Phantom Fangs: Prologue (The Lost Princess 0f Howling Sky Book 0.5) Read online

  KESTRA PINGREE

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 Kestra Pingree

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Any unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.

  This is a work of fiction.

  kestrapingree.com

  Summary

  The final battle is coming.

  The four-man werewolf squad known as Phantom Fangs has a game plan to end the timeless world war between werewolves, vampires, and humans. The pieces have fallen into place. There will soon be a clear victor. But everything changes when a certain lost werewolf princess turns out to be much more than a myth.

  Claim the princess, rule the world.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Map of Prime

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Prime: World Guide

  Get a FREE Steamy Shifter Romance Novel

  Kestra's Books

  Stay Connected

  Message from the Author

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  CASPIAN

  WITH A FLICK OF my hand, I signaled my squad to get into position. Aerre and Rodrick moved ahead and out of sight. Their job was to perch in a couple of the giant trees making up this thicket. The height would be advantageous for them to watch unseen; they would also have an easy time sniping the maneaters if the situation called for it.

  Todd and I dashed out from our cover of trees and bushes a moment later. Winter was almost over and green leaves were beginning to sprout on mostly bare branches, defying the frigid air for the promise of spring. We plowed through detritus before reaching the small clearing where the enemy’s roader was parked. The vehicle was too big and bulky to go any farther, so the Paws Peak scouts were stuck on foot for the rest of their patrol, easy targets for Aerre and Rodrick. That worked out well for us.

  I looked back to make sure I couldn’t see any of the four towering black spires through the tree-branch canopy. I thought we’d be in trouble because of the lack of leaves, but the branches twisted together and choked out the sky with or without leaves. I didn’t have anything to worry about. The roader was deep enough inside of this thicket, there was no way Paws Peak could see us. We couldn’t see them from in here either.

  “Get to work,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Let me know as soon as you plant those bugs and let’s get out of here.” Today wasn’t about engaging maneaters in a fight. This was pure research. And recon.

  “On it,” Todd replied. He was busy at work, sticking ladybug-sized tech on the roader and some of the gear it carried in its short cargo bed.

  The commsbud in my ear let off the tiniest hint of static before stabilizing as Aerre’s voice came through. “Pay attention, Caspian. The maneaters are coming back around.”

  “Don’t shoot unless you absolutely have to,” I reminded.

  “Heard you the first time,” Rodrick said, joining in the conversation relayed through our commsbuds.

  I closed my eyes for a couple seconds, concentrating as I looked inward to the pool of moonlight waiting undisturbed within me; I always pictured it in the base of my stomach, deep blue like a lake. I visualized a drop of water from above disrupting the still surface. It sent out a ripple of light, restoring the dormant energy to its true power as my body buzzed. When I opened my eyes again, a flare of light blue, almost like flames, sparked across my black skin. I sped forward with silent steps as my combat boots barely touched the ground, leaving Todd behind. I came to an immediate halt as soon as my enhanced eyesight zeroed in on the maneaters who were now deep within the thicket.

  Crouching down to keep myself hidden, I focused the moonlight in my eyes, observing. I would be able to read into the scouts’ tiniest movements like this without having to waste much of my moonlight reserves. Good breeding made me one of the most powerful werewolves in the world—though that wasn’t saying much, considering how small the world had become. If the Paws Peak scouts headed back too soon, it was my job to distract them without giving us away, to keep them from their roader until Todd could finish his setup.

  It didn’t look like that would be a problem either. The Paws Peak scouts, three werewolves in total, were hyper-focused on the trivial gossip they were exchanging. I hadn’t met many wereas in my life since females of my species were rare, even before adding war to the equation, but these careless maneaters and their constant jabbering reminded me of the old wereas back in Wolf Bridge who had nothing better to do than talk.

  “I’m done,” Todd commented, his voice warbling through the commsbud.

  “Easiest damn mission we ever did,” Rodrick replied and let out a hardy guffaw that made my commsbud screech and me flinch.

