Chapter 12 #3
“I don’t know.” And that was the truth, and it was worse than either answer he’d been bracing for, because it meant neither of us knew what was real and neither of us could go back to before.
He turned away. Crossed to the far corner and sat down on the floor with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up and his forearms resting across them and his head bowed. He looked like a man who’d been beaten. He looked like a man who’d stopped fighting.
I crossed to the bed and sat down. My back burned where the gray creature’s claws had torn through the shift and into skin. My hip throbbed. My hands were raw from the fall and the crawling and the cold.
I looked at Dietrich in his corner. I knew I should hate him.
He’d locked me up. Kept me prisoner in my own grandmother’s cottage.
In the same cage his father kept my aunt.
But he’d also run through a frozen forest with a cracked skull to stand between me and a creature that stood taller than any man, with nothing but a command and his bare hands.
He’d done it without hesitation, without weapons, without even stopping to consider that the woman he was saving was the same woman who’d just tried to kill him.
Time passed. I couldn’t sleep. I’d lain in the furs and listened to him breathe across the room and watched the fire burn down and build back up, burn down and build back up.
The cold crept in deeper each time the flames shrank.
My breath fogged above the bed and the boards groaned the way wood groans when the temperature outside drops fast. Snow, probably.
A heavy fall, the kind that buries the forest and steals the heat right through the walls.
He fed the fire the first time without looking at me. The second time, he got up and crossed to the hearth and stayed there longer than the fire needed.
I closed my eyes when I heard him stand.
He pulled the spare fur off the chest and carried it to the bed and laid it over me. Careful. The way you cover someone you think is sleeping when you don’t want to wake them.
He’d told me the loneliest thing I’d ever heard come out of a man’s mouth and I’d told him I’d do it again. And he’d still gotten up in the dark and covered me because I was cold.
I pressed my face into the pillow and bit down on the sound that tried to come out of me.
By the time gray light showed through the cracks in the boards, the wound at his temple had closed.
I’d set bones and stitched wounds and watched flesh mend itself over days and weeks and months.
A blow hard enough to crack bone and pour blood down a man’s face did not heal overnight.
It couldn’t. The body didn’t work that way.
His body did.
I filed it away with everything else I couldn’t explain about him and reached under the bed for the grimoire.
The leather was cold against my fingers. I opened it in my lap and turned past the entries I’d already read. Blood-keepers, protective symbols, humans. Then I reached the werewolf section, the pages that had been locked behind blurred text since the first day I’d found the book.
The text was clear.
I stopped. Blinked. Looked again. The words that had swum and blurred every time I’d tried to read them were sharp now.
Dark ink on yellowed parchment, steady and legible as grandmother’s handwriting on the herb jars.
Using my power in the clearing had cracked a lock I didn’t know was there.
The grimoire recognized it and was opening doors that had been sealed shut.
I glanced at Dietrich. His eyes were still closed. He hadn’t stirred.
I started reading.
On Werewolves
Werewolves are beings cursed to take the form of beasts.
They are stronger than men, faster, with senses that can track a blood-keeper from miles away.
They heal faster than any human. They survive what should kill them.
Broken bones, torn flesh, wounds that would put a man in the ground.
But they are not invincible. Cursed blood fighting cursed blood heals slow and ugly.
A werewolf wounded by another of its kind will mend, but the body spends its strength fighting the foreign magic before it can close the wound.
Fire slows them. Silver burns them in ways they cannot shake off.
And a blood-keeper who has reached her full power can do things to a werewolf that no amount of healing will undo.
My eyes went to Dietrich’s temple. The gash was closed. A thin pale line where bone had been showing before. Cold settled deep in my stomach. I looked back at the page before the thought could finish forming.
The transformation is agony. Bones breaking and reforming, flesh tearing and reshaping into new configurations. But they endure it because the beast gives them power beyond anything their human forms could achieve.
Most take the form of wolves. Large, monstrous wolves far bigger than any natural beast, with teeth that can crush bone and claws that can tear through armor.
