by Amelia Jade
There was no warning. No waiting. One moment the human forms of the Fenris shifters were sitting patiently. The next they were up and running down the gentle sloped sides of the valley, changing as they went. The faster animals such as the wolves and big cats on the flanks swiftly outdistanced the bears that anchored the center, curling inward like a pincer.
With slightly more preponderance and organization the Cadian lines moved forward to meet them.
“Get ready, boys!” Gabriel bellowed to his troops.
He didn’t wait to ensure they did as they were told, instead putting action to his words as his bear ripped forth from his skin with a swiftness rarely seen. Fur sprouted and covered every inch of his skin as his hands thickened and claws emerged from where his fingers had been. He fell to all fours, one of his massive paws digging at the ground, leaving massive furrows where his claws struck deep.
Behind him he heard the muted noises of his men and their animals.
They were ready.
A piercing screech sounded nearby as Ava took to the air, swirling high as she gathered the rest of the Ragin’ Air Fillies around her.
To his left the calls of ancient birds of prey sounded as Andrew and his gryphons took to the air once more as well.
And above them all, the skies shook with noise as the dragons announced their presence on the field.
The charging Fenris Remnants reached the spot on the field where they could no longer turn back, and Gabriel gave the signal.
Together with nearly four hundred of his comrades, the Green Bearets of Cadia charged up over the crest of the hill and descended into the valley beyond, flowing down the incline like a wave of death. The earth trembled beneath their passage, and he knew they would soon reach their enemies, where they would strike them a fatal blow.
The final battle between Fenris and Cadia was about to be joined.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Stephanie
She never wanted to drive that fast again.
Thankful that the trip was over, she steered through the streets of Cloud Lake as rapidly as she could, trying not to break any laws, and only failing a handful of times when it was safe to do so.
Tires screeched and rubber burned, filling the air as she slid to a halt at the motel that the Green Bearets had used as their headquarters. Stephanie got out of the car and looked around at the empty barricades and unlit windows behind it. The place was a ghost town. The life of the old motel had been sucked out of it when the shifters left.
Idly she wondered if they would ever return there.
“They aren’t there anymore,” a shaky voice said from behind her.
Stephanie spun to see an old man hobbling by, an intricately carved wooden cane in his left hand supporting him as he moved with painful slowness.
“I know,” she replied glumly. “They left.”
“Yup. Went north, I heard,” he said, raising a gnarled hand to point her in the right direction.
“Out of the city,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Think so,” he confirmed cheerily, not realizing she wasn’t happy about it.
“Shit.”
Stephanie thanked the old man and hopped back into her rental car, the family-friendly compact car not exactly leaping off the line, but accelerating with constant steadiness. She weaved around slower-moving cars and headed north. She paused twice to ask others. Each time they seemed to know exactly where the shifters had gone.
Had the whole town turned out to see them off? Were they celebrating it, or saddened by the loss of their new shifter friends, I wonder.
Finally Stephanie pulled to a halt, guiding the car up onto the curb and parking it on a section of grass that had already been torn up.
The passage of the bears was obvious to her. They had left a swath of trampled land behind them, which even in the deepening gloom had been enough for her headlights to reveal to her as she followed the directions given.
Crouching down, she laid a hand on the tracks, wondering just what the hell she was supposed to do now. Giving up wasn’t an option. She needed to get to Gabriel. To tell him how she felt.
How do you feel?
That was simple, she thought. She loved him. Thoroughly, completely, and unbelievably. But she did. Stephanie had spent most of the frantic car ride back to Cloud Lake trying to decide just what it was she was going to say. How she was going to tell him, and what words to use. In the end though, it had become clear that she didn’t need to phrase it just right. She didn’t need to use any fancy words.
There were simply three words that needed to be said, and that was all.
Gabriel was out of reach at the moment though. With his men, on his way to do battle. A battle in which she was afraid he would let himself go, succumbing to the fight and ending his internal struggle. It was a way out for the hurt soul, and one she was scared he would be sorely tempted to take. She couldn’t let him do that. He needed to live. For himself.
And for her.
A medium-pitched whine approached from the city, and she stood up, glancing behind her as a pair of headlights oddly close together approached at high speed.
A very thin-looking boy, perhaps in his late teens or early twenties on an ATV came zipping up to her.
“You going after them in that?” he asked as he came to a halt, a large video camera slung over his shoulder.
Stephanie eyed the camera, wondering what he was doing with such ancient technology. Most things these days were recorded on much smaller devices.
Then again, his vehicle wasn’t exactly new either. Perhaps this is all he has access to.
“If I have to,” she said slowly, walking closer to the vehicle, letting the headlights fall over her frame as she took a deep breath, accentuating her breasts under the thin white blouse she wore.
The man’s eyes followed predictably, allowing her close.
“What about you?” she asked, letting her voice grow soft.
“I’m gonna video their fight,” he said proudly. “Gonna put it up on YouTube. I’m going to be famous, show the world what they’re truly like.”
“Yeah?” she asked, running two fingers along the handlebars as she came up close to him.