  “Shut up, you oaf,” Aerre growled. “The scouts aren’t that far away.”

  “Yeah, and you see how fucking observant they are.”

  Rodrick did have a point though. The scouts were carrying on with their conversation, oblivious to the world around them.

  “Regroup,” I said. “And Aerre, don’t call names. Rodrick isn’t an oaf.”

  I tucked my remaining moonlight reserves deep into the recesses of my body; I pictured that still blue lake at the base of my stomach before I started messing with it. I needed to conserve what I had so it lasted until I could recharge on the next full moon.

  “Okay, Mom. Rodrick isn’t an oaf. He’s an agitator spy and outsmarting all of us,” Aerre growled again, causing the commsbud in my ear to crackle. It must have had a short. I didn’t remember it being so grating on my ear before. I made a mental note to ask Todd about it once we got back to camp.

  “Aerre,” I warned, “enough.”

  I popped the commsbud out of my ear. It was almost as small as those bugs Todd just planted and looked like a polished gray pebble. I pressed its smooth metallic body lightly between the pads of my thumb and index finger and made my way back to camp. Todd beat me there and was already messing with the branches and camouflage tarp hiding our roader to unearth the keyboard for his pactputer.

  After he pulled out his pactputer from his backpack, a few centimeters thick rectangular computer with a glass screen on one side he could hold easily enough in one hand, and attached a keyboard, I approached him. “Think you could take a look at my commsbud sometime? I think it’s shorting out.”

  Todd held his left hand open, palm up, as he typed away with his other hand. His skin was pale like he never saw the light of day—which wasn’t true. He didn’t tan. He only freckled. We were on opposite spectrums.

  I gave him my commsbud and he pocketed it. Then he continued typing away and tapping the pactputer’s touchscreen without missing a beat. Todd was the youngest of us, twenty years old, three years younger than me. He was inexperienced in combat, not to say he was incapable, but he was the weakest of us in that regard. His technical know-how more than made up for that, though. He was the reason why we were here, in a thicket outside of the wall surrounding Paws Peak, the last werewolf kingdom aside from Wolf Bridge. You’d think being the last we could have found some kind of common ground, but Paws Peak was full of maneaters and Wolf Bridge prided itself as shields. Paws Peak ate humans, we protected them. But that wasn’t entirely accurate either.

  “Get a reading on those bugs? They connect?” I asked.<
br />
  “Yeah, but this isn’t anything new. The scouts’ roader isn’t out of range of anything I’ve tested before. The real test for my tech field tweaks will be when they head back. If the bugs stay connected when they get inside the walls, I’ll just have to figure out how to strengthen my field to reach out to foreign tech and I’ll probably be able to hack into the spires and the entire Paws Peak system.”

  “Impressive.”

  Todd’s pactputer was our central hub when it came to the technical parts of our missions. It held everything together. It connected our commsbuds, allowing us to communicate. It uploaded and synced information to our intelibands, somehow bulky and still slick metal bracelets with their own little touchscreens. We had them covered in rubber, so they’d be less abrasive since we wore them so often. They were one of Todd’s newer inventions and utilized actual holograms. The holograms themselves weren’t interactive, but we could spin a 3D map using the touchscreen. We often ghosted through missions with the powerful information we could have at our disposal. It was thanks to Todd we earned the name Phantom Fangs.

  Todd scratched at the black beanie on his head, revealing stray strands of his fire-red hair. He quickly tucked the strands back under the fabric when he noticed. He never acted like he cared about anything outside of his tech world, but I had been around him long enough to know he was self-conscious about how he looked. I had a theory about that. Redheaded werewolves like him didn’t exist anymore. He was the last, and he was from a line of maneaters. Todd never talked about it because getting him to talk about anything other than tech was like pulling teeth, but I didn’t think I was wrong.

