We carried on walking in complete silence. I couldn't help the feeling of dread building inside me. Somehow, Malcolm — the human — had managed to rattle me. There was something smug and cocksure about his manner, like we were all puppets and he was holding our strings, like we were acting out some sick performance for his benefit.

Within minutes, we reached the first sentries. They were crouching, and the snow beneath them was stained red because they had caught a squirrel. They tormented it like a cat would a mouse — letting it run half a metre, then dragging it back towards them with a knife.

Bloody ferals.

Distracted as they were, it was easy for us to sneak from tree to tree. Rhys and I were armed with our own knives and the strongest branches we could find. We snuck up behind them, hit them over the heads and then gutted them. Between us, we dragged their bodies into positions to make it look like they'd argued and killed each other, just in case anyone came looking.

It wasn't necessary. We could have gone around them easily ... but they would have kept the poor squirrel alive for hours. Hours of undeserved suffering and fear. Yes — we were about to kill hundreds of people, and we found the time to care about a single rodent. It was stupid but, at the same time, it wasn't.

With the ferals dead, I picked up the squirrel carefully. She was hurt badly — one of her feet was missing, her tail was broken, and they had removed her front teeth so she couldn't bite them. She wouldn't survive the day, let alone the winter. Sighing, I took hold of her neck and twisted as quickly as cleanly as I could.

"Why? Why are they so cruel, if they're just wolves?" Rhys demanded.

"Because we don't have a human brain and a wolf brain. We only have two halves, and they don't work quite right on their own," Leo said.

I nodded thoughtfully. "And Goddess only knows what else that pill screws up."

We heard snow crunching to our left, so we moved on quickly, before we were seen. Rhys and Leo had let their wolves out — their eyes were pitch black. I kept my hood up and walked behind them, and no one looked at us twice. I wasn't the only female, but I was the only one who didn't look like a corpse walking.

The camp was eerily quiet. It was the hour before dinner, when it was still too light for revelry but too late in the day for running errands or training. We reached the first water barrel before we had gone twenty metres, and we crowded around it, pretending to drink, while Leo measured the width and height and relayed the measurements to Fion.

Right now, Jace would be marching the prisoners to a meeting point between the camps, utterly clueless. I could only hope it would be a pleasant surprise for him — the feral threat destroyed without him having to lift a finger. Maybe he would even be grateful, and maybe he could overlook that I had lied to him. The last thing I needed was a war with the packs.

"Fifty-four centimetres, did you say?" she was asking. "That would be seven and a half millilitres."

I unscrewed the bottle and used the syringe to measure out the poison. The dark liquid was slow to spread in the water — extending inky tendrils in every direction. We watched it disappear warily. It didn't feel real, that what I had just done would kill people, but maybe that was for the best.

An hour went by like that. Occasionally, we would catch Aaron and Connor's scents and realise they had already dosed a barrel. More than a few times, we had to wait for Fion to finish calculations for the other teams before she could help us. We decided to call it a day when we had nearly run out of poison and every barrel we found looked familiar.

"Ryker and Emmett finished ten minutes ago. They're out. Team Knuckleheads isn't far behind," Fion informed us. "So move your asses."

"Yeah, yeah — asses are moving," I promised.

It was at that inopportune moment that a bell started ringing in the middle of camp, summoning everyone to eat. The paths that had been so empty were about to be flooded, and that only increased our risk of being noticed. So I grabbed Rhys and Leo and pulled them into the nearest tent, which was mercifully empty. Once everyone was sat down for supper, it would be safe to sneak away but, until then, we would just have to wait it out.

And while we waited, we sorted through the duffel bag. There were several rifles, dozens of cartridges, two smoke bombs which we couldn't use without gassing ourselves, knives of the illegal variety, ropes and — last by not least — a sack that weighed more than everything else combined.

Rhys was the one to open it, and he pulled out a curved metal plate. It was the chest piece of my armour. Why Fion had packed it, I had no idea but, then again, I hadn't even known she'd brought it from Lle o Dristwch. If we hadn't decided on poison, the armour would have been useful in the fight, so perhaps she had just forgotten it was in there.

"What's this?" Rhys demanded.

"It's wolf armour," I said, realising he had missed the whole thing. "Jeff gave it to me."

He tapped the wolf crest etched into the surface, which I had barely glanced at twice. "This doesn't belong to Jeff. It belongs to my family."

I turned to stare at him. When Fion had said it belonged to one of the old-blooded families, I thought she meant some obscure branch of the Alphas before Caradoc, not my foster family. What were the chances that this was a coincidence? Probably a million to one.

"So this was the same armour Eira Llewellyn wore," I surmised. "Why the hell did Jeff have it?"

Rhys frowned. "Eira?"

"Your aunt," I told him. "Dad had a little sister, apparently."

His frown deepened to an outright scowl. He was wary, and rightly so, because this was an absolute mess. "And I didn't know about this ... why, exactly?"

