The lake stretched wide and merciless beneath the storm, a pale scar across the black heart of the mountain. Snowmobiles roared behind us, six, eight, ten engines tearing the night open with mechanical fury. Headlights stabbed through the blizzard like silver spears. Bullets whined past, sparking off the ice.
I ran with Leo crushed against my chest, his small body jolting with every stride. My boots barely touched the frozen surface; the blood in my veins had turned to fire and would not let me sink. Ahead, the far shore rose in a jagged line of pine and stone, safety, maybe, if we could reach it.
Behind me, Ryan's massive black wolf spun to face the hunters alone.
I felt the moment he made the choice, felt it like a blade between my ribs. He planted himself in the center of the lake, hackles raised, fangs glowing white in the headlights. The first snowmobile bore down on him. Ryan leapt, jaws closing on the driver's throat, tearing man and machine sideways in a spray of blood and steel. Another vehicle clipped his flank, sent him tumbling, but he rose snarling, unbroken, defiant.
Damon limped a dozen yards back, rifle empty, one leg dragging a dark streak across the ice. Blood froze as fast as it fell. He was slowing, dying by inches, and still he turned to fire his last magazine into the oncoming lights.
A hunter on foot raised a crossbow. The bolt glittered silver, aimed between Damon's shoulder blades.
I saw it happen as though time had thickened.
Ryan saw it too.
Suspicion, prophecy, betrayal, everything that had festered between them for days, vanished under the older law. Ryan launched himself across the ice, a black comet, and crashed into the hunter an instant before the trigger released. Man and wolf rolled, claws raking armor, fangs finding flesh.
The ice screamed.
Cracks shot outward from the impact like lightning made of crystal. For one heartbeat the lake held. Then it shattered.
Ryan vanished.
There was no splash, only a terrible hollow boom as the black water swallowed him whole. The snowmobile that had been racing toward Damon plunged after him, driver shrieking, gone.
I stopped dead at the edge of the broken circle.
Twenty yards away the ice was a jagged wound, hungry, waiting.
Leo wailed against my neck.
Everything inside me, every fragile human piece I had clung to for twenty-five years, burned away in a single white-hot instant.
A sound rose out of my chest that was not a scream, not a howl, but something older, something carved into the marrow of the world when the first moon rose over the first wolves.
The air itself bowed.
"FREEZE."
It was not loud. It did not need to be.
The word struck the storm like a hammer on an anvil. Wind died mid-howl. Snowflakes hung suspended, glittering. The lake answered its queen.
Water exploded upward in a perfect circle around the hole, flash-freezing into a column of ice that caught the moonlight and threw it back in blinding silver. The surface resealed beneath it, thick and solid and unbreakable, as though winter itself knelt at my command.
Every snowmobile engine coughed and died at once. Headlights flickered out. Riders tumbled from seats, clutching ears that bled from the power that had just cracked the sky open.
I walked forward.
Not ran, walked, each step ringing like a bell across the newborn ice. My hair floated though there was no wind. My eyes glowed pure argent, pupils narrowed to regal slits. The aura rolling off my skin was not warmth; it was pressure, ancient, royal, absolute.
The hunters, elite killers trained to murder kings, fell to their knees and pressed foreheads to the ice. Some wept. Some pissed themselves. None could lift their gaze to meet mine.
I reached the place where Ryan had vanished.
One hand plunged into the fresh ice. The column shattered at my touch, revealing him beneath, suspended in black water, fur floating like ink, eyes closed.
I pulled.
The lake fought me for one heartbeat, jealous of its prize. Then it surrendered.
Ryan's wolf form rose through the broken surface as though the water itself placed him gently into my arms. Two hundred pounds of soaked muscle and fur, and I lifted him without strain, cradling him against my chest the way I cradled Leo moments before.
The remaining hunters scrambled backward, abandoning weapons, snowmobiles, pride. They ran into the trees and did not look back.
Silence returned, vast and stunned.
I carried Ryan the last twenty yards to shore and laid him on the snow. Leo stumbled after me, sobbing but unharmed. Damon collapsed nearby, leg twisted at a sickening angle, staring at me with the same terror the hunters had worn.
Ryan coughed, a raw, tearing sound. Black water spilled from his lungs. He shifted back to man mid-heave, naked, blue-lipped, shaking, but alive.
I knelt over him, palms pressed to his chest, feeling the frantic thunder of his heart.
His eyes opened, storm-gray and dazed. When they focused on my face, something like reverence flickered through the exhaustion.
Damon's voice came out cracked and small. "That… was the Voice of the King."
I did not answer. I was still glowing faintly, moonlight made flesh, and the power inside my chest felt vast enough to swallow the sky.
Ryan reached up with trembling fingers and touched my cheek, leaving a streak of lake water and blood.
"My queen," he rasped.
Behind us, the ice gleamed smooth and perfect, reflecting the moon like a mirror forged for coronation.
The hunters were gone.
For now.
But the mountain had seen what I truly was, and soon the entire kingdom would know.