Chapter 7 #2
A blood-keeper’s first rule of survival: never let them see what you are. Hide your gift. Bury your knowledge. Walk among them like you’re one of them. The moment they suspect is the moment you become prey.
They are not evil. Most of them. Just frightened. And frightened people kill.
Anna’s face flashed in my mind, her empty eyes, staring at the sky. The village watching her drown based on nothing but suspicion and fear. I’d almost died the same way.
I flipped ahead.
Werewolves
My hands stopped.
Werewolves are the hunting dogs of older, darker masters. They were not born. They were made. The hatred between our kinds was put there on purpose, bred into their blood and bone by the ones who built them.
They hunt us specifically. Can smell our blood across distances. Our magic draws them like a scent on the wind. This makes them deadly. They don’t stumble across us by accident. They seek us out. It is in their very nature to hunt and kill us.
The words started swimming. I blinked. Rubbed my eyes. Tried to focus. But the text was fading. Blurring like ink running in water.
“No.” I turned the page. More blurred text. “No, no, no.”
The werewolf entry continued for several more pages. All of it was unreadable. I caught fragments. Made from, blur. Sanguinarian, blur. Broke free, blur. Words surfacing and drowning before I could grab them.
Everything I needed was right here, right in front of me.
And I couldn’t read a single word. The book had cut me off.
It had decided I wasn’t ready. The book was teaching me in order, I realized.
Giving me what I needed when I needed it, the foundations first, the dangers later.
As if it knew that some knowledge required strength to carry, and it wouldn’t burden me with what lurked in those blurred pages until I was strong enough to bear it.
The sound of footsteps outside made me shove the book under the bed. I pushed it far back against the wall and was on my feet by the time the outside bar scraped free.
The door thudded against the inside bar and held. A pause, and then a fist hammered against the wood, hard enough to rattle the hinges.
“Open the door,” Dietrich ordered from the other side.
“No,” I called back. “How does it feel?”
He pounded again, harder this time. “Open the door. Now.”
I didn’t move. Let him stand out there. Let him feel what it was like to want through a door that wouldn’t give.
“I have food,” he ground out. “And wood for the fire. Open the door or I’ll take the hinges off.”
I believed him. I waited three more breaths anyway, long enough to make the point, then crossed to the door and lifted the bar.
The door swung open and the cold hit me first, then the white.
It had snowed in the night. The clearing, the trees, the ground between the cottage and the dark wall of pines, all of it buried under a fresh layer that turned the world quiet and clean.
For one breath I saw past him, and beyond the trees, through a gap in the pines, the lake.
Frozen solid now, a flat gray sheet of ice.
I knew that lake. Grandmother had taken me there as a child, before she moved to the village, when this cottage was still hers and the forest was still safe.
I’d sat on the bank and thrown pebbles while she washed herbs in the shallows and told me the names of things.
The memory hit so hard, my whole body seized then Dietrich stepped through the frame and blocked the light and the lake vanished behind his shoulders.
He had a brace of rabbits over his shoulder and snow in his hair and his beard, the ice crystals caught in the coarse dark hair melting as the cottage warmth hit him.
His eyes swept the room, the cold hearth, the dead fire, the haze of smoke still drifting through the air like the cottage had been slowly choking on itself, and then his gaze found me, standing rigid in the middle of it with my arms folded and my chin raised.
“The fire went out.” He dropped the rabbits on the table with a heavy, wet thud.
“It smoldered wrong,” I replied. “The windows are boarded shut. The door was barred from the outside. The smoke had nowhere to go, and neither did I.” I spread my hands at the haze still hanging between us.
“I could have suffocated in my sleep and you wouldn’t have known until you came back to a corpse. ”
He said nothing to that. Just crouched by the hearth and started stacking kindling like I hadn’t spoken at all.
“Did you hear me?” I pressed, stepping closer until I was standing over him. “You locked me in a sealed room with a dying fire. Are you trying to keep me alive or kill me? Because you’re doing a poor job of picking one.”
