ALARIC
CHAPTER 1 – ALARIC
Lycan Kingdom
Western Carpathians, Polish-Slovak border
Six months ago
The frigid wind had died an hour ago, and Prince Alaric liked the quiet even less than he liked the hunt. At twenty men, the hunting party was large, but that gave Alaric no comfort. Even the wintry weather felt wrong. Despite his heaviest layers, Alaric felt bone-cold.
His wolf paced in his mind space as snow crunched under the men’s boots. Snow was kind to hunters; it kept every track. It was less kind when the thing being hunted could hunt back.
Ahead, his father, King Frederik XXV, led the way with his sword already drawn.
Alaric had argued against this hunt twice. Twice his father had answered that a king who let his villagers be eaten did not deserve the mountain. Or the crown.
So Alaric followed.
He wished for his bow, even through the thick gloves stiffening his fingers, but his father insisted that archery was a coward’s weapon, not a future king’s.
His wolf stopped pacing and went still. Then it began to growl, low and steady, its hackles rising.
Something was listening.
Alaric tightened his grip on his sword and scanned the trees around them.
Ahead, the king stopped and turned, one finger pressed to his ear. Listen.
And Alaric heard it.
Silence, the kind that eats sound.
No birds called. No branches creaked or snapped. Behind him, the crunch of boots stopped, and the cold pressed in. All Alaric could hear was his racing heart and his wolf’s warning huffs.
“Something is coming,” King Frederik whispered, and the words fell dead a few feet from his mouth.
Alaric inhaled and grimaced. Rotting carrion had penetrated his face cover.
The muffled cries of children cut through the quiet.
“Help us. Please. Help us!”
His father’s head whipped toward the cries.
“Who’s out there?” King Frederik bellowed. “Show yourself!”
“We can’t move,” a child sobbed from somewhere ahead. “Please, we’re all alone.”
“Men! Forward!” the king called, pointing his sword toward the voices.
Alaric ran after his father through the trees and brush. His wolf was snarling now, loud inside his skull, and the stench of rot thickened with every stride. The men surged past him.
The sobbing stopped.
A heartbeat later, the children began to laugh, small, bright, delighted voices, all in unison.
Alaric skidded to a halt as his father reached the edge of a clearing.
“Father!” he shouted. “Wait!”
King Frederik stopped and turned, scowling.
“I said forward! Come, Alaric!”
He strode into the clearing, and the men poured in after him. The children’s laughter swelled.
His wolf howled at him to turn back. Alaric ran forward anyway. His father was in there.
The first screams tore through the trees before he reached the clearing.
The stench hit him like a fist, thick enough to taste.
Bodies filled the trees around the clearing: men, women, children, hanging by their necks from withered vines. Their limbs were twisted at wrong angles, their abdomens torn open, their eyes wide and glassy, their mouths bloodied.
“The villagers,” Alaric whispered.
“To me, men! To me!” King Frederik roared, charging toward the creature in the center of the clearing.
It laughed in the voices of children, a screaming man dangling from each bony hand. “Help us, please! Help us!” it cried, still laughing.
Then it bit the head off one of them with its long, broken teeth.
Alaric’s stomach heaved, but he couldn’t look away. The thing stood nearly twice a man's height, all thick bone under leathery gray skin, with no muscle anywhere on its cadaverous frame. Its skull was bare, and a small red flame burned deep in each sunken socket.
The men froze, swords half-raised.
“Attack!” King Frederik bellowed. He reached the creature and hacked at its leg.
The blade sliced through the gray hide, and the skin fell away in flaps. Beneath it there was no blood, only dry sinew and bone.
The creature looked down at King Frederik, threw back its head, and laughed. The children’s voices fell away. What came out was a deep rasp, like bone scraping stone.
It flung the headless body onto the king, knocking him down. The other man was hurled aside, and his screaming ended against a tree trunk with a thud and a crack.
Before the king could rise, the creature seized him, one hand clamped on his torso, the other on his head.
“Father!” Alaric cried. He raised his sword and charged.
He was still ten strides away when the creature twisted.
Alaric felt the air wrung out of him as the king’s body dropped, and his wolf howled, raw and endless inside his skull.
For one heartbeat he couldn’t move. Then he raised his sword.
“Attack!”
It was his father’s word in his mouth. The men surged forward anyway.
Their blades bit into the creature’s legs, and it screeched and crouched. One long arm swept through the line, hurling men against the trees. The impact shook the hanged villagers loose. They dropped onto the soldiers, and the men screamed as dead limbs tangled with theirs.
The creature seized another man, split him open, and bit into his entrails.
Alaric plunged into the fight. Around him men were beheaded, gutted, thrown into the trunks. He cut at the thing’s leg, and the gray skin fell away in flaps, but it kept killing.
“Prince Alaric!” a man screamed.
Alaric turned toward the voice just in time to see the man’s head vanish into the creature’s mouth. Then the creature swung the headless corpse like a club.
Alaric flew across the clearing and slammed into a tree. Stars burst behind his eyes. His sword was gone, so he snatched a dead man’s blade from the snow and rose in a crouch.
One by one, the screaming stopped, until the silence came back, the kind that eats sound.
Alaric stood alone among the nineteen dead. He was the only one left alive.
The creature had already turned back to its feast, crouched over the bodies with its back to him. He searched the tangle of limbs and corpses for his father’s body and couldn’t find it.
The creature stripped the flesh from a man’s leg, the crunch of bone loud in the quiet.
Run, Alaric.
Now.
It was his wolf, begging him.
He turned toward the trees and ran.
