingering for only a moment. Big and warm and soothing.

"Thanks… Sit and rest. I could've gotten—"

"Save your energy for rage,” he said, sitting across from me. “We're going to need it."

The gesture warmed me more than the threadbare blanket, but I tucked myself farther into it all the same. "Do you think they went back to Margin? Grady and Shay, I mean?"

"Anything's possible." He crunched on a pickle, the loudest thing I'd ever heard him do. Unlike Grady bashing through doors and stomping on the floorboards like they’d wronged him, Thomas moved like a ghost. "We'll find them."

"I have to go back anyway for my baba at some point." I took a pickle from the jar and offered it to Sasha who ignored me, her attention split between the hard biscuit and her alpha.

"Do you."

Not a question. Never a question with him. "Well, he did say you were keeping him captive."

He leaned back in his seat, his gaze on me. "He's free to go anytime."

"So you're not keeping him captive, then?" Because he definitely was keeping Gabriel.

"No more than I am you.” He gestured vaguely with his pickle. “It was after I saved your dad’s life and he masked my scent with his blood when I was… Well, I found out who he really was after that."

"A poisoner." I sighed down into my lap and reached inside my pocket for the little jar of poison that was so much stronger than Baba’s. Shay’s creation, only because I begged her to help.

"Faust would've gotten it somewhere else if not from your dad. Something even more powerful, and there'd be even fewer of my pack left.” He went quiet for a long moment, the food in his hand forgotten. “Maybe all of us would be dead."

"You blamed me, though, when we were in Margin."

"I didn't know you. I didn't know how deep into this war you were willing to go."

As deep as the war went. Deeper if it meant getting Archer, Grady, and Ronin back.

I took a bite of the sharp, tangy pickle as I mulled over my next thought. "When you were what?" At his silence, I clarified, "You were talking about my baba when he was masking your scent when you were what?"

A beat of hesitation. "Nearby in the Crimson Forest."

"Doing what?"

Moments passed, churning over each other like the steady grind of Thomas's teeth even though he’d long since swallowed. Somehow, I’d struck a nerve.

"Hunting," he finally said, and his lethal tone chased a shiver down my back.

"So you were there that day Baba was shot, nearby. Did you see Lager, the bald man? Or me ride away on my horse?"

"No. I heard the shots and smelled the blood."

"You didn't hear anything else?” My voice pitched higher. “No shouts from my neighbors' house?"

"Nothing."

Jade would've been screaming her head off though. Unless for some reason, she couldn't.

Unless she'd been knocked out. Lee, too, possibly.

My stomach plunged the food sideways, and I gripped the table tightly until I was sure I wouldn't be sick.

"I swore to Shay I wouldn't hurt Lager myself, and I won't, despite all he's done.” I exhaled slowly. “But Faust… I want to see him pay."

"You will," Thomas growled. "I'll take great pleasure in ending him."

"How? Where?" And why hadn’t he killed him before now? Unless the chance had never presented itself in almost two years’ time?

"Soon. Even with the help of the Slipjoint wolf pack—”

“The ones at the church in Margin?”

His eyes narrowed, and I had a feeling he wasn’t used to being interrupted. “Yes. Even with them, Faust and his pack still outnumber us. We need to surprise them like you did in Old Man's Den. And wouldn't it be something else if he died right at the opening of a ruby cave, the thing he’s so desperate to find."

My eyes widened. "You know where they are?"

"No."

"But you’re the alpha," I reminded him.

He turned the jar as if looking for a specific pickle. "You know that the ruby caves are only seen by female wolf shifters who are ready to breed with her harem. The females dream of the ruby caves, which is how they usually find them, but there have been cases when males and females stumbled upon one by accident. Unless invited in by a female, even the alpha can’t go inside or find them on his own because the caves move."

The caves moved? "But…you’re the alpha.”

He cut me a hard look. "So you’ve reminded me, but I’m not a female. Females have the real power in the Crimson Forest pack. They mate. They create life. That’s why they have the harems to protect them and the pups."

"But you weren’t in a harem by default?"

"Not by default, no. Not at all. I was invited many, many times to join a harem and breed in the ruby caves." He gazed at me, eyebrows lifted. “Harems are forever, though. And there were plenty of females only interested in the act of breeding, not in breeding itself.”

