Chapter Sixteen
“Sorcha, run.”
She might not be a wolf, but Sorcha knew the command of an Alpha when she heard one. Aidan’s strength all but rippled around them, like moonlight on water. His eyes flashed gold and stayed that way. She could see how he could easily command a pack of wolves. An earldom.
But it was too late.
The lightning bird had been a trap, set just for her.
The Collector would have known she would not be able to abandon him to his fate. And if the Collector was not lurking about waiting to stop her, the bird would do the trick for him. Because the net had tangled him up and pinned him down, but it had also held a spell, waiting.
For her.
The egg was made of glass and wrapped in red string, tucked behind vines of ivy. It sat on an iron horseshoe marked with sigils on a narrow ledge created by a crooked stone in the wall. Something moved inside of it.
A summoning.
And now the glass egg tumbled and fell, cracking into pieces. There was no putting it back together.
Sorcha was already on her feet, glancing around frantically.
Shadows, ivy, stone walls, dried blood. Nothing else yet that she could see.
Her stomach twisted with dread. There were wings beating inside her chest, Elderberry desperate.
Crows gathered on the crenellations and the window ledges and the rotted planks of what was left of the roof and screeched. “What’s coming?”
“Run, damn it,” Aidan ground out. One of his bones cracked, the wolf already overtaking him.
But there was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. No time to think of a banishing spell.
They weren’t alone in the tower anymore.
And there was no outrunning a nightmare.
The spectral horse snorted once, a menacing sound that scraped up the spine, prickling like thorns, before it materialized.
It was massive, with blood-red fur and blood-red eyes and a jaw that could crack a skull like it was a walnut.
There was something skeletal about it, even through the heft of muscles and bones that were not corporeal.
That would not stop it from doing considerable damage, as it did not need its heft for that.
Nightmares only need breathe on you to seed dreadful visions until the fear overtook you and it gorged itself. You could survive a visit from a nightmare.
For a little while.
Sorcha did not generally fear monsters. Black Shucks were dangerous, but they could be understood.
They needed food and water and air to breathe, like most creatures.
As did Shellycoats and goblins and imps.
But Nightmares had no needs beyond the fear they drank from their victims. It was the only thing that sustained them. The only thing they craved.
A circle of salt might delay them. A ring of iron and rose thorns. A potion of rowanberries steeped with the ashes from a summer solstice fire. But they were not foolproof.
More to the point, Sorcha had none of those things. She had embroidery scissors and breadcrumbs and comfrey ointment.
She did not, currently, even have a wolf.
Where was Aidan? Why couldn’t she see him?
Had he gone? Was he safe? She couldn’t hear his stern, deep voice, nor the soft snarl of his wolf.
Only the snorting breaths of the Nightmare circling around her, trapping her in the tower.
Only the rapid beat of her heart in her chest and her wrists and her ears. Her mouth went dry.
Aidan was not here.
She was not even here, not really. She was back at Nettlestone Hall, but it was all wrong.
The gate was open, her wards smashed. There were no pigeons, no crows, no barn swallows.
She raced through the courtyard but the bakehouse was empty, the ashes of the fire long since dead. No Aesop, no Simon, no unicorn.
Fear threatened to swallow her whole.
No kittens, no hounds. No Black Shuck.
Sweat dripped down her back. The shadows reached her across the cracked cobblestones.
“Granny!”
No grandmother, only a house filled with dust and moth-eaten curtains.
No one was left. Only cobwebs and Sorcha and blood on the floor. No Elderberry. Her chest was empty, no magic, only blood pumping too fast.
Only paper birds approaching from every direction, filling the sky, the kitchens, clogging the chimneys, perching on the barn roof.
Each one seeking her help, paper wings rustling, rustling.
They were caught in her hair, piling around her like snow, burying her.
Pressing her down, choking the breath from her lungs.
She fell to her knees when her legs shook too hard to hold her up. The tower ground was hard and cold and shocked her back into herself, for just a moment.
The tower, the Nightmare. Those were real. Abandoned Nettlestone was not. A thousand paper birds were not.
She struggled to catch her breath.
She needed her grandmother and her birds and her animals. Black Shucks needed raw meat, and the thrill of the chase. Wolves needed moonlight.
And she had been wrong before. Nightmares needed something as well. Something more than just fear—they needed to stoke that fear, to make it grow, sometimes from nothing.
They needed shadows.
“Aidan,” Sorcha croaked. At least, she hoped there was sound coming from her raw throat. The Nightmare’s hooves crashed down next to her, sending sparks that made her chest seize. “Sunlight. We need sunlight.”
She still couldn’t see him, could barely gasp out his name, but she had to trust that he could hear her. “Aidan.”
Aidan’s worst fear was coming true.
The wolf roared up inside him, refusing to be denied. There was no calm, no discipline, no willpower to contain him.
