Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
He stepped into the snow and his body came apart.
It happened in the daylight, in full view, close enough that I could hear every sound.
The cracking came first, wet and organic, bones snapping and reforming, joints dislocating and reshaping.
His back arched and a scream tore from his throat that became a howl halfway through.
His shirt split as his shoulders widened.
His spine curved and extended. His hands hit the ground and the fingers shortened, thickened, nails darkening into claws.
His face elongated, jaw pushing forward, teeth lengthening, skin rippling and tearing as gray fur pushed through from underneath.
I couldn’t look away. My body was locked, every muscle frozen, my eyes forced open by a horror so complete it overrode every survival instinct I had.
The man fell apart. The wolf stood up.
Gray fur. Massive body. Scars across its face and flanks. The long pale line across its muzzle where the fur refused to grow.
The wolf from the clearing. The one that had pinned me in the snow. The one that had tried to …
Its yellow eyes found me lying in the snow and its lips pulled back from teeth stained dark with old blood.
I ran.
I was on my feet and running before my mind caught up, barefoot through snow that burned and cut and swallowed my ankles, in a shift that caught on every branch and tore and I didn’t care because the sound behind me was claws on frozen ground, heavy and fast and getting closer with every stride.
The trees swallowed me. I ran the way I’d run the night I escaped the village, blind, desperate, powered by nothing except the animal certainty that stopping meant dying. Or worse than dying.
The wolf was faster. I could hear it closing the distance, the rhythm of its paws, the low rumble building in its chest. The same sounds I’d heard in the clearing. The same sounds that meant it had stopped hunting to kill and started hunting to possess.
I threw Forceweaving behind me without looking. Heard it connect with a tree instead, the trunk cracking, branches crashing down. The wolf didn’t slow.
I threw again. Empty. The well was dry. I’d spent everything on Erik in the cottage and the practice before that and there was nothing left.
My foot caught a root. I went down hard, face first into frozen mud, my lip splitting, my mouth filling with blood and dirt.
I tried to get up. My arms wouldn’t hold.
The wolf’s shadow fell over me.
I rolled onto my back and saw it standing above me, massive and gray and panting, steam curling from its mouth.
Its body lowered over mine and I felt the heat of it through the shift, felt its weight pressing down, felt its muzzle push against my neck and inhale, long and deep, tasting my scent.
Its body shifted. Adjusted. Its hindquarters moved and I felt the intent of it with a clarity that turned my blood to ice.
I screamed.
The black wolf hit the gray wolf like a boulder thrown from a cliff.
The weight vanished from my body as the two of them collided and rolled, a tangle of fur and teeth and blood that crashed through the underbrush and into the base of an oak.
The impact shook snow from the branches and they were on their feet instantly, circling, snarling, two enormous wolves facing each other in a clearing that smelled like blood and pine and terror.
The gray wolf was bigger. Broader through the shoulders and chest, built with the dense, scarred musculature of something that had been fighting for decades.
It lunged first and caught the black wolf by the throat and drove it sideways into a tree.
The black wolf yelped and twisted free, leaving fur and blood behind on the bark.
They circled. The gray wolf lunged again and its jaws found the black wolf’s shoulder and clamped down.
I heard bone crunch. The black wolf howled and its claws raked down the gray wolf’s flank, opening four long gashes that poured blood onto the snow.
The gray wolf held. Bit deeper. The black wolf slammed its body sideways, driving them both into a fallen trunk.
The gray wolf lost its grip. The black wolf drove upward, its jaws closing on the gray wolf’s belly. It bit down and tore and the gray wolf screamed, a sound so human it raised every hair on my body, and dark blood spilled across the snow.
The gray wolf staggered. Its back legs buckled.
It snapped at the black wolf’s face, caught its ear, tore through the cartilage.
The black wolf didn’t let go. It held the belly wound and shook its head, tearing the gash wider, and the gray wolf’s snarls turned to whines turned to something desperate and terrified.
