Did Mason know something we didn't? Or was he just a cocky son of a bitch? I had no idea.

I supposed he wouldn't care much if they killed his brothers. It was only saving him the trouble of doing it himself. One day, inevitably, they'd get tired of his shit and challenge him. He knew that.

He seemed to guess the rogues wouldn't touch him while he was holding a child, and so he took his sweet time to move. Eventually, he turned to me, just because I was closest, and he handed me his daughter. I rested her against my hip, astonished as always that someone so little could weigh so much.

Finally, Mason shifted. Amidst the chaos, he wove through the churning mess of bodies and teeth to tear out a rogue's throat with deadly precision. A heartbeat later, a russet-brown wolf knocked him sideways, and the two of them rolled over and over, snapping at each other's throat. It was either Rhodri or his father - I couldn't tell, and I didn't have time to stop and squint at them.

"We need to move," I hissed at the girls. They had screamed when the wolves had appeared, and Lilah was in tears now. She tried to snatch her child from me, but I caught her jacket instead and started dragging her away from the fight. She was too weak and terrified to offer much resistance.

We went towards the trees. Lin followed willingly enough, but her face had gone ghostly pale, and I reckoned she might faint before we got very far. That was okay. I took them a few dozen metres, and then I pushed Lilah to the ground. Only then did I hand the kid back to her.

I crouched over her, my shoulder pressed against a tree. I needed to be close enough to see what was going on. And I could. Just about. I could see teeth flashing and bloodied pelts and bodies on the ground.

I couldn't tell who was winning. The Vaughans were descended from the older bloodlines, so their wolves were silver-grey, like Liam's. But in that writhing mass of fur, they would have needed to be bright green for me to pick them out.

Lin crouched behind us. They were hidden by the tree trunk, which made them feel safe, but I had no doubt Nia knew exactly where we were. The toddler was still crying, albeit quietly. She was old enough to know that something was badly wrong.

"Why aren't we running?" Lilah demanded.

"Because I don't think they're here for us," I told her in a rough whisper. "Keep your mouth shut and your head down, yeah?"

She dug her fingernails into my arm hard enough to draw blood. It was more fear than malice - I could smell it on her breath, overwhelming and sickly-sweet. "What if they come over here?"

"Then I'll kill them, won't I?" I snapped. My wolf was feeling gutsy, all of a sudden, and hers was cowering. It was a nice change.

Lilah shut up. Lin seemed to have been rendered speechless for the first time in her life. I was free to turn my full attention onto the fight. It had fractured into several smaller skirmishes in the seconds we'd spent bickering, but there was still a distinct lack of flockie bodies on the ground.

It should have been easy. Liam's brothers were outnumbered nearly three to one. Nia, Rhodri and Rhys should have been able to take them out individually, given enough time. But time was the one thing we didn't have. And all three of them were putting up one hell of a fight.

The rogues were trying to leave Felix alive, which meant they could only wound him. That had been the plan, anyway. I had no doubt Nia would abandon it if he made too much of a nuisance of himself.

A group of four wolves came charging down the gorge to throw themselves into the fight. Reinforcements for the flockies, I guessed. Mason had used his few seconds of grace period well. The raiders still had the advantage of numbers, but I did wonder how much longer that would last.

Two wolves were already down, and neither of them were silver-grey or even big enough to be one of the Vaughans. I was hardly daring to breathe. My wolf wanted to throw herself into that mosh-pit, because our packmates were fighting for their lives down there and we were stuck protecting the enemy.

A low growl rumbled through the gorge. It had come from a wolf at the far side of the fight - a wolf so massive that it had to be Micah. His silver pelt was stained all kinds of red, but it wasn't those little peppered tooth marks that were bothering him now.

No, Nia had bitten off the last few inches of his tail. And while he was reeling, she got her teeth into the hole in his belly and ripped it open properly. A handful of grey-pink entrails came spilling out into the dirt. It wouldn't stop him biting anyone, but it would slow him down.

His howl of pain was loud enough to make me wince up in the trees. Now that he was injured, someone else could finish him off. Nia released him and plunged back through the commotion to find Mason, because he was the real target of this ambush. Anyone else was just a bonus.

I lost sight of her in the press of bodies. But I could see where she was going, because Mason was surrounded by three rogues, and one of them was my uncle. I could see that now - unlike Rhodri, he didn't lock and hold when he was fighting.

And then, just as it was looking like we could actually pull this off, things went horribly, horribly wrong. It wasn't the flockies who did it. It wasn't a new band of reinforcements. Instead, a sleek, panther-like creature came racing out of seemingly nowhere and threw itself into the fight.

