The Darkest Hour

“That’s Scourge?” Tigerstar’s exclamation rang with disbelief above the falling rain. “He’s no bigger than an apprentice!”

“Shh!” Panic flared in Boulder’s eyes. “This may not be a Clan as we know it, but these cats would kill if their leader ordered them to.”

“It seems I have visitors.” The black cat’s voice had a brittle, high-pitched sound, like the splintering of ice. “I wasn’t expecting to see you again, Boulder. I heard you’d gone to live in the forest.”

“Yes, Scourge, I have,” Boulder replied.

“So what are you doing here?” Scourge’s voice held the faintest suggestion of a snarl. “Have you changed your mind and come crawling back? Do you expect me to welcome you?”

“No, Scourge.” Boulder held the black cat’s ice-blue gaze. “It’s a good life in the forest. There is plenty of fresh-kill, no Twolegs-”

“You haven’t come to extol the virtues of forest life,” Scourge interrupted him with a flick of his tail. “Squirrels live in trees, not cats.” His eyes narrowed, glinting with a pale fire. “So what do you want?”

Tigerstar stepped forward, shouldering the gray warrior aside. “I am Tigerstar, the leader of ShadowClan,” he growled. “And I have a proposition for you.”

Chapter 1

Watery shafts of light sliced through the bare trees as Fireheart carried his leader to her final resting place. With his teeth clenched firmly in her scruff, he retraced the route the dog pack had taken as the brave warriors of ThunderClan lured them to the gorge and their destruction. His whole body felt n u m b, and his head spun with the terrible realization that Bluestar was dead.

Without his leader, the forest itself seemed different, even stranger to Fireheart than the day he had first ventured into it as a kittypet. No thing was real; he felt as if the trees and rocks could dissolve like mist within a moment. A vast, unnatural silence covered everything. With the rational part of his mind Fireheart realized that all the prey had been scared away by the rampaging dog pack, but in the grip of his grief it seemed that even the forest was stunned into mourning for Bluestar.

The scene at the gorge replayed over and over in his head. He saw again the slavering jaws of the dog who led the pack, and felt its sharp teeth meet in his scruff. He remembered how Bluestar had appeared out of nowhere, flinging herself at the dog, driving it—and herself—over the edge of the gorge and into the river. He flinched again at the icy shock of the water as he leaped in to rescue his drowning leader, and their hopeless struggles until two RiverClan warriors, Mistyfoot and Stonefur, came to help then.

Most of all, Fireheart recalled his dismay and disbelief as he crouched beside his leader on the riverbank, and realized that she had sacrificed her last life to save him and all of ThunderClan from the dog pack.

As he bore Bluestar’s body home, with the help of Mistyfoot and Stonefur, he kept pausing to scent the air for fresh traces of dog, and he had already sent his friend Graystripe to scout the territory on either side of their trail, searching for signs that the dogs had caught any of the ThunderClan cats in their desperate race for the gorge. So far, to Fireheart’s relief, they had found nothing.

Now, skirting a bramble thicket, Fireheart set down his lifeless leader once more and raised his head to drink in the air, thankful to taste only the clean scents of the forest. A moment later, Graystripe appeared around a clump of dead bracken.

“Everything’s fine, Fireheart,” he reported. “Plenty of broken undergrowth, but that’s all.”

“Good,” Fireheart meowed. His hope rose that the dogs that had escaped the fall into the gorge had fled in terror, and the forest once again belonged to the four Clans of wild cats. His Clan had lived through three terrible moons, w h en they had become prey in their own territory, but they had survived. “Let’s keep going. I want to check that the camp is safe before the Clan comes back.”

He and the RiverClan warriors took up Bluestar’s body again and carried it through the trees. At the top of the ravine that led down to the camp entrance, Firestar paused. He briefly remembered the early morning, when he and his warriors had followed the trail of dead rabbits that Tigerstar had laid to lure the dog pack to the ThunderClan camp. At the end of the trail they had found the body of the gentle queen Brindleface, slaughtered to give the savage dogs a taste for cat blood. But now every thing seemed peaceful, and when Fireheart tasted the air again he could detect only cat scent coming from the camp.

“Wait here,” he meowed. “I’m going to take a look.”

“I’ll come with you,” Graystripe offered instantly.

“No.” It was Stonefur who spoke, flicking out his tail to bar the gray warrior’s way. “I think Fireheart needs to do this alone.”