Chapter 53

“Keep going, just keep going,” Jade urged.

They were making a mad dash through the forest. Olivia was barely hanging on - her sword lost, her chain shirt feeling more like it was weighing her down than it could protect her. Jade wasn’t much better. And Renee was pale as a linen sheet in the moonlight, when there was moonlight.

The teeth marks were gone, but none of them were sure if that mattered.

Alexander Houndsfang had bitten her.

The dash to escape the camp had been haphazard - Olivia and Jade didn’t want to leave Renee behind, but the sorceress had taken off in the opposite direction as her friends, leading the werewolf back towards the bandits as they poured out of the alehouse and their camps. Her hope had been that at least those outlaws that weren’t in the Risen Wolf Gang might have an issue with a werewolf.

That hadn’t even started to become an issue, though, because Houndsfang was a wolf, and wolves chased.

She’d made it fifty yards before he caught her, knocking her to the ground. And, looming over her, unable to speak with his body so close to a true wolf form, he’d snarled as he pinned her to the ground, raising a claw to carve through her chest. But then he’d stopped, his wolf grin appearing again even as his blood dripped from the gaping, sucking sword wound in his chest down onto Renee, and he’d snarled.

She’d Shadow Stepped away at the last possible moment.

Perhaps a moment too late.

The plan had always been for Fergus to meet them at the edge of the camp and escort them down one of his pre-scouted escape paths. Olivia and Jade, after seeing Renee leading Houndsfang away, had painfully accepted her sacrifice and staggered to the treeline, hesitating just long enough to see the torches lighting and spreading as the crowds of bandits followed the sound of the commotion.