Dark, patchy fur. A set of razor-sharp ivory white teeth. Eyes filled with molten gold. I'd never seen a Shadowcat in my life, but I didn't see what else this ... thing could be.

It wasn't on our side. And it wasn't on the Vaughans' side either. The Shadowcat was ripping into anyone and everyone in reach, and it was doing it with such lethal efficiency that the entire fight began to fracture.

The rogues were scattering. Backing up and regrouping, probably on Nia's orders, because they were going to be mincemeat if they stayed still. They darted in to taunt the Shadowcat before dashing back into the trees, and it was pretty obvious they were trying to distract it from the few pairs of wolves who were still tussling.

Their panic thrummed across the link, making the world spin around me as I tried to wall out those sickening vibrations and quivers of uncertainty. I wondered how much of it was Nia spilling over.

"Oh, Goddess. Shit. What the hell is that?" Lilah whispered.

"Shut up," I said shortly. "Please."

I didn't want it coming our way. It was bigger than your average wolf, bigger even than Micah, and it was ploughing through the rogues like they were nothing. I pressed my back against the tree trunk and prayed.

And then the toddler burst into tears. There was no discernible reason for it, but her mother was crying quietly and the rest of us were looking hella stressed, so maybe she'd picked up on that.

I pressed a hand over her mouth, the same way I'd had to silence my brother when he'd been little. A few seconds of suffocation had always seemed preferable to watching him get ripped apart by flockies, and the principle applied here too.

It was too late. The Shadowcat dropped out of a chase and swung its head in our direction. I didn't even have time to swear before it let out a strangled hiss and charged at us.

And that was it. There was no one close enough to get in the way, and most of them were too busy fighting for their lives to care anyway. No chance of outrunning it. Even if we shifted, the kid would be left behind. She was too big to carry in my jaws.

So I was left to frantically strip off my horrible, tight flockie clothes and shift. No sooner had my forepaws touched the ground than the creature slammed into me, knocking me flying. I landed heavily on my side. I felt something snap. Several somethings, if I was being honest.

My yelp was involuntary. But before the Shadowcat could blink, I was back on my feet. I was all that was standing between him - because it was definitely a him - and three relatively innocent people.

I snapped at his paws, at the end of his tail, at his soft underbelly. He'd turn towards me, roaring his hatred for the whole world to hear, and I'd dash away to find a new target. He was huge, yeah, but it made him slower. I could dart in and out and distract him by doing what I did best - being annoying.

I managed a few seconds of that, luring him further away from the girls with every step, until he tired of the game and lashed out with one massive paw. It caught me across the face, leaving a set of bloody rents down my chin.

And while I was reeling, he clamped his jaws around my shoulder. I was lifted off my feet and shaken vigorously. If he'd done it a bit harder, he would have broken my neck. As it was, I could feel my internal organs being rearranged and my spine screaming out.

The world was flashing black and white. Spots swirled in my vision, dancing around and making me dizzier still. Just when I was about to pass out, he dropped me like a discarded chew toy. And I just lay there, stunned and helpless, while he opened that awful maw with his eyes fixed on my throat.

That would have been it. Lights out, game over, if another wolf hadn't put himself between us. He raised his hackles, lifted a lip, and gave a growl which put thunder to shame. That was enough to make the Shadowcat pause.

You would've thought that I'd be grateful for such an unlikely rescue. That I might appreciate the person who'd just saved my life. But it wasn't a member of my family. It wasn't even a rogue. It was Mason.

Nia had let him go so I could keep my cover. And maybe, just maybe, she was hoping they might kill each other. Either way, I didn't like it.

The Shadowcat sneezed, all of a sudden. He snapped at Mason once and rather lazily, and then he swung his massive head around to eye the wolves gathering behind him. I could see Nia's wolf, bloodied and panting hoarsely. Rhys and Rhodri weren't far behind her. The other rogues were dealing with the few flockie reinforcements who were standing.

The Shadowcat knew that if he went for Mason, he would be attacked from behind a heartbeat later. He stood there and hissed at all of us, froth dripping from the corners of his mouth.

He was old. I could see that now. His fur was littered with bald patches - scars, all of them. His teeth were chipped and broken. One of his eyes spun uselessly in its socket while the other was clouded. He didn't have a scent, save for a cloying stench which was old and stale and reminded me of things that had been dead for a while.

He snuffed at us curiously. He seemed calmer than before, in that he wasn't killing indiscriminately, but I sensed it wasn't going to last long.

