Chapter 95: Drop a Pin

NATALIA

Charlie's jaw practically hits the dashboard as we drive through the palace gates.

“When you said you lived in the Royal Pack, I didn’t know you meant in the gosh-darn palace!”

I was worried that he would be freaked out. But he just looks amazed and totally excited.

“There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me yet,” I say. “For starters, my sister is the queen.”

“Somebody pinch me,” he says, “because this day just keeps getting crazier and crazier.”

“Tell me about it,” I say.

I open the car door, but suddenly I feel my muscles growing heavy.

I don’t want to go inside.

Once I set foot in the palace, I have to face the reality that Ariel is missing. Again.

When she was kidnapped several years ago, I eased the pain by pretending that I didn’t care about her.

But I can’t pretend this time.

She’s my sister. I need her to be okay. I need her to come home.

I feel my breath quickening as panic swells in my throat.

Then I feel something else: Charlie’s firm, heavy hand resting on my shoulder.

“Natalia,” he says, “give your faith to the Moon Goddess. Her light guided you to me. She will guide your sister home too.”

~But her light didn’t guide me to you,~ I want to say. ~So what does that mean for Ariel?~

I brace myself for the storm to come, climb out of the truck, and walk toward the palace.

When we enter the front door, there is none of the chaos that I was anticipating.

Not at all. It’s deathly silent.

I creep through the foyer, and Charlie lumbers behind me.

We turn a corner into the dining room, and see my mother sitting alone at the large wooden table, wiping her eyes with a cloth napkin.

“Wait here,” I whisper to Charlie, leaving him at the threshold.

I approach my mother and take a seat next to her at the table.

I wrap one arm around her frail shoulders and pull her in for an awkward hug.

“Any updates?” I ask her.

“Nothing,” she says. “No word from the pilot. The radio’s gone dead. It’s like they vanished into thin air.”

My heart sinks. I was hoping they would have gathered some new information in the time it took me to drive back from the Crescent Moon Pack.

“Where’s Xavi?” I ask in a whisper.

“He’s with your father,” she says, “who is inconsolable, by the way. She was his favorite little warrior.”

“She ~is~ his favorite warrior, Mom. Don’t start speaking about her in past tense. She’s not dead.”

“I wish I could have your youthful optimism,” my mom says, wiping away another tear with her napkin.

“Where’s Dom?” I ask, desperate to talk to someone with more information and hopefully a better attitude.

“Alex’s office, I think,” she says.

I get up from the chair and give her a quick kiss on the forehead. “Please, Mom,” I say, “try to have some faith. She’s coming home.”

I walk back over toward Charlie and motion for him to follow me as I lead him up the stairs to Alex’s office.

When I knock on the door, Vivian opens it. She doesn’t say a word, but opens the door wider and lets me in.

General Dave and Dom are standing over Alex’s desk, looking at a giant map.

I run to them and peek over Dom’s shoulder.

“Tell me everything,” I say.

Dom looks up at me, and I instantly see the pain in his eyes.

“We’re trying to figure out where to send pack warrior squads to do a ground search.”

“This is official business,” General Dave says to me curtly.

“And I’m officially Ariel’s sister,” I spit back. “I want to know what’s going on, and I want to help in any way I can.”

Dom nods sympathetically and points to a red pin on the map.

“This is where the plane last pinged on the radar,” he says.

I peer at the spot. It’s situated just over the peak of a mountain range on an island out in the middle of the ocean.

“It was a clear day, and Dusty is one of our most experienced pilots,” Dom says. “So it must have been a malfunction with the plane.”

I hear Charlie’s footsteps as he walks over and joins us at the table.

“And who the hell are you?” General Dave asks.

“This is Charlie,” I say.

“But you can call me Chuck,” he chimes in. “I’m Natalia’s destined mate.”

Dom can’t hide the look of shock on his face when he hears those words.

“You know what?” Charlie says. “Can I have some of those pins?”

“No. Time is of the—” I hear General Dave start to protest, but Charlie has already grabbed for the jar of pushpins.

I instantly flush and try to hide my face behind my hair. I can’t help but be embarrassed by his tactlessness.

Reaching over my body, he starts putting pins down on the map.

After a moment, he pulls his hand back to reveal seven more pins in seven other mountain peaks on the circumference of the island, creating a full circle.

