Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Iwas outside and freezing before my next breath came.
Snow crunched under my bare feet. I’d forgotten boots, hadn’t thought about boots, hadn’t thought about anything except the door and the forest and the distance between me and the cottage growing with every step.
The wind cut through grandmother’s torn shift and the cloak and went straight into my bones, and my breath came in white clouds that the dark swallowed before they’d fully formed.
I ran.
The grimoire pressed against my chest, the leather already slick with snow. Branches whipped my face and I felt skin split but didn’t slow down, couldn’t slow down, because two things were chasing me now even if neither had caught up yet.
Dietrich. Behind me, bleeding on the floor, but alive.
I hadn’t hit him hard enough to kill, which meant I hadn’t hit him hard enough to keep him down for long.
He’d wake. He’d find the door open and the cottage empty and he’d come after me the way he always came after things that tried to leave.
Fast and certain and impossible to outrun.
And the wolf.
The howling I’d heard through the boards every night.
The claws on frozen ground outside the door.
The sniffing along the base of the wood that had stopped only when something snarled from the tree line.
I was running through the same forest that had killed William.
Running in nothing but a torn shift and a red cloak with blood on my face and blood-keeper scent pouring off me like smoke.
The trees pressed close on every side. Massive trunks that vanished into shadow above my head, their branches woven together so tight the moonlight filtered through.
Snow fell in thick flakes that caught in my hair and melted against my flushed skin and turned the ground beneath my feet into a treacherous mess of ice and hidden roots and frozen mud that gave way without warning.
I kept running. The red cloak billowed behind me and caught on every thorn, every branch.
I yanked it free again and again, heard fabric tear, kept moving.
The forest had swallowed me and I could feel it.
Dark pressing in from all sides, the silence between the trees that wasn’t really silence at all but the sound of things holding their breath and listening.
William had walked into this forest with six armed men and never come home.
I’d heard the howling through the boards every night.
The circling, the claws on frozen ground, the sniffing at the door.
I’d stood in the mouth of a black wolf so big its head reached my chin and watched its teeth glisten in the dark.
And I’d run into this place anyway. In a torn shift. In bare feet. Bleeding.
Because the cage was worse than the wolf. Because Sophia had died behind these boards and I refused to follow her.
I kept telling myself that while the trees closed in and the dark got thicker and the silence got louder.
The ground changed without warning. My foot caught a root and I pitched forward with a cry, the grimoire slipping from my grip and tumbling into darkness.
I went down hard. Sliding, rolling, branches tearing at my cloak and my arms and the bare skin of my legs.
I hit a rock with my hip and the pain whited out my vision.
More sliding, more scraping, and then the slope levelled and I crashed to a halt at the bottom of a ravine, flat on my back with stars bursting behind my eyes and the taste of dirt and blood in my mouth.
For a long moment I couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything but lie there and gasp while the cold seeped into my back through the wet snow and the trees stood over me like witnesses to something they’d seen before.
The grimoire. Where was the grimoire?
I rolled onto my side and saw it lying in the snow a few feet away, the dark leather stark against the white. I crawled toward it and pulled it against my chest and held it there while my hip screamed and my hands shook and the forest went on being dark and silent and full of things I couldn’t see.
Then the howl came.
It rose from somewhere above me, from the direction I’d been running.
Long and hungry and wrong in a way that lived in the marrow rather than the ear.
This was the sound I’d heard through the boards.
The circling. The sniffing at the door. But there were no boards between us now, no bar, no walls, no Dietrich settling against the outside of the door to keep watch through the night.
There was nothing between me and whatever was making that sound except snow and dark and the red cloak wrapped around my shoulders.
I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the pain in my hip. The ravine walls were too steep to climb back up and the only way was forward, deeper into the forest, further from the cottage, further from the only person who knew what hunted these woods after dark.
I ran.
The ravine opened into a clearing ringed by massive oaks, their branches woven together overhead like a cathedral ceiling, blocking out what little moonlight remained.
