Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
The bark exploded off the pine in a shower of white splinters that caught the pre-dawn light like sparks.
I gathered the threads again. Aimed at the next tree. Pushed.
The blast went wide and shattered a branch ten feet above where I’d been aiming. I swore under my breath, wiped the blood from my nose with the back of my hand, and gathered the threads again.
I’d been out here for an hour. Maybe longer.
The snow around me was littered with debris, broken branches, scattered bark, a boulder I’d cracked clean in half with a blast that had drained me so completely I’d had to sit in the snow for ten minutes before my hands stopped shaking.
Beyond the clearing, through a gap in the pines, the frozen lake glinted flat and gray in the early light, the same lake I’d nearly drowned in, its surface unmarked, patient, pretending it hadn’t tried to kill me.
I kept my back to it and trained facing the cottage.
My shift was soaked with sweat despite the cold.
My fingers were raw. The humming beneath my skin had gone from a roar to a whisper, the well running low.
I didn’t stop. Stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering, and remembering meant the sound of bones cracking on a forest floor and gold eyes in a wolf’s skull and the taste of a man’s tears on my lips while he —
I threw another blast. It connected this time — hit the trunk dead center and sent a crack running up the wood that split the tree nearly to the crown. Better. Still too much force, not enough precision, but better.
The back of my neck prickled.
I didn’t turn around. I didn’t need to. My body had learned to register him before my mind did, the shift in the air, the warmth that shouldn’t carry this far, the scent of pine and smoke and the animal musk underneath that my stupid, treacherous body still leaned toward like a plant toward light.
I hated it. Hated that my skin knew him. Hated that the same nerve endings he’d woken with his shaking hands still fired when he stood within twenty feet of me. Hated that my body didn’t care about lies and wolves and broken trust, it just remembered his mouth on my collarbone and wanted more.
“You’re wasting power,” Dietrich observed from the doorway behind me.
“Go away,” I snapped, gathering the threads again.
“You’re hitting the tree but you’re using ten times the force you need. You’ll drain yourself in minutes in a real fight.”
“I don’t recall asking for your opinion.” I threw the blast. It went wild — caught a low-hanging branch and sent it spinning into the clearing where it buried itself in the snow like a javelin.
“You can’t prepare for my father by hitting trees,” he pressed.
I spun around. He was leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded, the bandages on his ribs visible through the gap in his shirt. His face was careful. Neutral. Giving nothing away except the truth of what he’d just told me.
“And what do you suggest?” I demanded.
“A moving target,” he replied. “One that fights back.”
“You’re injured.”
“I’m healing.” He pushed off the doorframe and stepped into the clearing. “And I’m still faster than anything you’ve fought before. If you can learn to hit me, you can hit him.”
I wanted to refuse. Wanted to tell him I’d rather train alone than spend another minute in his proximity, feeling his heat creep across the distance between us and hating myself for noticing.
“Fine,” I agreed instead, because he was right and because Erik was out there somewhere getting stronger and I didn’t have the luxury of letting pride outweigh survival.
He crossed to the far side of the clearing and settled into a stance I hadn’t seen before, weight forward, knees bent, hands loose at his sides.
Even injured, even holding back, the way he moved was wrong.
Too fluid. Too quiet. The body of a man wrapped around the reflexes of something faster and more dangerous.
“Come at me,” he invited.
I gathered the threads. Aimed. Threw.
He wasn’t there. He’d moved the instant before the blast left my hands, a sidestep so fast my eyes couldn’t track it, smooth and silent, and the Forceweaving hit nothing but empty air and buried itself in the snow behind where he’d been standing.
“You’re telegraphing,” he called from three feet to the left of where I’d aimed. “Your shoulders tense before you release. Your fingers curl. I can see it coming before you’ve committed.”
I threw again. He dodged again. I threw a third time and he circled behind me and I spun and threw wild and the blast caught the edge of the woodpile and sent logs rolling across the clearing.
“Stop aiming at where I am,” he instructed, moving back to his starting position without a hint of exertion. “Aim at where I’m going to be.”