Because Mason was injured. His right foreleg was buckling every time he tried to put weight on it. His pelt was closer to red than grey at this point. He'd come off better in the initial fight, but fighting three wolves at once had taken its toll.

This new plan wasn't going to work. Yes, the Shadowcat might kill him and make life easy for us, but he'd kill me and the girls and the kid right afterwards. My uncle and my cousins must have all realised that, but it was Rhodri who made the decision.

He came loping over to land a vicious bite to the Shadowcat's thigh. And when he howled and twisted, Rhodri just held on. And he kept holding on until the Shadowcat slammed him into a tree trunk with bone-breaking force. And then he got up, turned tail and ran.

The Shadowcat gave chase. Rhodri's father followed both of them. I wasn't sure if they would be able to lead him very far, but every metre they got would give us more time to get the kid somewhere safer.

Howls in the trees. Closer than I would've liked. There were more flockies on the way, and it was time to give up. It had only been a minute since the ambush had started, but sixty seconds felt like a lifetime when you were fighting for your life

The few rogues who were still fighting broke away in such perfect unison that I knew they'd been mind-linked, and the flockies went after them. The fight would move to the border. Nia was the only one left, but even she was loping back toward the carnage in the gorge bottom.

"You'd better haul ass now," I told her through the link. "I'll bet half of the pack is on their way."

I was ignored. She risked a few seconds more to check on the rogues who were down. One was clearly dead, with their throat splattered across the forest floor. Another had a shredded hind paw. These days, flockies tended to aim for the legs, not the throat. Break the right bone, and the rogue can't run away. Break the right bone, and you get a prisoner to interrogate.

Nia made a beeline for the lame rogue. She licked at her muzzle, and then she darted forwards, quick as a coiled snake, to close her teeth around wolf's neck. A single bite to the base of the spine was all it took. One moment alive, the next twitching and listless.

Death was never as quick as you'd like it to be. In the movies, they'd snap your neck or put a bullet in you, and you'd be out like a light. But the truth was, it could take minutes to properly die even when your throat was outside your body. And those minutes were spent in agony. It was still better than being captured.

The wolf let out a pathetic mewling sound with her last breath. Nia had already moved on, because there was one more rogue struggling to find his feet with a dislocated hip. She would have to kill him, too.

Before she could get there, Mason decided to pad back towards her. He wanted his prisoner alive. Nia stopped where she was, her tail swinging back and forth in silent indecision. She knew that if she stayed, she'd stand a good chance of killing him, but she wouldn't leave Silver Lake in one piece.

"Go," I told her through the link. It was a broken, desperate plea. "Please, Nia. You can't-"

"It's okay, kiddo," Nia said. "I'll kill him nice and quick and then run like hell."

Liar.

I tried to get up. Tried and failed. My spine seared white-hot, which meant nope, and I collapsed back into an ungainly heap. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Even if I could have reached them, I couldn't have made her leave. I could only have died alongside her.

"We'll find another way, okay?" I tried.

The link warmed with a wry smile. "I doubt that, somehow."

Another attempt to rise. More of the same devastating agony. They were both so frozen in place that I knew their minds were clashing on some higher plane of existence. Nia was going to kill him the old-fashioned way. If I was going to stop her, I was going to have to get more imaginative.

There was one way to do it - one way that would make her absolutely furious - but it was sure to work. And so I pulled on my link to Lily. If anything was going to move my cousin, it would be her mate.

It didn't take her long to come charging back. She was missing half of her ear. She stopped at the top of the ridge, clearly unwilling to come any closer. Felix was injured, but he was still on his feet, and she was easy pickings.

Nia was prowling towards Mason now. She was doing it slowly so she could concentrate on defending her mind. She was at a disadvantage. She had to break through his walls and kill him, while he only needed to delay her long enough for the rest of the pack to get there. That way, he'd win without moving a muscle.

And neither of them had noticed Lily. She pointed her muzzle skywards and howled. It was a slow, mournful howl. The type that called us home from a hunt.

Nia and Mason snapped out of their trance to look at her. I could see the frustration written all over Nia's face. She shot me a nasty look, and then she dropped a shoulder like she was about to charge Mason. He did what any trained fighter would do and braced for the impact, which gave her the split second she needed to turn tail and run for it.

Mason watched her go with his head cocked. He snapped at thin air, clearly annoyed that he'd lost the main prize. He had one prisoner, yes, but Nia was so clearly our leader.

