Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 65871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 329(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 220(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 329(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 220(@300wpm)
“Stay here. Don’t leave this room under any circumstances.”
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know, but that is an alarm. Stay here. Don’t. Go. Anywhere.”
She nods sleepily, and I have some confidence she will listen. Whatever is happening out there, she needs to stay safe and defended.
As I leave our bedroom, I find the castle in the kind of chaos that has never happened before in my lifetime. We have never been attacked before, not in hundreds of years. My ancestors have repelled invasions with these walls. I know I can trust in them. But the pack is untested in mass combat, and the enemies we are fighting are not another pack contesting territory. They are vicious vampiric creatures.
Being untested does not mean we are not prepared.
They are waiting for me to give them orders, some in wolf form, others naked and in their human shapes, but ready to shift. Blood is in the air.
“Into the war room. Now!”
I give the order, and am followed by those who need to follow it. A wolf pack is a beautiful thing in a moment like this. Creatures of instinct do not need to be directly told what to do individually. They know where they rank in the pack. They know whether they are to follow me directly, or if they are to wait for the generals to emerge. I am immensely proud of all of them.
The war room contains surveillance equipment, including cameras that reveal the entire grounds of the castle. It is impossible for so much as a flea to penetrate our defenses without being discovered. Those camera feeds clearly show a great number of vampires clustering around what they consider to be weak points in our defenses.
“Surveillance shows multiple vampires outside the castle,” I say, having taken stock of the situation. “Let’s remember, they cannot come inside. They have to be asked in. So, we’re going to hold the walls until daylight. Do not, I repeat, do not bite them. We do not need any more infections.”
There’s a rumble of what feels like dissent among the pack. I know they are frightened. When we are scared, we want to take our animal forms and rip into aggressors with our teeth.
“If you bite them, you take in their blood, you can become corrupted. You could become sick. You could die. Or worse could happen—you could become a thrall to one of them. Their slave. Unable to resist their will. Never. Bite. A vampire.”
“Didn’t your mate eat one?”
“Yes, and that is why we are here now,” I say. They’re not going to blame Anya, but I am not going to pretend that that incident was not the source of this one. “My mate made a mistake, and we are not going to keep making the same mistake, are we?”
“I meant she got to eat a vampire,” the wolf says, baring his teeth. “Seems unfair we don’t all get a bite.”
“Again, eating vampires is a bad thing,” I repeat myself, knowing that I am speaking to the less evolved parts of all our brains. “If we want to be rid of this threat, Elena has ensured that we have everything we need to repel the creatures. That means going to the arsenal, using garlic, silver weapons, human forms, and human armor. Go. Now. Hold the walls. Do not go outside. I do not want to lose any of you.”
As sunrise approaches, it becomes apparent that we are in a siege. A very casual, low-key siege. The wolves want to go out and fight. The vampires have to tolerate the sun, but they are doing that with wide-brimmed hats and the vampire equivalent of sunscreen. It looks as though the castle is surrounded by gardeners.
“Ridiculous,” Piotr says. “Sitting in here, hiding from the dead. We should attack.”
“That’s what they want us to do,” I respond.
“We need to wait them out,” Elena says.
“They could be here for hundreds of years. We have to get rid of them now,” Viktor interjects. “We should be firing those guns. Taking headshots. We should be wiping them out. Haven’t you been telling us for years now, Elena, that there’s a vamp uprising coming? Isn’t that why we have these special weapons?”
“If we kill these vampires, more will come, and in greater numbers. And they will have reason to attack. We could be at the start of a true war, a war we are unlikely to win. We have to handle this situation with some kind of delicacy and diplomacy. Sooner or later, the vampire who came here to see you, my alpha, will appear again. When he does, we will speak to him and settle this matter.”
Piotr and Viktor are not impressed, but I agree with Elena’s assessment. This is a powder keg, but it hasn’t exploded yet. We have to be careful. I do not want my whelps to be raised in a war zone.