  Rustling brush and a string of heated retorts signaled Aerre and Rodrick’s arrival back to camp. Those two never stopped. Rodrick was big and imposing with tattoos and white scars that stuck out against his brown skin, but that brawler look wasn’t what got to Aerre, the blond pretty-boy type with skin that tanned easily in the sun. No one would have ever mistaken any of the four Phantom Fangs members to be related. My skin was almost as dark as coal. Basically, none of us looked anything alike.

  Even when Aerre and Rodrick stopped verbally harassing each other, they continued with their scathing looks—meaning Aerre. Rodrick rarely took the bait. Aerre really needed to let this spy thing go.

  Phantom Fangs was formed about two months ago. Aerre and Rodrick had plenty of time to get past their differences, but Aerre wouldn’t try. He and Rodrick came from different backgrounds, from a different place, but they also had something major in common. Neither of them were actual werewolves. They were tethered. Humans changed by a werewolf, by me. Thinking back on it made my stomach churn, but they chose me. They chose this. In that, they were exactly the same.

  Our squad was good. Amazing even. We may have been new players in the Prime War, but we made our name infamous on our very first mission. We had been marked in history for as long as our history would last because we killed the last male vampire. We knew it was true when the vampires fell back, reluctant to get caught in any more squabbles. That wasn’t how vampires played. They were running scared when they used to be big players in the Prime War.

  The Prime War was timeless, probably as old as the beginning of this world: Prime. It all came back to werewolves, vampires, and humans. The cycle of killing between and among these three species was the world’s history, and it almost resulted in its end when the Hellfire Strike happened. War was done a little more carefully now that the planet itself had suffered such grievous wounds from the Prime War. Tech was even banned for a time, leaving us somewhere between medieval and modern, but it didn’t stop the war. However, I could see an end. I could also see the hazy beginnings of a world I wanted.

  I was twenty-three, surrounded by war my entire life. Nothing new. But, the more I saw, the more I wished it would end, the more I wished the world could change. That was the start of the path that led me to form Phantom Fangs. All that was left was to have patience. I wanted peace and to rebuild a world that was broken almost beyond repair, but the time had to be right. The Prime War finally had to end. That or the entire world would finally end. But I never dwelt on the worst-case scenario. Giving up wasn’t an option. I had a squad and an entire kingdom to protect. Already, I was on my way to accomplishing something because Phantom Fangs had influence despite my father’s attempts to keep me out of politics.

  Sometimes, I forgot I was, by blood, a Prince of Wolf Bridge.

  “The scouts are heading back into the walls already,” Todd informed as he pressed a finger to his ear. He must have been listening to whatever audio his bugs were transmitting through his commsbud. “They’re in their roader, moving fast. Signal’s still strong.”

  Aerre found it in him to turn off his aggression for once. We all joined him in a neutral silence, waiting for Todd to divulge more information. He was staring at his screen, monitoring a tiny moving blip that consisted of the four bugs he planted. If they moved away from each other, they would become their own blips. Some of the screen had charted area, but once they entered the walls, the blip floated along a dark grid space.

  “Still working?” I asked.

  “I’m in,” Todd confirmed. “I’ll continue monitoring and recording their conversations while I work on my tech field. Maybe some of the stuff I bugged will get taken out of the roader and we’ll have multiple intel feeds.”

  “It’ll probably be a whole lot of nothing,” Rodrick muttered and leaned against a thick oak trunk. “This will be thrilling.”

  “Interesting conversations would just be a bonus,” I said. “Todd’s goal is to hack into the spires.”

  Rodrick grunted. “Yeah, yeah. Research mission, all about Todd, I know.”

  Aerre settled onto a rock on the opposite end of camp, as far away from Rodrick as he could get. He cradled his gun and began polishing it obsessively. He puffed a long strand of blond hair out of his face that had escaped the braids hugging the sides of his head. That was another thing Aerre and Rodrick had in common: long hair. Why couldn’t they try to find something in common? I did it easily enough—even if the hair observation was stupid.