But he did let her go. He wasn't about to abandon his family in the middle of the bloody woods, and I was very grateful for that. He was also bleeding heavily, so he couldn't have chased her very far. My family had got a few good hits in. There was even a set of tooth marks at the base of his neck which were a few millimetres short of his carotid.

He went off to shift. He came back in just a pair of jeans and a good deal of his own blood. It didn't seem to bother him. He was carrying his t-shirt and a jacket, and I thought he might put them on, but instead, he dropped them at my paws.

"Shift," he told me.

It was actually better to avoid shifting when your bones were broken - and especially if there was any spinal damage, but he'd said it in that voice which made my wolf quiver like a puppy. I shifted back.

It hurt more than it should have. I lay as still as I could, but the pain from my shoulder and my ribs was still enough to bring tears to my eyes. It took a good deal of willpower to reach for the shirt. Lin helped me wriggle into it. The shirt reached down to my mid-thighs, and the jacket covered the rest.

Mason had helped Lilah up. They'd done some rather messy whoops-nearly-died-just-then type kissing, and he'd shushed his daughter for the second time. Now the Luna was sniffling like she was about to cry again, but she still pushed her mate in my direction and whispered something.

Nice of her. Or it would have been nice of her to care so deeply about my well-being had I not hated Mason with every fibre of my being. I didn't want him near me, let alone touching me.

He crouched over me. I was still in agony when I tried to breathe, let alone move, but I hugged my arms to my chest. It wasn't because I was cold, but more that the scars on my arms were in plain sight.

Mason checked the gashes on the side of my neck first. They were bleeding badly, but none of them were particularly deep. His attention shifted to the tooth marks in my shoulder next, and while he put pressure on them, he said, "Remind me which pack you're from."

"New Dawn."

"New Dawn," he repeated. "And they train their females, do they?"

Slowly, cautiously, I nodded.

He laughed. I'd literally just saved his mate and his daughter from certain death with that 'training,' but there was an edge of delighted scorn which was hard to mistake. Down in the gorge, Felix was sat on that last living rogue to stop him wandering off. He had a mouthful of pelt, and he still managed to laugh with his brother.

If I hadn't hated him already... Goddess. He was still laughing as his fingers prodded my shoulder, feeling along the joint for damage. It hurt, and it hurt quite a lot, but I didn't dare growl at him.

"Can you move this arm?" he asked.

I grimaced. "I'm sure I can. It's more than I don't want to."

"That's because your collarbone's broken."

He was an idiot. Wolves didn't have collarbones. If anything, the Shadowcat had broken a piece off my scapula, but I wasn't about to correct him. His fingers were dangerously close to my throat.

Without warning ... and for no discernible reason, Lin let out an agonised moan and sank to the ground. She knelt there, her eyes unfocused and unseeing, and she started crying. She'd been fine during actual violence, strangely enough - pale-faced and shaky, but nothing I hadn't seen in flockie girls a hundred times before. This was ... different.

"It's just the shock," Mason sighed. "Leave her."

It didn't look like shock. I knew shock. I was in shock right now. But since I couldn't really move and it would take some serious balls to disobey him while he was standing right there, I left her alone.

Mason's hand moved to my shirt hem next. I swatted at his fingers reflexively because ... just ... no. Not happening. Plus there were more scars on my stomach, and those were harder to explain.

He caught my wrist and pinned it against my side, his lip curling in amusement. "Don't flatter yourself, Braveheart."

And then he was pulling my shirt up, and there wasn't much I could do to stop him, short of throwing a punch. As it turned out, he just wanted a look at my ribs, which were turning blue-black at an alarming speed. A finger prodded the middle of that tender area, and I had to bite my tongue to keep a stream of swearwords in. The finger trailed lower, coming to rest on one of the darker, more prominent scars where flockie teeth had torn my pelt.

"These aren't from training."

The way he was looking at me now ... I didn't like it. He'd stopped looking at my chest and started looking at my eyes, and I did wonder if he was starting to suspect.

"No," I said. "This isn't the first time I've been caught up in a rogue attack."

It wasn't even a lie. I was just usually on the other side of it.

"I see," Mason said, letting go of the shirt hem. "Your ribs are broken too. Try and stay still until the medics get here."

I shook my head, and then I got up. My spine was still throbbing, but it had stopped screaming at me, so I assumed something had healed. It took me a minute to pull my jeans on one-handed, but it was worth it just to see the look on Mason's face.

"Tough little thing, aren't you?" he asked. There was a generous helping of sarcasm dripping from those words, and it brought another smirk to his lips. "You want to walk so bad? Go walk over to Micah and hold his guts for him."