“You bet,” he said, his nerves starting to show through as she got closer to him.
Stephanie was sick with herself at the moment, but this was the only way she might have a chance of getting close to Gabriel. Perhaps there was still time, maybe something had stalled them. It had been four and a half hours since they’d left. Could they be that far away? She didn’t know. All she knew was that time was running out no matter what.
“That sounds fun,” she told him, biting her lip as she came up right next to him.
“I—”
Her punch caught him right in the stomach, doubling the poor kid over. Stephanie grabbed his shoulder and hauled, using her weight as leverage to pull the kid off the red and black ATV even as he howled in pain. She kicked him again as he was down, then reached for his video camera, swiftly removing the batteries from it. Nobody needed to see footage of what was about to happen.
“Sorry,” she said, swinging one leg over the ATV. “Really, I am sorry. I’ll make it up to you!”
With that she was gone, zipping along the flattened trail and into the forest, the ATV’s headlights making sure she could see.
Overhead the thunder rumbled louder. She hadn’t seen lightning yet, but it could only be a matter of time before it and the rain appeared. She poured on the speed, going as fast as she could around the trees, trying to stay as close to the path they had taken as possible. The nice thing about four hundred bear shifters going by in a straight line, was that they trampled much of the forest beneath them. Only rocks and large trees threatened her path, and she easily avoided those.
Stephanie just hoped she was in time.
I’m coming, Gabriel. Just wait for me. Please. Wait for me!
***
Thunder crashed overhead. Either she wa
s getting closer to the storm, or it was closing in on her. Stephanie didn’t know, but she could barely see now, the sunlight that was still visible somewhere was badly diffused by the forest canopy.
But she had to be getting close. She had to be.
A branch slapped at her face and she cried out in pain as it opened several cuts on her face. Still, she didn’t stop. Her hand tightened around the throttle, and she inched her speed up a little more. The ground was starting to flatten, and there was less debris. Was she coming to the edge of the forest?
Without warning the trees thinned and then disappeared completely. The ground sloped upward, and as Stephanie followed the incline, she gasped.
Up ahead of her were bears. Lots of bears!
She’d done it! She’d made it in time!
A smile burst onto her face as happiness blossomed inside of her.
“GABRIEL!” she screamed. “GABRIEL I’M HERE!”
But they didn’t react.
No, that was a lie. They were reacting. They were moving. She felt joy flood her system.
Then the bears charged up the hill and disappeared over the other side.
“What? No,” she breathed, her voice disappearing in the wind and the thunder.
They must not have heard her. She gunned her stolen ATV to the top of the hill, not sure she wanted to see what lay beyond, but knowing that she had to look anyway.
The sight that greeted her eyes also took her breath away. Stephanie swerved to a skidding halt as she tried to take it all in. It felt like a scene out of a fantasy movie. Large groups of warriors maneuvering on the battlefield.
Except they weren’t men on horses, but instead they were colossal, outsized animals bearing down on each other. The weather didn’t help dissuade her feeling either. The clouds above were thick and black, and even as she watched, lightning coursed through them, followed closely by thunder.
They were still billowing in from the west, and slamming into the mountain, where the clouds seemed to roll up and over themselves and fall back down over the valley in front of her. The sun, well into its descent to the west, had gotten out from under the cloud cover. So now rays of light came darting in under the clouds at a sharp angle, highlighting the field before her in a golden glow completely at odds with the darkness above it and further to the east.
The bears she’d come so far to catch, only to see them slip out of her hands when victory was close, were charging down the mild incline in front of her. Her eyes lifted above them, and she gasped at the sight of two much larger groups of animals about to collide.
There were plenty of bears she saw, and wolves. There were lions, tigers, and leopards too. Panthers, cheetahs, and…here and there she saw a very few others as the two groups slammed together with a thunder that vibrated up through the tires of her ATV to shake her body, so violent was the collision. She wanted to rip her eyes off the sight before her, but she couldn’t.
In one area a small herd of elephants used their great ivory tusks to impale their enemies, one of them even tossing a hapless wolf dozens of feet through the air where it crashed into a group of its fellows, knocking them aside before it stopped, unmoving. A bellow of pain came from the elephants as a dozen bears swarmed up the side of one, ripping its tough, leathery coat to shreds, leaving nothing but a corpse as they moved on as fast as they’d come, like a land-bound school of piranha.
The sky was rent apart by a blast of fire, and the shriek of a bird of prey was cut off short as a form tumbled from the air, nearly unrecognizable. Stephanie tore her gaze off the carnage on the ground below her, and realized for the first time that there was a battle going on in the skies above her as well.
Dragons wheeled and dove, spitting out fire and frost and all manner of elements from their mouths as they battled one another. Amongst the great behemoths of the sky she could see two distinct other species doing battle as well. The smallest of them looked exactly like flying horses, if one were to ignore the three-foot-long horns on their heads. The other, she realized after a moment of squinting, had to be gryphons. Here and there bodies fell, impacting upon trees, open ground, or even slamming down on top of the groups fighting on the ground below.
“How do they tell each other apart?” she wondered as the carnage grew greater.
