Gamma No More - Book 3

Stripping, they shift and run towards the battle in three formations, spearheads moving in three directions around the battle edges.

Toni prays she isn’t sending the wolves that followed her to their deaths, but she has to have the strength to lead others in battle, she cannot sit by and watch wolves tearing each other to death, but the idea of risking others’ lives sits like a heavy yoke around her heart, squeezing it, sending her heart rate up.

As they get closer, the sound of the battlefield is deafening, and trying to pick out the individual sounds becomes impossible. The battle has drowned the forest out. The new normal is the song of battle and death.

Snarling, snapping, howling, yelping, and growling echo around the field, as an unspoken language of war unfolds around them, embracing them in its deadly grip.

Fur meeting fur in violent fury

Teeth tearing

Lives ending

Wolves battered, tattered, and torn surround them.

The violence unfolds unthinking on the field, as the scent of blood, fear, anger and adrenaline floods the area from the assembled wolves, driving out rational thought.

Survival becomes the one true thought in the minds of the surrounding wolves.

As Toni and her group move through the heaving masses, she sees bodies pushed down by wolves fighting to get to their next opponent, not cognisant of their actions on their fellow wolves.

A heavy sadness fills her heart, forcing the yoke over her heart, to break, her resolve to stop this returns, but deep inside her she wonders if it is too late to help in this fight, would she have been better holding off, letting the fight play out?

It just seems too cowardly to have watched from the edges and the one thing she’s never been is a coward, except the nagging feeling is she’s brought over two hundred wolves into this blood bath.

There’s a fine line between not being cowardly and being foolish and Toni tries not to second guess herself on which side she has fallen in this battle.

As the Veiled ones followed Toni, it had taken them thirty minutes to cut a path between the wolves, getting to the front edge of the fight.

They had dropped every wolf that had got in their way, all non-fatal injuries, crushed back legs, snapped achilles, dislocated legs, the injured bodies of wolves all left in their path.

Behind them, wolves from both sides limped and dragged their bodies out of the battle until their injuries healed, some slinking away, others watching from the sidelines, waiting to be well enough to re-join the madness.

Years of training had taught Toni how to incapacitate a wolf, taking them out of the fight, something they had focussed on in training and for once, she rejoiced at her upbringing.

Ezra and Di flanked either side of her, forming a deadly point to their incursion, as her anger at the leaders of this fight grew, unconsciously, her control over her dark side diminished slightly, creating a small patch of calm around her as wolves from both sides fled, not wanting to be close to her.

As wolves moved away, and were left unharmed, it was as if an unspoken message was being passed forward, clearing a path before her, allowing their progress to speed up.

As they neared the front line, Toni couldn’t see any way to identify which wolf was the King, losing faith in her plan. All the wolves near the centre were big, and powerful and she had never seen the King in either form, but she’d expected a wolf larger than her own.

But it’s her wolf that is dominating the area, larger than any other wolf nearby.

Flanked on both sides by her pack, wolves dart away from her, looking for easier single targets, allowing her pack mates to spread out slightly, dominating the area.

She had figured if she got to the King, and the leaders of the opposition before the fight, she would have attempted to talk, but if necessary she had been prepared to challenge both, but to do that in the middle of a battle wouldn’t work.

Eventually, she sees a large Black wolf heading the attack in the centre of the wolves they are cutting a path through, but fighting to one side is Axis, Delta Alek’s wolf, she’d recognise that light grey wolf anywhere, with his tail turning a darker shade until it gets to the black tip.

After time spent running with him as a pup, she feels an unexpected surge of protectiveness from Tyra, but she knows that Alek’s loyalty wouldn’t let him fight anywhere but by his King’s side.

‘To me, I see the King,’

She calls to the Veiled ones and two Deltas with her close ranks once again as they alter direction, fighting their way without serious injury towards the King.

Scanning the wolves in front of him, she tries to identify which could be the opposing leader, but none stand out, as if the wolves before him were a distraction, meant to tire the King and his guard.

Toni lets out a howl, readying to find a way to attempt to disengage the front line fighting, hoping that the others were now pushing the flanks, trying to corral the wolves towards a bottleneck.

Above the noise of battle, a warning bark rips into Tyra’s ears, something resonates deep inside her, in the most sacred part of her soul, she knows that wolf and it was a bark calling for help, but not from one in her immediate vicinity.

