Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 50

Chapter 50: I Need A Hero (She Got Three)

The jungle tried to kill them at mile three.

The first portal ripped the ground apart in front of Nicholas. He banked left on instinct, his wolf’s paws barely clearing the portal’s edge before it widened.

Two more opened behind it. Then four. Then ten.

Sterling saw it from above. The pattern was textbook isolation tactics. The portals were forcing three corridors. Each one wide enough for a single body and too narrow to regroup.

Sterling: They’re herding us. Three channels. Do not separate.

The canopy above them detonated, dark fae pouring from the trees. They dropped through the branches in a swarm that hit the jungle floor between the ground team and the dragons above.

Maddox shifted into his dragon, and his flame hit the swarm center-mass.

Then his flame abruptly stopped working. His muscles burned, and his vision doubled.

Sterling: I am losing my shift.

Ryker: Same. My fire is gone.

Griffin: I was just force-shifted and am on the ground. Three fae on me.

The formation collapsed. Dragons who had been providing air cover force-shifted in clusters, human bodies crashing through the canopy.

Maddox’s shift broke last. He hit the jungle floor in human form hard enough to drive his boots six inches into the mud. His sword was out before his vision cleared.

Sterling’s voice came through the mindlink, fragmented by the dampening.

Ryker: I have fourteen accounted for. We were cut off northwest.

Sterling: Copy. I was cut off to the south. The portals are driving us away from her position. This is a deliberate split.

Maddox stood in a corridor of green with four dead fae at his feet and no formation, no fire, and no dragon. But for the first time in fourteen hours, he could feel her heartbeat pressing against the void behind his sternum.

Then the connection opened in a flood. Her fever hit him first, scalding, the temperature of a woman whose body had been burning for days without relief. Her terror slammed into him so hard he staggered. The kind that comes from running for your life and knowing the distance is closing.

Every protective instinct in his body ignited at once. He tore east through the corridor with his blade out.

Behind him, three separate groups fought three separate battles, the jungle swallowing all of them.

✦✦✦

Consciousness came back the way it always did now. Too fast and too late.

Guinevere’s eyes opened to green blur and motion. Her body was horizontal, being carried. She counted four hands on her body, gripping her shoulders, her legs, her waist.

Dark wings above her. The humming. The clicking.

She twisted. The motion was violent and sudden and fueled by the specific panic of a woman who had woken up in the arms of these things before and remembered exactly what they wanted to do with her.

Her elbow connected with a jaw, and her knee drove upward into a chest. The grips loosened for a fraction of a second.

She ripped free and ran.

The jungle swallowed her. Vines whipped across her arms and one cut her face. The canopy above was so thick the light came through in broken shafts that turned the undergrowth into a maze of shadow and steam.

Behind her, the clicking started. Then the chanting. Then the sound of wings folding and unfolding as they dropped to the jungle floor and pursued on foot, because the canopy was too dense for flight and the prey they wanted was running at a speed that meant they could not catch her from the air.

She tried to shift.

I can’t.

Her wolf’s voice was thin. Barely there. A whisper where there used to be a howl, the voice of an animal that had been burning and seizing and running on empty for days and had hit the wall that existed past exhaustion.

Please.

There is nothing to give. I’m sorry.

She kept running. Fast for a wolf in human form, but the advantage she usually carried, the blur that sat between wolf and dragon and belonged to neither, was gone.

Tears came. She couldn’t stop them. They blurred the green into streaks. She was running blind, batting vines with shaking hands, her body burning from the fever and her chest burning from the breathing and the dark fae were so close she could hear individual footfalls behind her.

Her breathing came apart. She tried to hold it together, tried the rhythm that Kael had given her in the cave, in through the nose, out through the mouth, but her lungs had their own schedule and the schedule said panic and the panic said faster and faster meant more oxygen and more oxygen meant more noise and more noise meant they could hear her.

Him.

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