The gray wolf broke free. Lurched toward the deeper forest trailing blood. The black wolf pursued, three strides, four, then its injured shoulder gave out and it crashed to the snow.
The gray wolf fled. Its howl faded through the trees until the forest swallowed it.
I lay in the snow where I’d fallen, my shift torn, my lip bleeding, my body shaking so hard my teeth rattled.
The black wolf lay in the clearing ten feet away, its sides heaving, blood matting its dark fur and staining the snow beneath it.
Its shoulder was twisted wrong. Its ear was torn nearly in half.
The gashes down its flank were deep enough to show white bone beneath the muscle.
Then the black wolf began to change.
The sound came first. That wet, organic cracking I’d heard minutes ago when Erik’s body had broken apart. Bones snapping. Joints grinding. Fur receding into skin.
The muzzle shortened, flattened, became a jaw and a mouth and a nose. The paws elongated into hands — scarred, familiar hands that I knew the feel of on my skin. The spine compressed. The ears rounded. The black fur thinned and disappeared.
Dietrich lay naked in the snow.
His left shoulder was dislocated, the joint bulging wrong beneath the skin.
His side was torn open in four parallel gashes that ran from his ribs to his hip.
His ear bled where the cartilage had been torn through.
His skin was gray with shock and blood loss and he was shaking, full-body tremors that made his teeth chatter.
He lay on his side with his eyes closed and his arms curled against his chest and he looked nothing like the man who’d kissed my neck over breakfast and everything like a wounded animal left to die in the snow.
I stared at him.
Dietrich was the black wolf. The black wolf was Dietrich.
The man who’d carried me out of the forest. The wolf that had sent Klaus’s dogs screaming. The man who’d hovered his hands over my sleeping body. The wolf I’d dreamed about — the one that had chased me through moonlit clearings, the one that had become him while pleasure tore through me.
The same. They were the same.
He was a werewolf. Like his father. The same blood, the same magic, the same creature built to hunt women like me.
They hunt us by scent, by instinct, by a hatred they cannot choose to put down.
I’d let one inside me. Kissed one and touched one and guided one into my body. Lain in the dark and listened to one breathe and felt safe.
The fury arrived like a wave. He’d lied. Every single day. Every touch, every silence, every careful deflection, lies built on lies built on the foundational lie that he was human.
But he was bleeding in the snow. And the blood was real and spreading and his skin was turning the color of old ash and his breathing was getting shallow and if I stood here being angry while he bled out I’d be the woman who let a man die because she was too furious to help.
I was a healer. Whatever else was true, that was still true.
“Can you walk?” I demanded, kneeling beside him.
His eyes opened — amber, glazed, unfocused. “Talia ...” he croaked, scraped raw by the transformation.
“Don’t,” I snapped. “Don’t say my name like that. Can you walk?”
He tried to push himself up with his good arm.
Collapsed. Tried again. Got his knees beneath him.
Standing was worse — he swayed and nearly went down and I caught him, bracing my shoulder under his good arm, staggering under his weight.
His skin was so hot against mine it felt feverish, that impossible furnace heat pouring off him even now, even half dead.
“Move,” I ordered. “One foot in front of the other. Don’t think about it. Just move.”
We moved. Slowly. Agonisingly. He leaned on me with his good arm across my shoulders and I held his wrist and braced his weight against my hip and we stumbled through the snow.
Every few steps he’d stagger and I’d have to plant my feet and hold him upright and the rage made it easier because I was too angry to let him fall.
“You’re a werewolf.” I hauled him over a fallen branch through gritted teeth.
He said nothing. His breathing was labored and wet.
“Your father is a werewolf. You are a werewolf. The black wolf that saved me in the forest was you. The wolf that’s been howling outside the cottage every night was you.” I adjusted my grip on his wrist and pulled him forward. “You’ve been lying to me since the moment I opened my eyes in that bed.”
