Hannah Pole - Song Of The Wolf

“Please!” she whispered frantically .

“Alison, listen to me.” He gripped her hands in his. He didn’t have much time left. “You need to break out of that cell.”

“I can’t,” she moaned .

“You can,” he said, maybe more harshly than was necessary. “You need to get out of there and get above ground. We can’t find your GPS chip all the time you’re underground. You have to get somewhere where the satellite can pick it up.”

“But how –”she whispered, but he barely heard it. He was fading away. The image of her was little more than a shadowed blur .

“You can do it, Alison. You have to,” he shouted at her. “Be strong.”

With that the world around him faded, the grey cave shuddering and giving way to blackness. He closed his eyes against the shadows and held on to the image of Alison’s beautiful face. He was going to find that female .

If it was the last damned thing he did .

“Dax. Wake the hell up.” Jake’s voice pierced his eardrums like knives.

“You goddamn idiot,” Dax spat, sitting bolt upright, making his head spin and his stomach roll. Though he tried to speak it sounded more like a growl.

Crap. He realised he was still in wolf form. Sat on the edge of the cave looking out over the sea. His limbs were stiff, and his whole body was cold right to the core.

He’d obviously been asleep for a long old time.

“Sorry, mate, can’t understand you when you look like a dog.” The Djinn chuckled, his blond hair blowing absently in the breeze. Jake was probably one of the most beautiful looking people on the planet, but it was completely fake.

Djinn of course had no body features; they were completely devoid of form, with slits for eyes, and an undefined opening for a mouth. Their bodies were creepy as hell too; they had no shape to them whatsoever, no breasts, and no genitals. Thankfully they could shift their bodies at will, taking on characteristics of humans, making them look more normal. And they could walk through walls.

Djinn had the ability to make their bodies go completely spectral and become ghostlike. And because of their ability to skin shift, they were some of the most insecure, bitchy beings on this side of the kingdom.

Dax growled at him, low and hard. He was an idiot for waking him up.

“Look, buddy. You obviously need to sleep. Do it at home,” he snapped, standing up in the small space of the cave and pointing out towards the road.

The Djinn was right; Dax did need to get home, but not to sleep.

He needed to do some research.

Alison woke with a start, the image of Dax’s strikingly well-defined face still in her mind. He looked so tired; his dark grey eyes looked almost black and were ringed with dark shadows. His black hair was long and straggly, like he hadn’t washed or brushed it for a while, and he had more stubble on his chin than she’d ever seen him with. His chest was still broad and muscled but she could see his ribs, he looked like he hadn’t eaten in a while. Worry snaked its way into her gut but she pushed it away. It was only a dream, right?

Even so, for the first time in weeks she woke with a smile.

The coldness sank in, her body groaning in response as she moved.

She ached from head to toe, her bones frozen, her body battered. She could barely feel her fingers any more. This cold was unbearable, especially without the warmth of her wolf. The oh so familiar heat at her core that represented the other half of her soul had disappeared leaving her empty and alone.

Alison cursed her luck, cursed it to the fiery depths of the Under Realm. She’d been captured by the Circle months ago, tortured and bound. Tamriel had rescued her but Maker only knew that she hadn’t felt safe since she’d been at home with her pack. She knew they would come for her and she had been right.

They had come for her. They’d taken her away and rebound her with the new High Lord’s magic. She shuddered at the memory.

The stench of the cell they kept her in wafted through her senses, making her gag. Thankfully her stomach had stopped growling; maybe it had finally realised they were only going to feed her the bare minimum.

You need to get above ground .

Dax’s voice reverberated through her. She was fairly certain that it was just a strange dream, yet she was grateful for it.

She’d been here for weeks, hoping, wishing that someone would come and rescue her. It had never occurred to her that perhaps they might not be able to read the GPS chip in the back of her neck because she was underground.

She smiled at her subconscious logic! Mayhap it was the memory of Dax that sparked that knowledge.

Though it was just a creation of her mind, that short moment with the image of him gave her new-found hope. Fresh determination.

She was at breaking point, on the verge of giving up on life. Now though she had something to work towards. Now she had a plan to create.

Now … She looked forward to her next encounter with the two tombs that guarded her rather than feared it, because she knew exactly what to do.

Alison sat on the mattress, listening intently for sign of any tuhrned coming to collect her. They’d gotten sloppy over time, and that would be their downfall. There were no windows in her cell and only one door that was heavy and locked.

Nearly there, she thought. She’d been picking apart the stitching on the mattress for a good hour or so, and finally it was giving way to a small hole, just big enough to get her fingers through. She paused again, listening to the noises around her.

She could hear her guards talking, laughing. There was the chink of glass on a table, and someone was shuffling something? Paper?

She assumed they were playing cards.

They really had gotten sloppy in the last week or so, maybe because she’d visibly given up fighting them. Now they weren’t twitchy and prepared to fight her when they came to give her food, water or…something else.

She internally cringed, as the memories hit her again.

She shoved them aside as best she could. They were drunk most of the time. They had grown used to her passiveness, her not being able to fight them because she was on the verge of starvation and death.

She was an easy target.

Or so they thought.

As the final stitch she’d been working on with her fingernail came free, she grinned, an expression that felt alien to her features these days. She dipped her cold, bony fingers through the small hole she’d created and pulled out some of the stuffing from the mattress. She kept pulling it free until her fingers brushed against the very thing she was looking for – the spring.

It took a good few minutes of tugging and teasing the wire before the spring came free but it did eventually.

She held the wire up in front of her.

The room was pitch black. They were so deep underground there was no natural light whatsoever, and the heavy door to her cell didn’t have a single crack in it, so no light seeped through there either.

She’d been kept in this fucking cell for so long now that her eyes had grown used to the darkness; her night vision had steadily increased, even though the rest of her body had begun to fail. As a result, as she held the curled bouncy bit of wire in front of her, she could see it clearly. This was exactly what she needed.

It took her a few minutes to get a second piece out of the mattress and she tugged a long piece of thread from the material too. She had to hide the wire somewhere they wouldn’t think to look.

She had thought of slipping it into her jeans pocket, but she doubted she’d have time to get it out once they arrived. Her clothes didn’t seem to last long when those sick bastards where around.