The first howl came thin as wire through the trees.The second had teeth.
Every man by the fire went still. Snow hissed on the coals. Somewhere in the black pines, something heavy shook the branches and sent a white sheet pouring down.
"Form up!" the sergeant barked.
Rowan shifted his wrists. Silver bit deeper, a cold burn that felt like a command. His wolf-heart surged to answer the howls, hot and reckless. His vampire-heart held a colder counsel: Count the enemies. Count the exits. Count who dies first.
The bell tolled then—one hollow note, close. Not from a church. From the supply sled lashed behind the wagon. The cloth-wrapped crate shivered as if something inside it dreamed.
Three shapes slipped out of the treeline—low, six-legged, with muzzles too long for any proper beast and eyes like candlewicks drowned in tar. Grave-hounds. More followed, a mute avalanche of breath and hunger.
The Wardens moved like a door slamming shut. Spears came up. Salt scattered in a glittering arc. Captain Maeryn Coil stepped forward, cloak pinned back, spearhead hooded in leather that she tore free with her teeth.
The first hound hit the spear and kept coming. It dragged itself down the shaft, dead and forgetting it, until Maeryn kicked its chest and pinned it to the frozen earth. It writhed, smoking, wordless with anger at the physics of dying.
Another hound sprang for a young Warden who had not yet learned how to be afraid the right way. Rowan was on his feet before he chose to be. He launched himself into the hound's path, felt jaws close on the silver links that bound him, and used that grip. He twisted. Chains whined. The hound's neck cracked like ice under a heel.
"Back! Back!" someone shouted. "Keep the line!"
A third hound reached the wagon. It slammed the bars and shoved its head between them, jaws spreading wider than bone allowed. Saliva hit Rowan's cheek and smoked on the silver there.
He let the wolf rise partway. Muscle stacked on muscle. For an instant the world sharpened to edges he could sort with his teeth. He drove his forehead up into the thing's palate so hard the roof of its mouth fractured. It thrashed. He looped chain around its muzzle, hauled, and felt vertebrae grind. The silver burned him, and he used the pain like a handle.
The bell in the crate rang again. Not loud. Just certain. And the hounds looked, all at once, toward Rowan.
Maeryn saw it too. "Vesper!" she snapped. "Down!"
But the hounds didn't want him down. They wanted him open.
They came as a pack, a dark tide breaking. Rowan planted his heels and pulled breath into the narrow space between his hearts. He found a small rhythm—wolf in, blood out—that he had discovered as a child and never named. The old monk who'd hidden him for a winter called it prayer. The vampire who'd tried to buy him called it inheritance.
Rowan called it surviving.
When the first hound leapt, he met it with the chain, catching both forelegs and yanking them past their limits. It flipped, spine tearing, and he threw it into the second. He went low under the third, shoulder to ribs, and felt something inside himself smile when the thing folded.
The camp rang with iron and breath and bad miracles. The Wardens held. Salt smoked in the air. Maeryn's spear whistled and struck true, again and again. When the tide broke at last, it broke all at once. The survivors skulked back to the trees, hollowed by their own borrowed hunger.
Silence came in a stagger, like a drunk finding a chair. Then the young Warden—freckled, shaking—let out a laugh he hadn't earned and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Maeryn approached the wagon, steam rising from the spearhead. She took in the broken bodies, the chain marks on Rowan's wrists, the way his pupils hadn't decided what shape to be.
"What did the bell do to them?" she asked.
Rowan glanced at the crate. The cloth had slipped, just a little. Cold bled from the wood like a rumor. "It didn't call them," he said. "It answered them."
"And you?" Maeryn asked. "What does it answer in you?"
Rowan didn't lie. "Both parts."
She studied him the way a smith studies a crack in good steel. "We move before dawn," she said. "We're not waiting for whatever comes after the hounds."
She signaled, and two Wardens slung chains from the sled to the wagon. The crate's contents rang once more, a soft sound like a coin deciding which side to show.
That night, when Rowan closed his eyes, the bell's echo trembled in his bones. He dreamed of a hall with no doors, a moon that hung too low, and a red river that ran uphill toward his throat.
He woke with the silver warm against his skin and frost blooming from his breath. In the dark beyond the firelight, something large moved and did not care who heard.
Cliffhanger: Dawn will not come alone.