CHAPTER FOURTEEN || HUNTER
Hours later, the moon rose over the ridge of pines, flooding the commune with silver light.
Daniel sat cross-legged on the ground near the fire pit, the glass vial of dark residue he’d gathered from Robert’s aura in one hand and an old brass compass in the other.
His messenger bag was beside him, stuffed with the supplies he needed—chalk, candles, and a handful of herbs that he poured around himself in a clockwise circle.
Daniel’s eyes were closed, his lips moving as he incanted his spell under his breath, his brow furrowed with concentration.
He’d used this locator spell before—many times, in fact—so I already knew how it worked.
He was attuning the magical signature of the monster who’d attacked Robert to the compass, so it would always point in the direction of the monster.
It could be used to find people, too, provided Daniel had a scrap of that person’s clothing or a bit of their hair or blood.
The spell hadn’t worked with the Algea because the creature hadn’t left anything of itself behind on its victims to track.
This monster was sloppier, apparently. Most of them were.
As I watched, Daniel’s magic formed a gossamer web of golden light spreading across the surface of the compass. Then a strand of it reached across the distance between his hands to touch the vial of black smoke as he chanted under his breath.
The spell snapped into place, the thread of power glowing brightly and then stabilizing.
Wolves, unlike other supernatural creatures, could see magic with our naked eyes.
No one had ever been able to give me a straight answer as to why that was, but whatever the reason, I was grateful. Because Daniel’s magic was beautiful.
“Got it,” he said triumphantly, grinning up at Lee and me with a pleased expression on his face.
“Now it’s just a matter of following the compass.
” His gaze lingered on us and a blush crept into his cheeks.
“Um… You guys will probably want to shift just in case. Also, I need to stay focused. And you’re both kind of distracting. ”
He was probably referring to the fact that Lee and I stood on either side of the warlock, already stripped down to our birthday suits.
I shot Lee a mischievous grin and he returned it.
A wordless understanding passed between us: yeah, we had plans for Daniel later.
But our mate was right. The sooner we got this over with, the sooner we’d be able to do a repeat of this morning. And we’d be able to protect Daniel far better in our wolf forms.
I dutifully dropped to my hands and knees and let the shift come over me. It rolled through my body like a wave, my bones reshaping, my senses sharpening, the world around me expanding into a symphony of scent and sound that I couldn’t have perceived while in my human body.
Unlike how books and movies sometimes depict werewolves transforming, it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. More like a deep stretch after sitting for too long. The wolf form was every bit as natural to me as my human one.
Lee shifted beside me at the same moment. Like me, he was larger than a regular wolf would’ve been and his fur was deep black, the precise color of his hair. His eyes had lightened to become a yellow-green that seemed to reflect light. I knew I was identical to him in wolf form, too.
Daniel watched us, naked wonder in his expression. He’d watched us transform before, but it felt different this time. Intimate in a way that it hadn’t before. Maybe he felt it too.
I rubbed my body against him, finding comfort in his warmth and vibrancy, the verbena scent of him. Lee did the same, both of us marking him with our scent.
Daniel’s eyes slid shut and a soft, startled noise escaped his lips.
Then the needle on the compass in his hand started spinning wildly, before snapping into place.
Daniel glanced down at it, blinking, as if surprised to remember what he was supposed to be doing. “Whatever did this to Robert is in that direction.” He pointed in the direction of the forest. “We ought to get going.”
With that, he stood, dusted off his jeans, and slung his bag over his shoulder.
“Remember, we’re not supposed to be engaging with whatever we find.
Not unless we have to.” I couldn’t help but notice the way his gaze lingered on me as he said that.
I tried not to take offense. He added, “We find it, we confirm what it is if we can, and then we bring that information back to the pack.”
Inwardly, I scowled in annoyance, even though he was right. Those were our orders. But my wolf was much more instinctual than I was, and it sometimes took over fully. Controlling it, especially if Daniel was involved and possibly in immediate danger, might be a challenge.
But I huffed in acknowledgment.
Daniel shook his head. He seemed amused, as if he knew exactly what had just gone through my head. Then he began walking.