“How am I supposed to know where you’re going to be?” I snarled, gathering the threads again with hands that were starting to tremble from the drain.
“Watch my feet,” he answered. “The body commits to a direction before the mind decides to move. The weight shifts. The lead foot turns. Read that and throw where the turn is taking me.”
I watched his feet. He moved. I saw the weight shift, left, his right foot pivoting, and I threw where the turn was carrying him.
The blast caught his shoulder and spun him sideways. He caught himself against a tree, his hand slapping bark, and looked at me with something that might have been surprise.
“Good,” he acknowledged, rubbing his shoulder.
We trained for hours. He moved and I threw and I missed and I missed and I missed and then I didn’t.
The pattern was agonizingly slow — nine misses for every hit, my Forceweaving scattering wide or arriving too late or hitting with so much force that I drained myself in a single blast. But the hits were coming more frequently.
By midmorning I was landing one in five. By noon, one in three.
He was teaching me without teaching me. Every dodge showed me what I’d done wrong.
Every hit showed me what I’d done right.
He never praised beyond a clipped “good” or “better” and never criticized beyond the practical, “too wide,” “too slow,” “you’re broadcasting again.
” The distance between us stayed useful.
Two people with a job to do and no room for anything else.
Until he corrected my stance.
I was planting too wide, he explained, which threw off my aim.
He stepped closer and his hand hovered near my hip, not touching, just indicating where my weight should shift.
But the heat of his palm radiated through the fabric of my dress and sank into the skin beneath and my concentration shattered like a jug hit with too much Forceweaving.
The blast went sideways. Took out a section of the woodpile I’d already damaged.
We both stared at the scattered logs.
“Sorry,” I muttered, stepping away from him. Putting distance between my body and the memory of his hands.
“Wider stance,” he repeated, moving back to his side of the clearing like nothing had happened. “Try again.”
We didn’t acknowledge it. Filed it away in the growing catalog of things we weren’t discussing, alongside the way I’d caught him watching my mouth while I drank from the waterskin, and how I’d turned away too fast when he’d pulled his shirt off to check his bandages, and that thickening in the air every time we got within arm’s reach and neither of us knew how to thin it out again.
I collapsed onto the stump near the cottage door and pressed my hands against my thighs to stop the shaking. My nose was bleeding again — a steady trickle that dripped onto my shift and wouldn’t stop. The Forceweaving had gone quiet beneath my skin, the well drained to its dregs.
Dietrich disappeared inside and came back with water and a cloth. He held them out without getting too close, letting me take them from his hands with a gap between our fingers.
“Drink,” he directed. “The power replenishes faster when you’re hydrated.”
I drank. Pressed the cloth against my nose and tilted my head back and stared at the gray sky and tried not to think about how natural it had felt, training with him.
How his body and mine had fallen into a rhythm, attack, dodge, adjust, attack, that felt less like combat practice and more like a conversation.
“How do you kill a werewolf?” I asked, still looking at the sky. “Not injure. Kill.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he sat on the ground near me, close enough to be heard, far enough to respect the boundary.
“Silver,” he began. “It burns on contact. Like pressing a hot coal against your skin. A silver blade will slow us down, weaken the healing. But it won’t kill unless you get it into the heart or sever the spine.
” He paused. “And getting close enough to a werewolf to use a blade means getting close enough to die.”
“What about fire?” I pressed.
“Can work,” he conceded, picking up a twig and turning it between his fingers. “If you can trap the wolf in it long enough. The healing is fast but not infinite, sustained burning will overwhelm it eventually. But fire is wild. Hard to aim. Hard to control in a fight where the wolf is moving.”
“And Forceweaving?” I lowered my head and looked at him. “What can my power do to a werewolf?”
His eyes met mine and held. “Everything,” he answered quietly.
“A focused blast to the skull will crack it open. Enough sustained pressure on the chest will collapse the lungs. A precise, concentrated strike to the heart ...” He mimed it with his hand, a single pointed thrust toward his own sternum. “The heart stops. The wolf dies.”
“But I’d have to be precise,” I replied.