Chapter 9: The Night Raid
The air in the hidden passage wasn’t just cold; it was the deep, damp chill of buried things, of soil and forgotten stone. It tasted of wet rust and loam. Cole led, one palm skimming the rough-hewn wall, his breathing a controlled whisper in the absolute dark. Behind him, the soft scuff of boots and the faint, metallic scent of five of Kaelen’s most trusted guards—betas all, chosen for their silence and their lack of an alpha’s aggressive scent signature.
A sliver of memory, sharp as glass: his mother’s hand, soft and warm, guiding his smaller one along this same stone. “Our secret, Elian. For hide and seek.” He shoved the memory down. It belonged to a ghost.
“Step here is loose,” he murmured, the words barely a breath. He didn’t look back, trusting the message to be passed. A faint click of acknowledgment from the soldier directly behind him, Vara’s second, a woman named Ivia.
They had slipped into the estate grounds like shadows through a tear in the world. The main force, with Kaelen at its head, was a distraction brewing in the cloud-choked sky a league to the east. Cole’s task was the lock. The gate. His heart was a frantic, trapped bird against his ribs, but his hands were steady.
The passage began to slope upward. A sliver of greyish light appeared ahead, filtering through a latticed grate. The wine cellar. The sounds from the estate above were muffled here: the heavy tread of boots on flagstones, a distant, rough laugh, the clank of a tankard.
Cole paused at the grate, listening. His lavender eyes had adjusted to the profound dark; now they strained in the feeble light. Two voices, bored, directly above.
“—patrol the west wall again. Pointless. No one’s coming. The Omega’s off playing princess in his dragon tower.”
“King Lysander thinks he’ll try. Sent word to double the watches.”
A snort. “Sent word to drink his imported wine, more like. This is the good stuff. Here.”
The sound of liquid glugging. Cole looked back, caught Ivia’s eye in the gloom. He held up two fingers, then drew one across his own throat. Ivia nodded, her face grim. She and the guard beside her eased long, oil-black daggers from their sheaths.
Cole counted in his head, his mouth dry. He pictured the cellar layout: the rack directly above the grate, the flagstone floor. He signaled.
With a rust-creaked sigh, he pushed the grate open. It was heavier than he remembered. The sound was like a nail on slate.
“What was—”
Cole was already moving, hauling himself up into the cellar’s cool, barrel-scented air. A sentry, cup still in hand, loomed over him, his face a cartoon of surprise. Ivia was a phantom rising behind Cole. Her arm snaked around the man’s mouth, her dagger found the gap between his gorget and helmet. A wet, choked gurgle. The second guard turned, fumbling for his sword hilt. The other beta soldier was on him, a brutal, efficient tackle that drove him into a rack of dusty bottles. They shattered. The smell of cheap, sour wine bloomed, masking the coppery scent of blood.
It was over in six seconds.
Cole stood amidst the wreckage, his boots sticking to the spilled wine. He didn’t look at the bodies. He looked at the door leading up to the kitchens. “The mechanism for the portcullis is in the gatehouse. Through the main yard.”
“Which will be crawling with them,” Ivia whispered, wiping her blade clean on the dead man’s tunic.
“Then we don’t go through the yard.” Cole crossed the cellar to the far wall, to a section of shelving laden with root vegetables in sacks. With a grunt, he shoved a heavy sack aside. Behind it was neither stone nor wood, but thick, ancient spiderwebs and a recessed handle. “Servants’ stair. Goes straight to the upper hall overlooking the inner court. The gatehouse is across from it.”
Ivia’s eyebrow lifted. “Your childhood home had escape routes from the wine cellar.”
“My mother liked privacy,” Cole said flatly, pulling the concealed door open. A deeper, drier dark greeted them. “And my father married a woman who understood contingency.”
The stair was a tight, spiraling coil of stone. They ascended single file, their world narrowing to the sound of their own breathing and the scuff of leather on step. Cole’s skin prickled. Every shadow in the recesses of his mind stirred. This was where he’d hidden, once, during a game. This was where he’d heard his father call for him, his voice echoing strangely. A good memory. It felt like a weapon now, turned against the place that birthed it.
At the top, a simple wooden door, warped with age. Cole put his ear to it. Distant sounds: more footsteps, the clatter of a pail, a shouted order about checking the perimeter torch lines. The main hall. He glanced back at Ivia. “Ready?”
She nodded, her hand on her dagger. “For a frolic through a den of wolves? Always.”
He eased the door open a crack. The hall was vast, high-ceilinged, and mostly dark. Moonlight streamed through the tall, narrow windows, painting silver bars on the flagstones. The once-familiar tapestries—hunting scenes, pastoral idylls—were gone, replaced by Lysander’s standard: a silver serpent coiled around a broken crown. The sight was a physical blow.
Directly across the open courtyard below, twenty paces of exposed ground, was the gatehouse. Light flickered from its slit windows. Two guards flanked the heavy door.
Cole’s target was the thick, iron-banded winch wheel visible just inside the gatehouse arch. It controlled the counterweight for the portcullis. Pull it, and the great iron teeth would rise.
“We can’t cross that,” Ivia breathed. “They’ll see us before we’re halfway.”