They hunt in packs or alone, depending on their nature.
The solitary ones are often the most dangerous.
Outcasts, exiles, creatures with nothing left to lose and no pack to temper their worst impulses.
They were not born from nature. They were built.
The Sanguinarians made them. Those ancient blood-drinkers needed hunters.
Fast and brutal and obedient, able to track blood-keepers across forests and mountains and drag them back alive.
So they took human men. Soldiers. Prisoners.
The willing and the desperate. Fed them Sanguinarian blood mixed with the blood of wolves and bears and the great predators.
The magic didn’t kill those men. It broke them apart and rebuilt them as something caught between man and beast.
The first werewolves were slaves. Dogs on a leash. They hunted blood-keepers through the wild places and brought them back to the Sanguinarian courts, alive and bleeding, and watched while their masters drank.
The Sanguinarians treated them like animals. Kept them in kennels. Bred them for stronger senses, bigger bodies, more obedience. Killed their mates when they bred without permission. This went on for generations.
Then one of them refused.
The stories disagree on who he was. An alpha whose mate was slaughtered for bearing a child without leave.
A lone wolf caged so long the chains wore grooves in his bones.
A werewolf who listened when a blood-keeper whispered the truth of what he was.
A weapon made from stolen blood and broken men, serving the very masters who’d unmade him.
Whoever he was, he tore the throat from the Sanguinarian who held his leash. And the others followed. The war lasted decades. The courts burned. The blood-keepers hid and documented everything.
When the fires died, the werewolves were free.
But freedom did not make them safe. The instinct the Sanguinarians bred into them.
The hunger to hunt blood-keepers, to track us, to crave us.
That stayed in the blood. In the bone. Coded into the magic that made them.
They stopped bringing us back to their masters.
They just stopped bringing us back alive.
Since then, werewolves and blood-keepers have been enemies. They hunt us by scent, by instinct, by a hatred they cannot choose to put down. We kill them on sight. This is the way it has been for centuries, and this is the way it must remain. They are our natural predators. We are their prey.
They kill us when they find us. But killing is not always the first thing they do.
The book slipped from my fingers and thudded against the floor.
The gray creature. The way it had stopped trying to kill me after I’d used my power.
The way its hunger had twisted into something else.
The lowered head, the different sounds, the body tensing in a new way.
The way it had pinned me face-down in the snow and pressed its weight against my back and I’d felt the rumble in its chest vibrating through my spine.
It hadn’t been an animal. It had been a man inside a monster’s body. And it hadn’t been trying to kill me.
Killing is not always the first thing they do.
My hand flew to my mouth. I lurched off the bed and quickly made it to the basin in the corner before my stomach heaved.
Bile burned up my throat. Nothing else to bring up.
But my body kept trying, kept convulsing with the horror of understanding what had almost happened to me in that clearing.
What those sounds had meant. What the pinning had meant.
What it would have done if my power hadn’t thrown it off me.
I heard him move behind me. The creak of leather, the sound of boots crossing the floor. Then he was beside me, crouching close enough that the heat from his body reached mine through the thin shift.
“What did you read?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t form words past the heaving and the tremors. Could only crouch there with my forehead pressed against the cold rim of the basin and try to hold myself together.
“Talia.” Gentler now. “Talk to me.”
“The wolf,” I managed, the words scraped raw. “The gray wolf. It wasn’t just trying to kill me.”
“It was a werewolf.” I lifted my head to look at him.
His face was pale in the firelight, the healed wound stark against his skin.
“A man inside a wolf’s body. And it wanted to.
..” My throat closed. “It was going to...” I couldn’t finish.
Didn’t need to. His expression told me he already knew.
A muscle in his neck jumped once and went still.
“You knew,” I whispered.
“Yes.” His reply was flat like there was no room for argument.
“Since when?”
“Years.” He didn’t flinch. “I’ve known there was a werewolf in this forest since before you arrived.”
I stared at him. “Years. You’ve known for years and you didn’t...”