  I grabbed a protein bar from the roader for a quick pick-me-up snack and settled down onto the grass. It wasn’t as good as fresh meat, but this was all we had. Eventually, I worked my way onto my back. I closed my eyes and let my mind wander.

  My squad was dysfunctional yet effective. I picked Aerre, Todd, and Rodrick for a reason. Because of their differences. Our differences.

  There was a world I wanted to see. I didn’t know the details yet, but they were slowly becoming clearer.

  CHAPTER 2

  RODRICK

  TODD’S LITTLE TECH PROJECT was taking way too fucking long. I thought for sure we’d be out of this stupid thicket and on our way back through and down the mountains to Wolf Bridge within a few hours, but no. We wasted the entire day outside of an enemy kingdom’s wall, and now it was hours into the night. Part of the day, I was allowed to hunt for our meals. It kept me from losing my damn mind at least. But it didn’t solve my problem.

  I was supposed to meet with Jobe tonight, outside of Wolf Bridge. That wasn’t going to happen, obviously. We had already spent days outside of this wall, waiting for Paws Peak to send out a scout, or someone from inside, we could quietly ambush to test Todd’s stupid bugs and tech field. Apparently, all this time wasted wasn’t actually wasted because Todd’s research-experiment-thing was working. It just wasn’t working as fast as I wanted. He was glued to his pactputer, doing Gods knew what, working his techy magic to find some way into Paws Peak so Wolf Bridge would achieve “High Kingdom” status.

  We’d see about that. This was the kind of information I needed to pass along to the rebels.

  I zipped up my coat when a cold wind blew past. We didn’t get to use a fire for our camp since the smoke, and maybe even the light, would have drawn Paws Peak’s attention. It was a good thing werewolves and tethered alike could digest raw meat without a problem.
>
  Todd was hunkered down inside of the roader, mostly obscuring himself and the light from his devices with the camouflage tarp. His teeth were chattering and his pale face looked blue—whether from the pactputer screen or cold, who knew—but he made no move to grab a damn coat. Caspian noticed as well and draped a blanket around Todd’s shoulders. He didn’t embellish it, no tucking in of the edges and swaddling Todd up like a kid or any shit like that. If he had, I would have had to call him out on finally transforming into a full-blown mother hen. His dark eyes flickered over to me like he knew exactly what I was thinking. I smirked in response and thoughtfully tugged at my short beard.

  “How much longer?” I asked. Huh, turned out I was the kid here.

  “As long as it takes,” Caspian replied with the perfect I’m-apparently-the-only-adult-here tone. “We went to the trouble of doing this, so we’re giving Todd as much time as he needs.”

  “Yeah, all right,” I muttered.

  Jobe would have to wait or leave and then try to meet with me again the next chance he got. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. It was unfortunate I couldn’t find a way to cure my boredom, though. Lying around and sleeping only worked so long before my body and mind rebelled, and they were in full-on rebellion mode.

  I turned to a big oak tree and unsheathed my knife from my combat belt. I absentmindedly shaved away at the spongy green moss bulging from its bark at first. Then I started cutting deep into the trunk, chipping away at the wood. I wasn’t really into defacing trees for no Gods damn reason, but there was this restlessness itching its way just underneath my skin. Without a task to accomplish, I was reduced to this state of purposelessness until I could get back on task. I didn’t like waiting, but I’d do it for my purpose, the greater good, the white against the black. Still, I was a better warrior than a spy, and I was better use as a spy than a dead man.

  “You’ll ruin your knife if you keep chipping away at it like that. It’s not an axe, dipshit, and that trunk is thicker than you are.” Aerre commented, the condescending tone of his voice was omnipresent. Also, he was still slaving away, polishing every damn one of our weapons he could get his anxious hands on. He didn’t do well with sitting around either. No, it wasn’t that. He didn’t deal with being away from Wolf Bridge for an extended period of time. A couple days away and he started with these tics.