The charging bears, with Gabriel in their midst, had just about reached their target. Even as they did, a massive dragon fell from the sky, taking out a double handful of their number. A hand flew to her mouth as she wondered if perhaps Gabriel was one of the ones who had just been crushed.
“So much death,” she whispered, horrified. “Oh Gabriel, I’m so sorry. How could I ever have accused you of loving this?”
The charging bears hit the side of what she assumed to be the enemy, and the battle was fully joined.
Stephanie had never before felt so small and helpless as she did now, watching the battle below.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Gabriel
He cursed as the Frost Dragon crushed a full squadron of his men just moments before they hit the Fenrisian flank. The only saving grace was that the dragon wasn’t a Cadian. Which, he hoped, meant they were winning the battle above. If the dragons could win control of the skies, the contest on the ground would be over in minutes.
That was a big, unsure “if,” however, and not one that he or his men could count on. So he roared once more, and with the call of his men behind him, Captain Gabriel Korver of the Green Bearets, commander of the Second Assault Company and leader of the Cloud Lake detachment, charged full speed into the unprepared flank of his enemies.
Bodies collided so hard bones broke on impact. A dozen shifters died in the first two seconds. Blood flew everywhere, drenching his fur. Gabriel marauded amongst the enemy ranks, biting and swatting with his massive paws, but never slowing. One smaller black bear didn’t move fast enough and he simply bowled it over.
Behind him came the weight of nearly ten companies’ worth of Green Bearets, driving a massive wedge into the side of the Fenrisians. Shifters growled, battled, and died with a suddenness that caught both sides off guard. His men were all veterans of the war. They had seen some of the heaviest fighting, and they used that knowledge now. Fenrisian shifters went down, clutching at their throats, or simply hitting the ground, their eyes empty, dead before they stopped moving.
It wasn’t so much a fight as it was a slaughter for the first five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. Dozens of his enemies had already perished, in exchange for maybe a half squadron of his own men. While he felt the death of each and every one of his troops, that was a ratio that Gabriel would pay any day to stop the fighting.
So he drove his men on harder. Faster. They flung themselves as deep into the Fenrisian formation as they could. But it was never going to last. They knew that. Eventually the Remnants got themselves together, and a solid block of bears greeted them. Gabriel snarled and lowered his head as if he intended to slam into them.
But just before he reached them, he jumped up and onto the backs of the tightly packed shifters. Around him his men did the same, trampling them underfoot. His momentum slowed, however, and eventually things devolved into a swirling melee of shifters fighting each other. He reached the ground, pivoted, and his massive paw swung through the air.
A wolf shifter that had been aiming for his back took his paw full in the face. It fell to the ground, dead in an instant as he crushed its jaw back into its skull, the deformed head a marker of the insane power contained within him.
A tiger rushed him and Gabriel bellowed a challenge, lumbering forward to meet the fleet-footed cat. He had to be careful—tigers were often a match for bears if they could be allowed to use their mobility. So Gabriel took that away from the tiger by charging in close before it could find open ground, trapping them both between the bodies of dead shifters. In close quarters the tiger had no chance, and Gabriel ripped it apart, though he suffered several wounds to himself as he went.
One of his men—Luther, he reali
zed belatedly—bellowed a warning and jumped over him, slamming bodily into a bear that had been about to strike Gabriel’s exposed flank, in a potentially killing blow.
He snarled a thanks to his friend and fellow captain, and then casually struck down a leopard that went by chasing a Cadian wolf shifter. His claws caught the muzzle of the cat and then effectively skinned the beast as its momentum ran Gabriel’s claws from mouth to hind leg, severing muscles and organs as it went. The cat managed two more strides before its brain realized what had happened, and then it flopped wetly to the ground, dead before it knew what happened.
Why is this happening? This is insane.
All around him, the Fenrisians were slowly retreating. They had no chance. They’d never had a chance. All too many Cadians were going to die today—had already died today. But at no point had the Remnants stood a chance of victory. Even now, as he glanced back behind the Cadian lines, he could see more and more shifters streaming down from the mountain pass, having been too far away to travel with the main body. There was a shifter there organizing them, and even as he watched, a full company of mixed shifters came forward together to reinforce the lines. It would be a minute, maybe two, before there were enough for a second company.
It was a suicide battle. The only question was, why were they so eager to die?
A bit of space was opening up between the lines now as the Remnants fell back and the Cadians let them. He saw a number of the Remnants shifters looking over their shoulders expectantly.
He glanced to the forest they had emerged from to the west, but there were no signs of anything there. More and more of the Remnants were glancing behind and around them. Not apprehensively, as if they were afraid of what was going to happen. But expectantly, as if they knew that something was about to occur.
But the longer the makeshift truce went on between the two, the more the Cadian lines solidified. Two more companies, nearly seventy more shifters, moved down the mountain paths and into reserve positions behind the already committed troops. The numbers weren’t slowing down, either. Cadia had called forth as many Guardians and trained warriors as there were, and though it was taking time, they were coming from all parts of the huge swath of territory that was to be guarded by them.