Her worst fears are being realised. The wolves she brought with her are in trouble. Her head snaps to the right and then to the left, trying to see which wolf she had recognised.

Instead, far to the left, Cage’s familiar red wolf, Hakan had placed himself in front of five wolves that were advancing on his Alpha’s wolf, Ink, who was already engaging two wolves of his own, one of which looked to be another Alpha.

They had pushed the wolves’ back, but in doing so, they had left their flank open and alone in a sea of foreign wolves, Karl and the remaining wolves nowhere in sight.

To their right, four more are close and bearing down on them and Toni cannot see where the rest of their supporting group is, and that is filling her with a dread that they may have died already, but she hadn’t felt their loss in the pack link.

Had her focus been so narrow that losing twenty-two wolves hadn’t affected her?

Other wolves are streaming towards them, sensing a shift in the balance and easy kills, an overwhelming force that two wolves cannot even contemplate facing alone.

Toni snaps back to reality as the wolf in front of her sinks its teeth into her shoulder, sending a jolt of pain through her body. Fuelled by anger at her momentary lapse in focus, she unleashes a relentless attack, tearing chunks of flesh from her attacker’s side with ferocious claws.

Blood drips from her muzzle as she prowls forward, surrounded by snarling wolves on both sides. With eyes glowing an eerie cobalt blue instead of their natural amber hue, Toni’s opponent falters, sensing an unnatural power emanating from her.

She lunges for his neck, clamping down with razor-sharp canines and savouring the metallic tang of blood in her mouth. But before she can assert her dominance and force him into submission, he panics and wrenches away, sealing his own fate as he tears open his jugular on her teeth.

A rush of darkness floods Toni’s mind at the kill, reminding her of the countless lives lost in this brutal war. She quickly shuts out those thoughts and turns to face Cage and Dimitri’s wolves, determined to protect her pack and those of the Alphas that stood with her, at all costs.

The King and Axis, Alek’s wolf, fade into the background as Toni focuses on saving those who followed her into battle. Her plan forgotten her need to save the wolves that came with her, her only focus now.

The veiled ones don’t question her action, maintaining their formation, not prepared to leave their Alpha in battle and continue to follow her without question.

Like every wolf here, Dimitri and Cage’s wolves already carried injuries from the fighting but were holding their own against the wolves they had already engaged.

Cage’s wolf Hakan kept glancing back at his Alpha’s wolf, Ink, but fighting distracted is no way to be on a battlefield. She bears the wound on her shoulder to prove that point.

The wounds they were inflicting on the surrounding wolves were deep, but that didn’t guarantee they would survive the punishing onslaught that was bearing down on them.

Slowly they are being overrun, and that thought rips a deep fear in Toni’s stomach.

They had joined with her at her request and she bears the heavy responsibility for every life that followed her to the battleground; she surges forward, her teeth slicing through the achillies of a wolf that was about to join the fight from the side, as she hears a yelp from the area she had seen Hakan and Ink fighting.

A sense of dread hits her body, no longer sure that just she can turn the tide as more wolves swarm in. The stench of blood suffocates her other senses, silencing her mind as the senseless fighting continues around her.

Waves of disgust wash over her, numbing her mind, before being brought violently back to the battlefield as a wolf barrels into her. Being taken out by Ezra.

It felt like she was an observer, not a participant in the madness that writhed and danced around her, and the injustice of the fighting brought her dark command up, leaking out of her, forcing wolves to back away in fear.

There were just too few of them and she had led them into this mess, and now she had to fix it. Protecting the wolves that had joined her was her chief priority and that started with the isolated wolves.

She takes another look around the battlefield, recognising wolves that had come with her. On the other side of the field, Joseph and Lance’s wolves were successfully pushing the wolves towards the choke point, but that meant wolves were being herded into too small an area.

The battle became far more vicious, dark and dangerous as wolves from different packs found themselves pushed into a smaller area. Instead of stopping the fighting, it had increased the desperation of the wolves, turning on their own side in confusion.

Ink and Hakan still appeared to be holding their own and isolated and in the middle, the King and Alek, and those on their side, were neither losing nor gaining an advantage, but the damage being inflicted on both sides was too much.

Time seemed to slow as she assessed the battlefield. All the time, while moving forward towards her isolated allies, Toni and Tyra seemed to soak up the whole of the battlefield in seconds. She felt her stomach drop away.

Finally, comprehending her strategy was always going to fail.