“Oh.” I nodded down at the table while my face burned all the way to the tips of my ears with my next thought. I shouldn't want to know this, but I asked it anyway. "Did Archer and Grady go to the ruby caves? Or stay outside…for the reasons you said?"

"A day never went by that Archer wasn't asked to the caves."

Of course he was. Falling in love with him had been effortless with his easy laugh and gorgeous…everything. I wasn't surprised.

"He never went," Thomas said carefully, and I could feel the harshness in his gaze soften some. "Sure, he messed around a lot outside the caves, but accepting an invite into the ruby caves is serious. Joining a harem is serious. Not to be done on a whim."

"And Grady?" I croaked.

"Grady is Grady. A lot of females liked him from a distance, but then they tried to talk to him.”

"I see your point."

“He wasn’t as bad then, but he wasn’t Archer either.”

It’s what I do to take the edge off of my nerves, Grady had once told me, right before sinking one hand down the front of my pants. To himself, he’d meant. He touched himself because he was too brash for the other female wolves? And yet he seemed so…experienced.

“There was one female he did like, though, a little thing,” Thomas said.

My blood squirmed at that, though I really ought to feel relief for him that he’d had someone.

“They made eyes at each other and then a whole lot more, but not in the caves.” Thomas stood abruptly, rocking the chair back and forth on its legs. “She was the first to die from poison.”

I gasped and covered my mouth, my pulse frozen. My chest ached fiercely for him. How terrible. I could only imagine how crushed he’d been afterward, how that might’ve helped cement the grouchy man he was. Now more than ever, I wanted to hold him. Both of them. Promise them everything would be all right.

"After the female and her harem leave the caves," Thomas said, his back to the fire, “they vanish and reappear somewhere else in the Crimson Forest. Some say the light of the rubies fades while inside, then dies, then births again somewhere else.”

Sasha plopped down on the table and laid her head on my hand.

“The cycle of life,” I said absently.

"Exactly.” He turned slowly toward the fire, all but blocking it with his size. “Fucking and leading my pack were what I was good at. Until they started dying."

Sasha sighed, such a sad sound, and her sweet breath rolled over my knuckles.

I reached out and stroked her. “Will Faust ever find the ruby caves?”

"He can’t,” Thomas said over his shoulder. “He rejected the Crimson Forest pack and started his own. We're tied to the Crimson Forest and the ruby caves though. Always have been since the pack has been around. When he walked away, the Crimson Forest and everything in it left him too."

"So he decided to try to take it back by force,” I said, nodding. “Why did he leave in the first place?"

He took a huge draw from the bottle and set it down hard. "Didn't like the new alpha. Plenty didn’t. Didn’t like that females could have multiple mates but not males."

I released a long, shuddery breath as I processed that. There was such bad blood between the brothers, and I had a feeling the rift was a tenuous, complicated thing similar to my relationship with Jade, only much, much rockier. I loved Jade more than I hated her, though, and it sounded like, at least deep down, Faust loved Thomas, too, if he couldn't find it in his small, cruel heart to kill his brother. Maybe I had it all wrong though.

"What about other wolves like the Slipjoint Forest pack?” I asked. “Do they have their own version of the ruby caves?"

"Every pack is different, but wolf mating is supposed to be sacred, secret, and even though they’ve helped me, I’m still an outsider to them. Faust could go join them if he really wanted, but he isn't a follower."

"He takes,” I spat. “Like Lager."

"I'll handle my brother when the time comes,” he said fiercely.

One thing was for sure—I believed him. And somehow or another, I’d handle Lager too.

Silence thickened the air inside the tiny cabin while Thomas stared, unmoving, into the flames. I’d learned so much, but there was still a lot I didn’t understand, especially the one thing I’d wondered since meeting Thomas. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“But if babies are so important to your pack,” I blurted, “why won’t you even look at Sasha?”

He didn’t answer for the longest time, though I knew he’d heard me. Finally, he said in a low voice, "She was my sister's."

"She's still your sister's, and you're her family. You all are. That hasn't changed, and it never will. She doesn't blame you for what happened."

The muscles across his shoulders tightened. "You can't know that."

“I do. Just look at her. Hold her. You'll see for your—"

He breezed toward the door without a sound, and without his coat. “I’ve got first watch.”