He thought I'd blanch or whimper or squeal like a girl. And maybe I should have done all of that - lived up to his paltry expectations and kept my head down. But I'd had enough. I limped back down into the gorge and knelt beside Micah's massive wolf.

He was lying on his side, breathing hard, and that was probably reasonable, given that a handful of his intestines were trailing in the mud. I pressed a hand against the tear to stop any more of them coming out. The things inside our bellies always wanted out to be outside. Why ... I didn't know. It was warmer in there.

Micah groaned. He was bleeding badly enough that I wondered if he'd die before the medics arrived. I sincerely hoped he would. It wasn't fair that we'd done all of this for nothing.

My eyes wandered to the last rogue. He had stopped trying to rise now, and he was just lying there, his brown eyes fixed firmly on me. Felix's teeth were wrapped around his throat, and his dislocated leg was twisted awkwardly beneath him.

I recognised him. Not by sight, but by the barest touch of his mind. He was one of the veteran raiders. Mortimer Morris. He had a dozen kids scattered across the north, and two of them had their own raiding teams. He'd seen sixty summers, survived countless raids and run with Rhodric Llewellyn himself. And now he was going to die.

I felt like crying. I shared the blame for this. And hadn't enough of us been tortured yet? Hadn't enough of us been hung out on a bone fence to cook in the summer sun? Hadn't there been enough spilt blood and mutilated corpses and ripped collars?

Micah was coming around. He hadn't been completely unconscious, but he'd been close, and I wasn't thrilled to see his eyes flicker open. He growled at me, somewhat half-heartedly. I kept holding his intestines for him because I was just that nice.

"What was that ... thing?" Micah demanded. The link was shaking horribly, given how much pain he was in. "It looked like a rabid panther."

"No idea. We'll see if our friend here knows anything," Mason replied, with a fond look at his prisoner. "But on the bright side, I think it did more damage to the rogues than us."

I wasn't so sure. I was feeling pretty damaged. But hey, when had I started thinking of myself as one of the flockies?

"No scent, Mase," Felix said into an open link. "You think that's what killed Old Henry?"

Oh. Could be. Maybe I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions so quickly. Rhodri, idiot that he was, wouldn't do anything to risk blowing our cover.

Mason shrugged at him. "Shit, I hope so. That pelt would look great beside Rhodric's."

I choked back a scornful laugh. It was one thing that the pack members believed that bullshit. It was quite another that Mason did. Even pinned to the ground and surrounded as he was, Mortimer Morris managed to snarl at him.

Felix tightened his jaw. A fresh trickle of blood ran down the side of Mortimer's neck, but to his credit, he didn't yelp. He just started thrashing hard enough that the Beta was thrown off him. He didn't, however, manage to dislodge the teeth from his neck, and it didn't take Felix long to correct his mistake.

Mason went to stand over them both, and he nudged the raider's chest with one bloodied toe. He was smiling now. "Save it for later, old man. You'll get your chance to sing in the cells."

More furious writhing. Mason moved his foot lower, and then he kicked Mortimer's dislocated hip hard to enough to make him whimper. He lay quietly after that.

"The old ones are hard to break," Micah said through a link which was probably supposed to be for his brothers alone. He was so delirious by that point that it went out to everyone. "Put him up against the wall and be done with it. Less hassle for us."

Yes. Please. A bullet in the head wasn't a nice thing to wish for, but it beat torture any day. Mortimer knew who I was. He probably knew that Liam was here. And even the bravest rogues could break under the knife, given enough time. Unfortunately, Mason knew that too.

"No. They knew where to find us," Mason said. He spoke slowly, like his brother was slow in the head. "They knew we'd be here, and that we'd be alone. This wasn't a raid. They were here to kill us. I want to know why."

Why? Wasn't it ... like ... obvious? He'd spent his entire life catching us and putting us in cages and carving us up, and he wondered why we might want him dead?

"Did seem that way," Felix muttered.

"Yes, it did. And what are the chances, d'you think, that they would happen to pick the moment when we're most vulnerable?"

The Beta tensed. He was unsettled enough to risk staring at his big brother with that pair of haunting dark eyes. "What're you saying?"

"I'm saying it wasn't a coincidence," Mason snapped. "Either they have the Goddess herself on their side ... or we've got a sleeper."

Uh oh. This was a shitty end to a shitty morning. I had to concede that, maybe, perhaps, this whole plan had been a mistake. The seed of suspicion had been planted, and I had no doubt it would grow quickly.

Trouble was, when he said those gut-churning words, he was smiling like he might already have an idea who it was. And he was looking right at me.