What in the name of Avilku was that woman doing? Staring up at a Draqon like that? While its mate fired directly at her?

Gerrit shoved her aside just as the arrow whizzed between them, close enough that he felt a breeze against his bare arm. Farther in the clearing, his guards doubled back. But it was too late. Thompson was nearly a mile off the ground, lost against the sunlight and the Draqon’s shadow. For his sake, Gerrit hoped they killed him fast. Death would be a better fate than what waited for him at the Draqons’ hive.

More Draqons descended into the clearing. Gerrit watched their necks rear back and their mouths stretch wide. They’d blast the space with acid any second, and he and everyone around him would be reduced to bubbling skin and seeping wounds.

He let out a piercing whistle.

His guards reacted instantly, shifting into their Vilkan forms. With a rip of Arakid cloth and a deafening howl, his guards became wolves. Swanson raced past, his silver and white fur glinting beneath the scant patches of sunlight and Draqon acid.

Beside Gerrit, the pilot gasped, her breath stolen and locked up in that pretty mouth of hers. She’d seen them shift. She knew what they were.

He grabbed her hips mid-stride and slung her over his shoulder. He followed his Vilkas straight into the clearing and raced toward the jungle’s edge on the opposite side. The fastest way through was across. His legs pumped hard as he ran, keeping pace with the wolves surrounding him.

Acid splashed behind him, and arrows flew around him, punctuating the air with whipping smacks as they connected with fallen trees, wet earth, and living hide. The Vilkas took more than a few in the haunches and shoulders, but still, they kept running. Toward the front, a Vilka with gleaming brown fur ran straight through the fire and emerged with three arrows in his neck. He ran two more strides before he fell.

Heat tore through Gerrit’s shoulder. The arrow blasted straight through the muscle and skin and out the other side of his body to lodge in a stump four feet away. He howled in agony and stumbled, almost losing his footing.

Over his shoulder, Jude screamed.

No, it wasn’t a scream. She was shouting something.

“Put me down! Put me down, you fucking asshole!”

He snarled.

He didn’t put her down, but he yanked her off his shoulder and into his arms.

Her eyes peeled wide at the sight of the blood coursing from his shoulder. She stopped shouting.

She slapped her palm against the wound, causing him to grimace in pain, but her instincts were right. Stopping the blood flow would keep him running faster and longer.

They leaped back into the jungle. Around him, paws and claws scratched over the foliage. A Vilka could outrun a human form hands down, especially in the jungle, but his wolves slowed to keep pace with their Alpha. They circled around him, watching his flank, and Swanson darted in close, his panting breaths hot against Gerrit’s back.

The young guard whined. Up, the Vilka said.

Gerrit didn’t need to look; he already knew. Through the patches of clearing in the canopy above them, he’d seen the first peaks of the mountain range appear.

They were almost to the pass.

A narrow, winding path between two sharp embankments with the occasional rocky overhang to protect from above, the pass was too twisting and tight for a Draqon to get low enough, and the rocks came together at the top, narrowing the space they could shoot down through. For the Vilkas, it was like running right into the barrel of a gun, but it was the best option. It was their only chance.

When they broke free of the jungle’s edge and Gerrit and his wolves crashed across the pebbled ground, he spotted the tallest mountain on Kladuu among the mountain range.

His home. His mountain.

They were so close.

“Go!” he shouted to his guards without a second’s hesitation. They’d make it. They had to. For Thompson. And the pilot in his arms. The instinct to keep her safe drove him to run faster.

As soon as the pass narrowed around them, more Draqons than he’d anticipated descended from within the cave-like pass. They had set this up, herded them here while others waited for them to charge in. Gerrit and his men were trapped from above, behind, and in front. More Draqons lined the pass, nearly ten in number, their hulking forms bathing the rock-covered trail in darkness.

The women sitting astride the hulking beasts keened and filled the rocky cavern with their high-pitched voices, the sound reverberating through the rocks and Gerrit’s skull.

An arrow struck the heart of the Vilka racing in front of Gerrit. He had to leap over his friend’s body. Around him, his men fell to arrows and acid and claws and teeth. The Draqons showed no mercy. They executed the Vilkas around Gerrit with precision, saving him for last.

“Retreat!” Gerrit shouted. Only Swanson heard. He was the only guard left.

They tucked tail and turned back toward the side of the jungle they had just come from. There, along the clearing’s edge, Gerrit spotted Ivers, a young Vilka in his first year of service.

“Grab him!” he shouted to Swanson.

With his mountain looming over their shoulders, they scrambled back into the jungle, Swanson dragging Ivers behind him.

* * *

They set up camp beneath an overhang of vines and moss and river rock.

In the sky, the Draqons circled. The canopy was too dense, and their numbers were too small to launch a full-scale assault on the Vilkas while they were holed up in a dense part of the jungle. They’d wanted the wolves racing through the open pass where they could pick them off one by one until only the Alpha remained. Then they probably would have taken him to their hive and tortured him in front of their queen. Bled out all his secrets, his pack’s secrets. And then they would have executed him and hung his body high in the sky for all the clans to see.

And Gerrit had led his pack straight into it.

He should have known better than to try the pass. But he’d flung himself and everyone else straight into it. And they’d all paid the price. All except Swanson, the unconscious Ivers laid out next to the fire, and the woman huddled on the opposite side, as far from them as she could get.

He’d nearly gotten the human killed today too, and he didn’t even know her name. He felt a toxic mixture of anger and shame, so he focused on the anger. Through gritted teeth, he asked, “What’s your name?”

She looked up. Her tattered uniform was covered in fresh blood, most of it his, though she’d received a few new cuts during the run through the jungle to add to the ones from her crash. But her shoulder didn’t smell infected. One good sign, at least. “Why do you care?”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“You’re that stubborn? You won’t even tell me your name after I saved you?”

“Saved me?” she sputtered. “When the hell did you save me? It seems to me like you need to be saved.”

Swanson stiffened at the words, and Gerrit snarled. The woman’s harassing scent flared with a touch of fear.

She wrapped her arms around her waist and looked away. “Jude,” she said like she had to dredge the word up from her marrow.

What kind of name was Jude? “Fine. I’m going on watch. Keep him alive,” he commanded Swanson with a nod toward Ivers.

“Sir,” Swanson said, “I should treat your shoulder.”

Jude’s focus latched onto the seeping wound from the Draqon’s arrow. He rolled the joint and fought back a hiss of pain. It hurt worse than he’d expected. But the woman’s fast thinking had probably saved his life. She stared at him, her brown eyes unblinking.

“It’s fine.” He stood and slipped into the foliage.

As he went, he heard Swanson say, “He’ll be okay.”

“Did I ask?” the woman—Jude—fired back.

Jude. A stupid name.

He hated that it suited her so well. That he liked it.