“The fire was fine when I left,” he muttered, striking the flint without looking up. Sparks scattered across the kindling and caught.
“Well it wasn’t fine this morning,” I snapped. “Maybe if you hadn’t sealed every way out of this cottage, I could have gotten more wood. Or pried a board loose for air. Or done anything at all besides sit here breathing smoke and waiting for you to decide I was worth coming back to.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t threatened to leave, I could have cracked a board for you,” he shot back, still not looking at me, feeding the new flame with small careful breaths that made me want to kick the kindling apart. “Let some air through. But you threatened to run, so I didn’t.”
“So this is punishment.” I didn’t make it a question.
“It’s not punishment.” He stood and turned to face me.
“You want to walk out of here and die in the forest, that’s your choice.
But I’m not going to make it easy for you.
” He folded his arms. “The bar stays. The boards stay. When I trust you not to bolt the second my back is turned, we can talk about the boards.”
“And when will that be?” I demanded.
“For as long as it takes.”
“As long as what takes?” I stepped into his space, close enough that he’d have to look down at me, close enough that he couldn’t pretend I wasn’t there. “What exactly are you keeping me here for?”
His mouth thinned into a hard line. “Keeping you alive.”
“In a cage,” I spat. “Sophia’s cage.”
He flinched like I’d put a blade through him.
“I found her scratches on the door,” I continued. My hands were shaking and I didn’t care. “I put my fingers in the grooves she made trying to claw her way out. And you’re using the same cage to keep me.”
“I’m not him,” he ground out, his back to me.
“Then take the boards down,” I challenged, and the tears were right there, pressing hot against my eyes, blurring the edges of his face. “Prove it.”
He stared at me for a long, terrible moment.
Then he picked up the rabbits from the table, pulled a knife from his belt, and started skinning them with his back half turned to me.
Conversation over. The wet, deliberate sound of the blade separating skin from muscle was the only conversation he offered.
He wasn’t going to take them down.
I couldn’t stay upright. My legs were shaking, and I could not pull air past whatever had lodged itself behind my ribs.
I crossed to the bed and sat down hard, pressed my spine flat against the wall, and pulled the furs across my lap.
My chest was too tight to breathe properly.
The breaths came out ragged and ugly, heaving things that shook my shoulders and made the bed frame creak beneath me.
The tears pressed and pressed and I wouldn’t let them fall, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction even though his back was turned, wouldn’t let this place and this man and this whole wretched history crack me open.
Behind me, I could hear him working. The scrape of the knife against bone.
The thud of meat on wood. The crackle of the fire he had rebuilt.
He cooked in silence. The smell of roasting rabbit filled the cottage slowly, thick and rich.
My stomach clenched so hard it hurt. I had not eaten since before the cellar.
My body was past asking. It was demanding, a deep, animal ache that had nothing to do with pride or fury or grief.
I heard him cross the room. His boots on the stone floor, steady and unhurried. Then he was standing beside the bed. I did not look up. I kept my face buried in my knees and my arms locked around my shins, and I waited for him to say something, to gloat, to make a point.
He did not speak. He set the plate on the bed beside me. I felt the warmth of it through the furs. Then his footsteps retreated, and the chair by the fire creaked as he sat down.
I stayed like that for as long as I could stand it, which was not long. The smell was right there, warm and close. My hands were shaking. My stomach was twisting in on itself. The hunger was bigger than the hatred, bigger than the grief, bigger than everything I was trying to hold together.
I picked up the meat with my fingers and ate.
The tears came then, sliding down my face and dripping off my chin while I chewed, while I swallowed, while my body took what it needed whether the rest of me agreed or not.
I ate and I cried, and I hated myself for both.
I hated that he could hear me. I hated that the food was good.
I hated that somewhere under all the anger and sorrow, I was grateful for it.
He did not say a word. He did not look at me. He just sat by the fire and ate his own meal and let me have whatever this was: grief and hunger and fury and shame all tangled together, pouring out of me in silence while I fed myself with shaking hands in my aunt’s cage.