From the shadows at the far end of the corridor, wolf skeletons embedded in the walls began to twitch.
The twitching started small. A jaw rattling against stone. A claw scraping inside its mounting. The sounds were wrong, wet-sounding despite being bone, producing an audio that belonged to living muscle and was coming from things that had been dead for millennia.
One skull rotated. Then another. Then five.
Stone cracked as ancient bones tore themselves free. Joints bent the wrong way. Spines twisted backward. Jaws hung open at impossible angles, hinged wider than any living wolf's jaw had ever opened, the gaping producing a silence that was worse than a growl because growling meant alive and this was something else entirely.
Wolf shapes, once sacred, now perverted into something silent, predatory, and utterly wrong, stepped forward on skeletal limbs.
Their hollow eye sockets fixed on him.
And they began to stalk.
Rook: RUN.
Gavriel: Already ahead of you.
