Chapter 15 #2
Everything stopped. My breath. My heart.
The floor tilted beneath my feet and the room went bright at the edges and I was suddenly back at the market, seven years old, grandmother’s hand crushing mine while she pulled me behind her skirt.
A man with amber eyes had been watching Sophia from behind the baker’s stall.
His son beside him — a boy with the same strange eyes.
Erik. Dietrich’s father. The man who’d taken Sophia.
I stumbled back from the doorway. The Forceweaving flared around my hands, hot and bright and wild, crackling in directions I couldn’t control.
His smile widened, showing too many teeth. The pretence of a harmless old man dropped away like a shed skin.
“Ah.” He straightened, his eyes brightening with recognition. “So you do know who I am.”
“Get away from here,” I warned, shaking, trying to hold the power steady.
“Why would I do that?” He stood slowly, unfolding from the step with a predator’s grace that had nothing to do with his apparent age.
His shoulders went back. His spine straightened.
He moved like an animal wearing human skin.
“I came all this way to find you. Been watching for weeks, waiting for the right moment.”
“Dietrich will ...” I started.
“Dietrich is deep in the forest.” He stepped over the threshold. No door to stop him. “Looking for timber, I’d wager. Heard that door blow clean off its hinges this morning.” His mouth curled. “Generous of you, leaving the way open for me.”
I threw the Forceweaving at him. The blast went wide — caught the doorframe instead of his chest, splintering what was left of the wood.
He didn’t flinch. Just tilted his head and breathed in through his nose, slow and deep, like a man savoring what he’d been starving for.
“There it is.” His eyes shifted from brown to amber.
“The power.” Another step toward me. “I felt it from miles away the night it woke in you. Fear and anger cracked you open and the old blood came pouring out.” His nostrils flared.
“I’ve been smelling it ever since. Every night, the scent getting stronger. ”
“Now I’m here to take what I lost,” he said, and the hunger in him was vast and specific and had nothing to do with me as a person. “What your aunt gave me for two years before she...”
He didn’t finish. Perhaps he couldn’t, but his expression shifted.
His eyes narrowed, and the muscle at his temple twitched once.
“Sophia had the Sensing,” he explained. “She could feel me in the forest at night. Feel what I was. What I could do.” He paused.
“I wanted her. Her gift. Her power. The way it would feel pouring into me when I claimed her.”
“So you took her,” I spat.
“I gave her a choice.” His lips twisted around the word like it tasted sour.
“Come with me, or I’d kill the old woman and the girl.
Your grandmother. You.” He studied my face.
“Sophia had the Sensing. She could feel the truth of a threat the way you can feel the weather changing, in her bones, in her blood. She felt mine. She knew I meant every word.”
My legs buckled. I braced myself against the table.
“She walked into the forest that same night,” Erik continued. “Came to the tree line and stood there and waited for me because she’d felt the shape of what I’d do to her family if she didn’t.”
The room was spinning. Sophia. My aunt. The girl who’d braided my hair and called me little Red.
She’d known what was waiting in the forest. She’d felt the truth of his threat with the Sensing, felt the violence coiled inside him, felt the absolute certainty that he would kill a child and an old woman without hesitation.
And she’d gone. Walked into the dark and offered herself to a monster because the alternative was burying her family.
“Every time I mated her, I grew stronger,” he continued. “Her power fed mine. The more I took, the more I needed.” He stepped closer. “And then I broke her. An accident. She fought and I — it doesn’t matter. She died. And the power stopped. And the world went dark.”
Something shifted in him. Got heavier. “Twenty-two years,” he ground out.
“Feral. Running through these woods like a sick animal. Forgetting what I was. Forgetting everything except the hunger and the absence of what she’d given me.
” His eyes locked with mine. He breathed in deep through his nose, pulling the air through his nostrils like tasting wine.
“Sophia was a candle, girl. You … You’re a bonfire.
The Forceweaving — raw power, not passive Sensing.
I could taste it on the wind and it burned away more than two decades of madness in a single breath.
” The amber burned brighter. “If claiming Sophia made me this strong, claiming you would make me ...”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
Unstoppable.
“You don’t want me,” I realized, and the understanding was somehow worse than the alternative. “You want what’s inside me. The power. You’d drain me the same way you drained her.”
“I loved Sophia,” Erik snarled, and the self-deception in it was breathtaking. “I loved what she gave me. What she made me feel. If that’s not love then the word has no meaning.”
“That’s not love,” I spat. “That’s feeding.”
“Call it whatever you like.” He crossed the threshold. “I’ve been starving for almost two decades. And you smell like the first meal I’ve had since she died.”
I gathered the Forceweaving and threw it with everything I had. This time it connected — caught him in the chest and sent him staggering backward, his boots skidding across the stone. But it didn’t send him flying. The power was scattered, uncontrolled, half of it dissipating before it reached him.
He straightened. Rolled his neck. Smiled.
“Good,” he acknowledged. “But not good enough.”
I threw another blast. It went wide and shattered the shelf behind him, grandmother’s jars exploding, herbs and glass spraying across the room, the smell of sage and yarrow flooding the air.
Grandmother’s jars. Years of careful labels in her slanting script, destroyed in a second.
Erik lunged. He crossed the distance faster than any human body should move and his hand closed around my throat and drove me back against the table.
The grimoire slid off the edge and hit the floor.
His face was inches from mine and his eyes were fully amber now, glowing, the pupils elongated and vertical.
“Your husband smelled like you,” he hissed, his grip tightening. “Sixteen years ago. He walked into my forest with your scent soaked into his skin and his clothes and I could smell it from a mile away.”
William. The word formed in my mind but wouldn’t leave my mouth. His hand was too tight on my throat.
“I tore him apart,” Erik continued, his nostrils flaring. “Every man with him. Followed the scent of you on his skin and killed everything that carried it. The way he screamed. The way he called out your name at the end like you could save him.”
Rage burned through the terror. I gathered every thread I could find, twisted them together, and detonated them at point-blank range.
The blast threw him off me and across the room. He hit the far wall hard enough to crack the stone and slid to the floor. I doubled over coughing, my throat burning where his fingers had been.
He was already getting up. Coming at me again, faster, his body low and coiled and wrong, moving in a way that had nothing human in it. He grabbed my arm and spun me toward the open doorway and shoved.
I flew through the threshold and hit the snow hard, the impact driving the air from my lungs. The grimoire was still inside. The cloak was still inside. I had nothing except the shift on my back and the Forceweaving sputtering beneath my skin.
I rolled onto my back.
Erik stood in the doorway. The light behind him framed his silhouette and the amber in his eyes was all that was visible, two points of hot gold burning in the shadow of his face.
“Watch,” he ordered.