Being a curator meant nothing; being an earl meant less.
There was only the wolf and the moon.
The Nightmare’s breath blew over him and Aidan was back in Orkney, searching for an amulet that had been buried centuries ago and recently dislodged.
Not by Aidan, not by his mentor, Professor Galloway, digging with his students.
Not even by the Iron Crows that harassed the island for amulets to steal.
By a wolf who could not be stopped.
There was only the churning ocean, the rocky shore, the snow on the wind.
And the wolf who cornered him under the full moon.
The wolf who had ravaged a village, his muzzle still stained with blood. The wolf who’d attacked travelers on the roads, pulled witches from their beds to tear at their throats.
Aidan had had this nightmare every night for a year and a day, after he was first bitten.
This was not how the Nightmare would trap him. He knew this landscape, the wild silver eyes glinting, the pain of teeth ripping through his flesh, the fear of being left to bleed out in the snow. The howl of a wolf no longer at a distance, but inside his own chest. His own head.
The fear that caught him was the horror that his wolf might be too much like the wolf that had turned him.
Feral, remorseless. Cruel. Uncontrollable.
He’d built walls and safeguards, researched binding magics, moon madness. His mother had wept and called him a monster. He’d made himself smaller, calmer, quieter.
All while the terror that it would not be enough ate at him.
Wolfsbane did not scare him, nor iron chains, nor a cage.
But now his wolf smelled his real fears on the breath of the Nightmare, felt his freedom.
Aidan had been shifting without the moon for some years now, but suddenly it flooded the tower, blinding him.
His bones cracked, re-formed. He landed on four paws, fur bristling. His lips lifted off his sharp teeth.
The wolf craved the moonlight, reveled in the twitch of his ears at every sound, his muscles ready to carry him across the moors. A howl built in his throat.
But mostly, his wolf saw Sorcha. Slumped, her red hair tangled with sweat, her fingers shaking. She was gasping.
The wolf stepped closer.
Aidan reached for those silver chains, the ones he wrapped around himself every day. The ones that kept the wolf under his command.
But the wolf snapped as if Aidan was a man standing too close.
Mine.
At least they agreed on one thing. Sorcha did not belong to the Nightmare. It would not have her.
Wolves did not fear—they were feared.
He stood in front of Sorcha, snarling at the Nightmare as it galloped around them, tainting the very air they breathed with dread. Shadows clung to its hooves. The ivy wilted on the stones.
Aidan could fight the Nightmare as a wolf, and he might even win.
But how long could Sorcha survive the onslaught of her nightmares? Her cheeks were pale, her hair sweat-tangled. And she was shivering. He could smell the terror roiling inside of her, staining her tears. Her lips moved but he barely heard her, would not have without his wolf’s ears.
“Sunlight.”
She reached out, clutching his thick fur in her hand, fearless.
“Aidan.”
The wolf’s gray fur was soft, so much softer than Sorcha had imagined.
It felt nice.
But she was too weak to pull herself up, as if she had been asleep for a hundred years. She shoved him. “Get to the sunlight.”
One of them should survive this.
He snarled at her, eyes as gold and mysterious as buried coins.
Her own eyes drifted closed, and when his jaws opened, it was the only thing she did not fear. He closed his teeth around the shoulder of her dress and dragged her toward the doorway.
The Nightmare circled closer, snorting and neighing, the sound so gratingly unpleasant that it roused Sorcha for a moment.
The wolf’s ears were stained with blood.
He didn’t let go of her, pulling her away from the shadows and the poisoned air and the red, red eyes.
The empty Nettlestone Hall reverberated in her head like a clanging bell: empty stables, broken windows, abandoned dovecote.
Feathers drifting across the stones. Paper birds filling the sky, so many, too many for her to follow.
She was so close to the archway, to the hills outside.
A hoof slammed down, pinning the hem of her dress to the ground.
If she stretched as far as her bones would allow, she could just brush her fingers against a beam of sunlight.
But not enough. The paper birds were everywhere, choking the sun.
The wolf snarled, snapping his jaws at the Nightmare, choking on its magic. The Nightmare reared up.
When it landed again, Sorcha was gone.
The wolf had pushed her onto the grass, out of the tower, to where the sun fell on her face and her hands and her lips when she took a true, full breath. The tendrils of the Nightmare’s magic receded, like scurrying insects. It was like sticky cobwebs had been strangling her and they melted away.
The wolf soared through the archway, the huge darkness of the Nightmare lunging after him. Gold eyes gleamed; teeth flashed. The wolf landed and the Nightmare followed, burning hoof aiming for Aidan’s head.
The sun caught it first.
The Nightmare dissipated into ribbons of shadows, crumbling like ashes in the warmth of the sun.
It was just Sorcha, the call of crows from the top of the tower, the softness of an autumn day, and a wolf.
“Well.” She sat up, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. “That’s never happened before.”