I could only shrug. "That's an excellent question. Tom told us. I think it's supposed to be a secret."

Rhys swore under his breath. "There'd better be a damn good reason for that."

"I'm starting to think we need to ask Rhodric about this," Leo muttered, probably trying to diffuse our tempers, "instead of — you know — jumping to conclusions."

He was right, as always. We couldn't afford this kind of distraction in the middle of the feral camp. Time to change the subject, or at least lighten the mood. I grinned at him. "Bold of you to assume Rhodric would give us an actual bloody answer."

And that was the end of the conversation. Rhys was still simmering away, and he had every right to, I reckoned. I left him to cool off while I sorted through the rest of the duffel bag, loading the guns and counting our ammunition.

Fascinating as it was, the armour wouldn't be of any use to us. But, when I looked under the sack, I found my wolf-knife. Aaron must have taken it from the police station ... and used it, if the dried blood on the hilt was anything to go by. I scratched it away with a fingernail and tucked it safely into a pocket. The weight was comforting.

In the end, we stayed in the tent for nearly twenty minutes, deflecting Fion's concerned questions with lies. When the ruckus outside had died down, we finally dared to sneak outside and head for the camp's edge. This time, I walked between Rhys and Leo and kept my head the hell down.

"Hey," someone called. "Hey."

I recognised that voice. It was Luke — the only feral from Ember. Shit, dammit, we'd been so close...

"Yes, you," he said as we came to a reluctant halt. I could feel Rhys and Leo looking at me, waiting for instructions, but I didn't have any to offer. I could only turn and hope he wouldn't recognise me.

And he didn't. It was Rhys who'd caught his attention. Rhys who was too tall to blend into a crowd. Rhys who had pretended to be a feral and then set fire to dozens of Luke's friends. Luke took a step closer, his face twisting with hatred.

"Where's your father, pup?" Luke spat at him. "I'd like a word with him."

So he'd figured it out. It wasn't hard — the resemblance was uncanny.

"I don't have a bloody clue," Rhys retorted.

"No? Do you think he might show up if I make you scream loud enough?" he sneered.

"I don't swing that way, sorry."

Luke didn't find that funny, strangely enough. He must have been mind-linking while we'd been talking, because the ferals behind him were bunching into huge, bloodthirsty mob. I reckoned we'd outstayed our welcome. We started running, and they weren't slow to give chase.

I was sprinting in a matter of seconds. The boys would have outstripped me easily — their legs were longer — but they were holding back for my sake. We were running very damn fast, but our lead had halved before we even reached the edge of the camp. Even shifting wouldn't have changed that: the ferals were well rested, and we weren't.

Once the tents turned to trees, I plunged into the thickest undergrowth I could see. I was heading for the part of the forest where it was hard to move in a straight line and where the trees were younger and shorter.

Footsteps behind us like an earthquake. Jeers from the nearest pursuers and howls from those who had stopped to shift. By the time I found what I was looking for — an oak tree with a low-hanging branch — I could hear the rasp of someone breathing at my shoulder.

I didn't have to explain the plan to Rhys and Leo, because they understood it as soon as I adjusted our course. We couldn't outrun the ferals, so we would have to put ourselves out of their reach.

The boys managed to get their arms over the branch and pull themselves up. But I'd misjudged the height of it, and I could only cling to the bark with my fingertips. I dangled there, fumbling for a better grip and desperately trying to bring my legs up, while the ferals got closer.

Then a hand closed around my arm and pulled. Leo managed to hold me in place while Rhys caught hold of my boot, and between them they managed to haul me out of reach with a heartbeat to spare, albeit without much of my dignity intact.

I ended up lying along the branch, my breaths coming in short gasps. The ferals who were still human were reaching up, jumping and trying to pull us down, so I had to stand up. Leo slipped an arm around my waist to steady me. Meanwhile, Rhys had opened the duffel bag and found himself a rifle.

He only had to sight down it and take off the safety before every feral in sight was running for cover. Crazy or not, none of them were freshly turned and their senses of self-preservation were intact. I grabbed a second rifle, handed Leo a third, and filled my pockets with cartridges.

I spotted Luke peering out from behind a tree trunk and swung my rifle around to take aim. He jumped back before I could squeeze the trigger, and the shot found bark instead. I swore because the kick had bruised my shoulder, and it throbbed as I loaded another cartridge. I hated guns.

"Wait them out," Luke shouted to the other ferals. "They can't hide up there forever. I want a circle out of rifle range. Let them escape and I'll skin every one of you alive. The tall one is Rhodric Llewellyn's son, so I want him breathing. As for the others ... they're yours to turn or kill, as far as I'm concerned."

Oh, they'd best not touch Leo. My wolf was feeling murderous enough as it was. Luke headed back in the direction of camp, probably to contact Malcolm and tell him about our apprehension. He was right — we couldn't stay in the tree forever, but we didn't need to. Three or four hours, Fion had said. Three or four hours until everyone here would die.