“I was ...” He coughed. Blood flecked his lips. “ — protecting you.”
“From what?” I snarled, dragging him around a boulder. “From the truth? From knowing what I was sleeping beside?”
He flinched. Even half conscious, even bleeding out, the words found their mark.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he managed. “If you knew what I was, you’d have ...”
“Run?” I finished for him. “I tried to run. You barred the door. I tried again and you dragged me back. So don’t pretend my choices mattered to you.”
He went quiet. Just the sound of his breathing and our feet crunching through the snow and the occasional wet sound from his wounds that told me he was bleeding faster than he should.
The cottage appeared through the trees. The doorway gaped open, the door still lying in the snow where my Forceweaving had blown it that morning. Through the gap I could see the wreckage, shattered shelves, broken table, rubble where the wall had crumbled.
A lifetime ago we’d been laughing about that door.
I dragged him through the threshold. He collapsed on the floor and I quickly got out of the way before his weight would have taken us both down. He hit the stone and groaned and curled around his injured shoulder and the blood from his side started pooling on the packed earth.
I stood over him breathing hard, my shift soaked with his blood, my bare feet numb, my hands shaking with cold and exhaustion and a fury that hadn’t dimmed one degree since I’d watched his bones reform.
“You lied to me.” I broke on the last word.
He looked up at me from the floor. His eyes were glazed with pain. The same eyes I’d looked into last night while he was inside me.
“I know,” he whispered. And closed his eyes.
I stood there for ten seconds. Fifteen. Let the fury burn.
Then I went to the shelf, what was left of it, and started looking for anything that had survived. Grandmother’s salve in a jar that had rolled under the remains of the table, unbroken. Clean cloth from the chest in the corner. Water from the water pail.
I knelt beside him and started cleaning the wounds on his side. My hands were steady because I was a healer and healing was what I did, even when I wanted to hit the patient more than save him.
“This is going to hurt,” I warned, pressing cloth against the deepest gash.
He hissed through his teeth. His hand found my knee — reached for it blindly, instinctively, seeking contact the way a drowning man reaches for anything solid.
I let him hold on and cleaned each gash with care, packed the deepest one with salve, and wrapped his torso in bandages torn from the cleanest cloth I could find.
His shoulder needed setting — the joint was out and swelling fast. I braced my foot against his ribs and gripped his arm and pulled, and the pop when it went back in made us both gasp.
He lay on the floor while I worked, his eyes half-closed, his hand still on my knee. The tremors were easing as his body started doing whatever impossible thing werewolf bodies did, knitting, healing, repairing damage that should take weeks in hours.
“Talia,” he rasped when I’d finished wrapping the last bandage.
“I’m not ready to talk to you,” I replied, wiping his blood from my hands onto my ruined shift. “I’m not ready to look at you. I’m especially not ready to hear you explain why lying to me for weeks was actually some noble act of protection.”
He went quiet.
“You’re going to heal,” I continued, standing and looking down at him. “Because apparently that’s what your kind does. And when you’re healed, you and I are going to have a conversation. A real one. With the truth this time. All of it.”
“All of it,” he repeated.
“Every lie. Every omission. Every time you let me believe something that wasn’t true.” I held his gaze. “Starting with the night you carried me out of the forest. Starting with why a werewolf, a creature bred to hunt blood-keepers, saved one instead of killing her.”
His eyes held mine. Amber and bright and full of something I didn’t want to examine because examining it might soften the rage, and I needed the rage. The rage was the only clean thing I had left.
“Rest,” I ordered. “I’ll keep watch.”
I crossed to the corner where the grimoire lay half-buried in rubble. Pulled it free, brushed the dust from the cover, and sat down against the wall with the book in my lap.
He lay on the floor between me and the ruined doorway, bleeding and healing and watching me with wolf’s eyes in a man’s face.
I opened the grimoire and started reading.
I had questions. The book had answers.
And Dietrich could lie there and bleed while I found them.