Cole’s eyes scanned the hall’s architecture. The minstrel’s gallery ran along the wall above them, a narrow walking space behind a stone balustrade. It connected to a similar gallery on the gatehouse side. “Above. The gallery connects. It’s… precarious.”
“More precarious than charging two armored men?”
“Yes.”
They moved like wisps of smoke along the gallery. The stone underfoot was littered with old bird droppings and dust. Below, in the courtyard, a squad of eight men assembled, their sergeant barking orders for the changing of the watch. Cole’s team froze, pressed against the cold wall. He could feel the seconds slipping away, each one a grain of sand falling toward the moment Kaelen’s dragons would be seen, the moment of surprise would be lost.
The squad marched off. The two gatehouse guards resumed their bored stance.
“Go,” Ivia urged.
Cole darted across the connecting stretch of gallery. It was little more than a stone bridge, open to the courtyard on one side. The moonlight painted him a perfect target. His heart hammered in his throat. He made it to the other side, flattening himself against the gatehouse wall. Ivia and the others followed, one by one.
The door into the gatehouse tower was just below them, accessed by a tight spiral staircase descending from the gallery. Cole pointed down. Ivia went first.
The stairwell was tight, stifling. The sound of voices, clearer now, wafted up.
“—bet it’s a false alarm. Whole thing. Dragon King’s got better things to do.”
“Better things than an omega who slithered away? You heard the rumors. He’s obsessed.”
Ivia reached the bottom. She peered around the curve of the stair, then jerked back. She held up three fingers. Three men inside.
No more time for stealth. Cole felt a strange calm descend. This was the lock. He was the key. He met Ivia’s eyes, nodded, and drew the slender dagger Kaelen had given him—a beautiful, wicked thing he called a ‘heart-seeker.’
They burst into the room.
It was chaos, but a contained, violent chaos. The three guards were unprepared, half-armored, playing cards on an upturned barrel. Ivia took the first, her dagger slashing across his throat before he could stand. The second roared, grabbing for a axe propped against the wall. One of the beta soldiers intercepted him, their collision shaking the small room. The third, younger, his eyes wide with terror, fumbled his sword free and lunged not at the soldiers, but at Cole.
Instinct, old and brutal, took over. Cole didn’t freeze. He sidestepped, the clumsy thrust going wide. His own dagger shot out, not for a killing blow, but for the wrist. The blade bit deep. The youth screamed, his sword clattering to the stones. Cole kicked it away, his blood roaring in his ears.
Ivia finished her man. The soldier with the axe grunted, taking a bruising hit to his shoulder before disarming his opponent and driving a dagger up under his ribcage.
Silence, broken only by ragged breathing and the moaning of the wounded youth clutching his wrist.
The winch wheel.
Cole stumbled toward it, past the carnage. The iron was cold, layered with old grease and rust. He wrapped his hands around a spoke. He pulled.
Nothing. It was seized fast.
Panic, hot and acidic, rose in his throat. “Help me!”
Ivia and another soldier grabbed adjacent spokes. They planted their feet and hauled. Muscles corded in their necks. A deep, groaning protest issued from the ancient machinery, from the very stones of the tower. Then, with a shriek of metal on metal that set Cole’s teeth on edge, it gave.
The wheel began to turn, slowly, violently. Chains rattled in their channels. From outside, down in the gate arch, came a tremendous, shuddering groan—the sound of a waking iron giant.
A bell began to clang a frantic alarm somewhere in the keep. Shouts erupted in the courtyard below.
“They’re raising the gate! To the gatehouse!”
Cole kept pulling, his slender arms burning. Through the gatehouse arrow-slit, he saw the massive, spiked portcullis lurch upward, six inches, then a foot.
Then he saw the sky.
The clouds over the eastern woods tore apart. Not from wind, but from the passage of something immense and ancient. First one, then three, then five scaled forms plunged through the gap, their wings blotting out the moon. And at their head, a creature of obsidian and brimstone, larger than the others, its eyes burning like fallen suns.
Kaelen.
A roar split the world. It was not the sound of an animal, but of a force of nature, of tectonic plates grinding. It shook dust from the gatehouse ceiling. The soldiers pouring into the courtyard below skidded to a halt, faces upturned in pure, primal terror.
The lead dragon opened its maw.
A river of liquid gold, shimmering with impossible heat, spewed forth. It washed over the gathered squad in the courtyard, not with the violence of an explosion, but with the terrible, thorough finality of a tidal wave. Light, heat, and sound consumed everything. Stone ran like wax. Metal vanished in a puff of acrid smoke.
The dragon-king banked, his vast wing sending a gale through the courtyard that extinguished the lesser fires his breath had not. Those molten gold eyes swept the gatehouse, found the arrow-slit. Found Cole.
Even across the distance, through stone and chaos, Cole felt the searing focus of that gaze. A promise. A reckoning.
Ivia grabbed his arm. “The yard’s clear! Our forces will land there! We need to meet them!”
Cole let go of the winch. The portcullis was halfway up, enough for a dragon to pass through. His job was done. He looked at the wounded youth sobbing on the floor, at the blood on his own hands, at the hellscape of golden flame and blackened stone unfolding through the narrow window.
He had opened the gate. He had let the dragon in.
A fierce, terrifying smile touched his lips. “Let’s go welcome them home.”