The snow here was thinner, sheltered by the canopy, and the ground was a mess of dead leaves and frozen mud.
I stopped in the center and turned in a slow circle, listening, watching, each exhale plunging into the cold and vanishing.
I held my breath. The forest held its breath back. Whatever was out there had stopped making noise, and that was worse than sound.
Branches snapped behind me. I spun.
Yellow eyes appeared in the darkness.
It came out of the tree line standing upright.
Gray fur covered its body from the jaw down, dense and coarse, rippling over muscles that bunched and shifted with each step.
It stood seven feet tall, maybe more, shoulders so broad they blocked the gaps between the oaks.
Its arms hung long at its sides, thick and wrong, ending in hands tipped with claws that curved like skinning knives.
Its legs bent backward at the knee, jointed like a wolf’s hind legs, massive clawed feet gripping the frozen ground.
Scars covered its face and flanks. A long pale line split its muzzle where the fur refused to grow, an old wound healed wrong and left for the world to see.
This creature was nothing like the black wolf.
The black wolf had been an animal. Enormous, yes.
Unnatural, yes. But still a wolf. This was a wolf forced into a man’s posture, or a man twisted into a wolf’s shape, and the result belonged in neither world.
It oozed hunger. Its lips pulled back from teeth the length of my thumb and a growl rumbled through its chest, deep enough that I could feel it vibrating through the frozen ground beneath my feet.
I backed up until my shoulders hit bark. Nowhere else to go. My hands came up instinctively, fingers spread, reaching for the heat that had thrown Klaus across the cellar, the power that had surged through me once and never again.
The creature moved toward me. Slow, deliberate, taking its time the way a predator does when it knows its prey has nowhere to run. It stopped ten feet away and its massive body dropped into a crouch, every muscle coiling, and I saw the moment it decided to strike.
It lunged.
A lock inside me snapped into place. Heat roared up from deep in my gut.
The same heat from the cellar, the same fire that had been dormant for days no matter how hard I’d tried to summon it.
It surged through my chest and down my arms and exploded out through my palms with a force that felt like being turned inside out.
I threw my hands forward and screamed.
The creature hit a wall three feet in front of me and yelped, a sharp, startled sound, tumbling backward through the air and landing hard on its side. It scrambled upright with its ears flat and fear bright in its yellow eyes.
I stood frozen with my hands still outstretched and power still crackling through my fingers. I’d done that. Somehow, without knowing how, I’d pushed that massive creature back without touching it.
It recovered quickly, shaking snow from its fur.
It turned those yellow eyes back to me, but the expression had changed.
The hunger was still there, but it had twisted into something else.
Its head lowered and its body tensed in a new way, making sounds that weren’t quite growls.
Lower, deeper, thick with an intent that made every hair on my body stand up and my stomach clenched with a revulsion so deep it was almost physical.
An ancient instinct stirred in me. An instinct that was older than thought, older than language, that recognized what was happening even before my conscious mind caught up.
The creature wasn’t trying to kill me anymore.
It wanted something else.
It moved faster than its size should have allowed.
Clawed hands hammered into my shoulders and drove me to the ground, the crushing weight slamming me face-down into the snow and dead leaves.
Its body pressed against my back, huge and suffocating, and I could feel the heat of it through the cloak, could feel the rumble in its chest vibrating through my spine.
Horror swallowed everything.
I screamed and twisted and lashed out with my hands. Power exploded from my palms. Raw, uncontrolled, fueled by a terror so complete it stripped every thought from my mind and left nothing but the animal need to survive. The creature yelped and scrambled off me.
I rolled away and shoved myself to my feet.
My shift was torn where claws had caught it and scratches burned across my back and shoulders, blood soaking through the fabric and into the red wool of the cloak.
My legs shook. My hands shook. The power was fading as fast as it had come, draining out of me like water through a cracked bowl.