Lee and I fell into step, bracketing the warlock between us as he led the way into the forest.
He hadn’t cast a light spell, I realized. He usually needed to.
But then, Lee and I didn’t need it. Wolves could see perfectly well in the dark. And, based on what he’d told us when explaining how his senses had changed since the initiation, he no longer did either.
The woods at night were a different world. The moonlight filtered through the canopy in broken shafts, illuminating patches of fern and moss while leaving everything else in deep shadow.
My wolf senses were dialed up to their maximum. I heard every rustle of leaf, every shift of wind, every distant heartbeat of the small creatures hiding in the undergrowth. The forest smelled of wet earth, cedar, and pine.
Daniel walked between us, the compass held out in front of him. His heartbeat was steady but elevated.
He was scared, probably. But he was doing it anyway.
Another thing I’d noticed but never really let myself acknowledge over the last two years: Daniel was extraordinarily brave. More than I’d realized.
The compass led us deeper into the forest. Past the stream where I’d thrown up the shield days ago.
It seemed like a lifetime ago now. And then past the clearing of old-growth trees, where the pack sometimes gathered for runs.
And into a tangle of trees that were so close together we had to go slowly to navigate between the trunks—me in the front, Lee in the back, and Daniel in the middle.
There was a wrongness in the air here. Something that pinged against a sense beyond the normal five—a pressure building against my skin mixed with a crawling sensation at the base of my skull, as if something was watching us from the darkness.
I heard the compass needle whirl again, then click firmly into place.
“We’re close,” Daniel breathed. “Whatever attacked Robert is nearby.”
My gaze darted around the forest. The trees were so thick here that I wouldn’t have been able to see anything until it was almost upon us.
I didn’t like that at all.
The forest had grown completely silent, except for the sound of our breathing and the rapid and reassuring beat of Daniel’s heart. There was no sound of insects or birds or small animals in the brush around us, the way there ought to have been. Even the breeze had died.
The total stillness was profound and unnatural. A telltale sign that something Otherworldly was nearby.
Unsettled, I continued forward, weaving between the trees.
Then a clearing opened before us without warning, and I saw them.
Plural, because there were two of them.
They crouched at the center of the clearing, motionless and waiting, their forms flickering between solid and translucent like a signal cutting in and out, the way monsters from the Otherworld sometimes did. They might’ve been sleeping or in some sort of… stasis.
Or maybe they knew we were coming and they were just conserving their energy as they waited for us to put ourselves in front of them.
They were both vaguely humanoid. They had two arms, two legs, and a head. But their proportions were all off. They were both too long and too thin. Their limbs bent backward, like a spider or a praying mantis.
Seeing it—the wrongness of them both—made my stomach heave instinctively. Their skin, if it even was skin, was a sickly grayish-white that seemed to emit its own faint luminescence.
And they had no faces.
Where faces should have been, there was smooth, featureless flesh, pulled taut over the suggestion of an almost horse-like skull. They had no eyes, no nose, and no mouth. Just a blank, terrible absence where a face should’ve been.
And yet, they turned toward us as we piled into the clearing and I could feel them looking at us.
The attention was like a physical weight, cold and predatory.
Every hair on my body stood on end.
Then, without warning, they moved.
The monsters ignored Lee and me, going right for Daniel, surging across the clearing with unnatural speed.
Daniel’s reaction was instantaneous. He incanted two words in a language that might’ve been Welsh and then a cone of vivid green light erupted from his hands.
The first creature slammed into it, letting out a shriek that sounded like tearing metal.
It flickered out of reality, appearing a split second later on the opposite side of the clearing. Like the Algea we’d faced months ago, these creatures were impossibly fast.
I threw myself between Daniel and the second creature, just before it reached out to snatch him with its unnaturally jointed limbs. Belatedly, I noticed it had sharp talons several inches long, tipped with wicked points.
The creature slammed into my body like a brick wall, knocking the breath from my lungs. The ground slammed up to meet me, and I rolled in a tangle of limbs, the trees around the clearing whipping past my field of vision in a blur.
Dazed, I sprang back to my feet and staggered sideways.
The creature reared back with one impossibly long arm, preparing to strike me again.