“What is all this?” Dave asks.

“On my travels, I heard a legend of the valley between these eight mountain peaks,” he says. “Right in the middle of the circle, all the way down in the deep gorge, is the birthplace of the Goddess Fate.”

“Charlie—” I say under my breath. But he doesn’t hear me and he doesn’t stop talking.

“She controls everything in the area, including the winds. That’s why it’s known as Fate’s Web.”

When Charlie finally stops talking, Dom and Vivian are eyeing each other, entirely confused.

General Dave, on the other hand, just looks pissed.

“Well then,” he says, pulling Charlie’s pins off the map, “now that we’re done with storytime, I’m going to go alert the pack warriors of their mission.”

“Let me know if I can do anything,” I say.

“Can you fly a rescue helicopter?” Dave asks dryly.

I shake my head.

“Then you and your mate can stop wasting our time,” Dave says, then walks quickly out of the room.

He stops at the door and calls back to Dom. “Make sure to keep an ear to the Royal Pack radio,” he says, “just in case the king and queen find a way to send us an SOS.”

With that, he disappears.

Dom smiles at me apologetically. “Sorry about him,” Dom says. “It’s been a long day.”

“I’m sorry too,” I say. “Keep me updated.”

I walk out of the office and into the hall. When Charlie joins me, I can see that his face has fallen.

“I embarrassed you,” he said. “I didn’t mean to, Natalia.”

“It’s fine. It’s—”

“No, it’s not,” he says. “I live a very spiritual life. And I don’t spend much time around people. I forget that my ideas can sound a little crazy.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I say to comfort him.

“Good,” he says, “because I think I’m right. And if your sister really is trapped in Fate’s Web, she could be in a whole lot of trouble.”

“Well,” I say, trying to sound confident, “no one is better at getting out of trouble than Ariel.”

~Please, Goddess. Let her get out of it this time.~

ARIEL

We run through the dark passage, paw over paw, back in the direction that we came from.

There’s no time to think—just to keep running from Fate, at all costs.

Alex is in the lead. And Fate is behind me, close on my tail.

In his wolf form, Alex can easily claw his way through any webs that shoot into our path.

The farther up we go, the thinner the web structure around us becomes.

Moonlight starts to seep its way in through the cracks, and I know that we’re getting closer to the exit.

As I run, I realize that I can no longer hear the scratching of Fate’s many legs on the graveled floor.

She has stopped just short of stepping into the moonlight.

But I don’t think twice about it. There’s no time.

I can see that we’re running straight toward a wall of webs.

~“I’m going for it,”~ Alex mind-links me.

Without pause, Alex bursts through it. I follow suit.

When my paws land on the ground again, I look around and pant with relief.

We’re out of the labyrinthine cave and back in the forest.

But even now, we keep running, continuing on the path, until we reach the mountain side.

We clamber up the rocky surface, our wolves propelling us forward.

We only stop when we reach the peak.

I peer out over the expanse. There’s nothing as far as the eye can see on the other side except for woods, and beyond the woods, water…surrounding us on all sides.

~“Holy shit,”~ I mind-link to Alex. ~“We’re on a—”~

~“An island,”~ he confirms.

~“We’re trapped,”~ I say. The ocean breeze sends a chill through my fur coat.

Alex lays down, and I curl up next to his wolf for warmth.

Huddled in close to him, I can hear his stomach grumble.

~“We’ll hunt for food tomorrow,”~ I say.

~“Yes,”~ he says, ~“but for now, we should get some rest. We’ll need it.”~

We cuddle close for warmth under the moonlit sky.

But before I close my eyes, I see something strange.

The moonlight is intensifying, growing brighter by the second.

I sit up and see that there is a distinct, singular moonbeam carving a clean path through the night sky.

Suddenly my head fills with a sound I've been desperate to hear all day:

~The voice of the Moon Goddess.~

~“Follow the path home, my child,”~ she says.

Then, like a spotlight, the moonbeam shifts, lighting up a path down the other side of the mountain.

~“You think you have a little more energy left in you?”~ I ask Alex, and his eyes glimmer in the light of the moonbeam.

~“Let’s get back to our kingdom,”~ he says, as we begin to follow the light.