Chapter 154

Amelia

The first strike hit Havenford, a river town so small it didn’t appear on most maps. One road in, one out, a single crumbling water tower, and a bridge that had collapsed and been half-rebuilt five times in four years.

Three wolves showed up early in the morning wearing scavenged gear and moving like seasoned medics. They had no sigil, no Pack standard, but they spoke the language. They offered help with repairs, rebuilt a section of the bridge, passed out medical supplies in labeled kits we later traced to a defunct aid agency.

They smiled, shared meals, and called the elders by name. By the time the sun slipped behind the ridge, they had murdered two respected elders and burned the town’s entire grain storage.

By the time the nearest patrol arrived, Havenford was frozen in shock. Half the residents had fled. The rest wouldn’t meet our eyes. The scent trails were intact, but the identifiers traced to a Pack disbanded nearly twenty years ago. Everything about it was off. Too clean, too efficient, too rehearsed.

We thought it was a rogue squad, an isolated act of violence, something terrible but singular. It wasn’t.

A week later, Fenwick was hit, then Clearbend. Different names, same rhythm, arrive with generosity, offer aid, build goodwill, then cut and run once chaos had been sewn.

In every town, they moved like wolves, talked like us, smelled like us. But the scent signatures were too precise. They didn’t drift, didn’t change under heat or sweat or fear. Simon tested the recovered satchels and gear, and what he found confirmed what I had already suspected.

They were using synthetic scent blends, enhanced with artificial bond hormones and resonance-mimicking chemicals. These were False Pack markers, engineered in labs, calibrated to fool instinct and built specifically to deceive us.

Simon said, later, that if he hadn’t seen the results with his own eyes, he would have assumed the samples were real. But no real wolf ever smelled that consistent.

I didn’t wait for the Council to debate phrasing. Relief camps had to go up immediately. I wrote the requisitions myself, pulled water filtration units and generator stock from the emergency supply rotation, redirected unused modular kitchens from the winter storage reserves. I rerouted units from low-threat zones and asked for veterans who could be deployed without delay. Then I left the palace and started traveling.

I visited every site we established. Not in secret and not with ceremony. I slept on the cots next to the healers. I peeled potatoes with teenagers who’d lost their parents. I helped patch tents, clean blood off triage mats, and carry water barrels up broken stairwells.

I didn’t wear my seal. I didn’t give speeches. I showed up in jeans and boots, and I stayed long enough for people to see me sweat.

They needed to believe the palace wasn’t some distant tower insulated from their grief. They needed to know someone up there could bleed.

Trust isn’t built with declarations or promises. It’s built in the quiet hours, in the tasks no one volunteers for. And I did every one I could.

In Elk Hollow, a scout team caught one of them crossing the ridge line. He had no sigil, no ID, and no reaction to our interrogation threats. But he wasn’t careful. His cache was shallow and badly concealed. We found a burner ledger inside, a black notebook with finance entries tied to shell accounts, three of which we had already flagged in relation to the blood market raid.

One memo carried the same sigil. It wasn’t coincidence, it was connection. And it wasn’t a theory anymore, it was strategy.

I called Simon back. His team accelerated deployment on the field-ready scanners, devices calibrated to detect synthetic scent patterns and resonance dampeners. Every soldier operating near high-risk borders now had to clear a scan at every checkpoint. Most passed. A few didn’t.

Of those flagged, two were confirmed as wearing scent masks. One ran. He didn’t make it far. The other just watched us, calm and still, as if waiting to see how far we were willing to go.

Meanwhile, Council funding stalled. They argued definitions. Whether this qualified as an invasion. Whether the Compact permitted unsanctioned reallocation of resources. They amended drafts. They requested clarifications. None of it helped us.

So I stopped waiting. That night, I walked into the palace radio room and keyed the emergency line.

I had no script, no handler. I sat, pressed the mic button, and told them exactly what we needed.

“Engineers. Medics. Truck drivers. Translators. Anyone with field experience. Anyone willing to learn. Come to your closest rally point. Don’t do it for me. Do it for the towns that won’t last another week without help.”

We had over three hundred new arrivals by sunrise. Some were civilians, others were human, and most didn’t even ask for compensation.

Days later, Richard found me in the archive wing. His jacket was still dusted with ash, and his shoulders carried too many hours of silence. He slid three files across the desk. No words. I opened them and read slowly. They were reports from an incident two and a half decades ago. Wolves attacked a southern outpost, followed by confusion over their identities, scent discrepancies, and then full retreat before anyone could mount a response.

The documents described the same patterns, marked by the same unnatural precision we had just begun to recognize.

“We thought it was a fluke,” he said. “A betrayal we never understood. But it wasn’t. It was the beginning.”

We hadn’t uncovered a new threat. We’d finally caught up to one that had been moving just ahead of us for years.

Two days later, the lab sent a report that made my stomach turn. Hybrid pheromones disrupted the synchronization cues used by the infiltrators. Our scent made their mimicry glitch. Portable diffusers were put into production by morning.

The response wasn’t unanimous. Not everyone was pleased.

Regional Packs started issuing quiet dissent, then louder ones. Memos couched in language about hierarchy, tradition, and protocol became open resistance to the idea of a hybrid commanding a central war effort. I knew it was coming. I hadn’t expected it to rise this quickly.

In Roseglade, a protest stalled a supply run. In Brindell, it escalated into a blockade. Footage leaked online within hours.

Richard and I didn’t issue a statement. We didn’t call for mediation. We drove there.

We brought no escorts, no press, just ourselves.

We walked into the center of the protest and let them speak. Not just the Pack leaders, but the teenagers holding signs, the middle-aged shopkeepers, the scared young wolves who still didn’t understand what was happening to their country. We listened.

Then I told them the truth.

I told them I hadn’t grown up expecting this. That I had lost everything before I ever knew what it meant to have it. That I didn’t wake up one day deciding to be their Luna. That I still didn’t always feel like I was.

But the enemy wasn’t waiting for us to feel certain. The enemy was already here, already wearing our names and uniforms and faces. And they weren’t checking bloodlines before they burned a village. So I wasn’t going to either.

We didn’t promise to make them comfortable. We promised to keep them alive.

And when we left, the road was clear.