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Snow swirled all around, the storm having worsened to near blizzard conditions since they’d landed. She could just make out Hunter’s large shape as he came up off the ground to lunge at the Ancient again. On a vicious hiss, the creature wheeled around and thrust the big Gen One away from him.

Then the Ancient began to prowl toward Kade at the edge of the cliff’s steep drop.

Alex’s heart wanted to explode out of her breast as she inched her way nearer and nearer to her plane. She wasn’t about to run, not even now. She was scared as hell, more than she’d ever been in her life, but she had to do something—for Kade, and for his brethren—no matter how insignificant her actions might prove to be against this threat.

She grabbed the loaded rifle she kept in the back of the plane.

Raised it as the Ancient stalked closer to where Kade was now trying to drag himself up once more. She couldn’t let the creature reach him.

Alex pulled the trigger.

The gunshot cracked like thunder in the snow-tossed darkness.

The Ancient hadn’t seen it coming. His large hand was pressed to his chest, but blood seeped through his fingers.

The otherworlder curled his lip back and snarled. Then he started prowling forward again … no longer toward Kade, but toward her and Luna near the plane.

Alex heard the howl of wolves from somewhere close. So many voices. At least half a dozen or more. She heard them, and could almost hear the beat of their paws rising up through the bitter cold of the storm and the chilling terror of the situation playing out on the ledge.

Alex knew the wolves were near, but she hadn’t been at all prepared for the sight of them, suddenly rushing up from the craggy slopes below. The pack charged en masse, leaping in tandem at the same target: the alien creature who roared with outrage as the eight predators attacked.

And as the wolves bit and tore and jumped at the Ancient, another adversary came over the ridge from below.

Seth.

Alex’s breath caught as the Breed male who looked so much like Kade emerged out of the shadows and the swirling chaos of the storm. He didn’t seem so much identical to Kade now as he did a mirror image—reversed somehow, as though he were the wilder, more dangerous half of the Breed male she loved.

Seth’s huge fangs gleamed as white as bone. His eyes threw off a feral amber light that seared like lasers. Alex swallowed as he gave her a brief, sidelong glance. She thought she saw an apology written in the stark expression on his face. Perhaps some measure of remorse.

But then, with a battle cry that made her blood run cold, he surged into a powerful leap and threw himself onto the Ancient.

They were too close to the edge of the cliff.

The forward momentum was too great to be stopped.

Alex’s eyes flew wide when she realized what was about to happen. She squeezed them shut an instant later, as Seth and the Ancient careened over the ledge together.

———

“Seth!”

Kade shouted his brother’s name, the cotton in his head from the blow he took having cleared instantly when he saw Seth locked in battle with the Ancient. Horror choked him not a second later, as they sailed past him at the cliff’s edge and plummeted into the darkness.

There was a great rumbling that seemed to come from all around him, like the roll of thunder, only he felt it in the ground beneath him. Above him, too.

Then, the violent crack of ice and hard-packed snow giving way from the rocky crag overhead.

The avalanche roared off the cliff, tons of crushing snow and ice, sweeping like a tidal wave past Kade’s head and down, into the mountain’s steep cleft below. A blinding, choking cloud of fine, powdery crystals rose up in its wake, chilling Kade’s face and forcing him to look away from the snow-filled crevasse where the Ancient and his brother had fallen. Nothing could survive the suffocating weight of that much snow.

Kade felt soft hands coming around his shoulders, the warmth of Alex’s body catching him in her embrace, holding him close. And behind them on the ledge, he heard the low sounds of voices. Hunter, Tegan, and Chase,