Chapter 18 #2
“Very precise,” he confirmed. “A wild blast will knock a werewolf back but it won’t kill one.
My father took your Forceweaving at close range in the cottage and walked it off.
The power has to be focused, a spear, not a wave.
Everything you have, concentrated into a point no bigger than your fist, aimed exactly where it needs to go. ”
“I can’t do that yet,” I admitted, wiping the blood from my nose.
“That’s why we’re training,” he reminded me.
I consulted the grimoire over the last of the bread. Turned to the Forceweaving combat pages and read while I chewed, tracing the instructions with a blood-crusted fingertip.
“The book describes something called threading,” I announced, studying the diagram, golden threads twisted together into a tight spiral, the point narrowed to a needle.
“Gathering the force into a single concentrated line instead of throwing it wide. Like the difference between throwing a bucket of water and forcing it through a nozzle.”
“Makes sense,” he acknowledged from where he sat. “Can you do it?”
“I don’t know.” I studied the diagram. The technique required holding the threads together under enormous pressure, keeping them from scattering while simultaneously aiming and releasing.
Every instinct would tell me to let go, to throw wide, to explode instead of pierce.
“The book says it’s the hardest technique. Most blood-keepers never master it.”
“You’re not most blood-keepers,” he observed.
I looked up sharply. His face was neutral but his eyes held something that wasn’t neutral at all, a fierce, quiet certainty that looked like faith.
I looked away before it could do any more damage than it already had.
“Again,” I declared, standing and brushing crumbs from my shift. “Slower this time. I want to try the threading.”
We trained through the afternoon. The threading was impossible at first, the threads scattered every time I tried to compress them, the pressure too great, my focus too fragmented. The blasts came out wide and weak, dissipating before they reached him.
“Tighter,” Dietrich called, dodging a blast that hardly ruffled his hair. “You’re letting them spread.”
“I’m trying,” I ground out through clenched teeth.
“Don’t try,” he countered, circling to my left. “The book said separate emotion from execution. You’re angry and the anger is blowing the threads apart. Pull the rage out of the weaving and use your will instead.”
“Easy for you to say,” I snapped, gathering the threads again. “You’re not the one whose ...”
I stopped. He was right. The anger was a fuel but it was also a fire, too hot, too wild, burning through the threads before I could shape them.
I needed cold. I needed precision. I needed the part of me that was a healer, methodical, exact, clinical, instead of the part of me that wanted to burn the world down.
I gathered the threads. Pulled the anger out of them the way I’d pull poison from a wound, carefully, deliberately, leaving behind only the clean golden force.
Twisted them together. Tighter. Tighter.
Felt them resist, felt them vibrate with the pressure, felt the narrowing point form between my palms.
I aimed at the tree behind him. Released.
The blast punched a hole through the trunk. Clean. Round. The size of my fist. The tree groaned and tilted and fell with a crash that shook snow from every branch in the clearing.
We both stared at the fallen tree. At the hole through its center, the edges smooth, a wound that looked surgical instead of explosive.
“There it is,” Dietrich breathed, and his whole face opened up.
I looked at my hands. They were shaking. My nose was pouring blood and my vision was graying at the edges and I’d used almost everything I had left. But I’d done it. The threading. A spear instead of a wave.
I swayed. My knees buckled.
He was there before I hit the ground, catching my arm, bracing my weight, holding me upright with one hand while the other pressed the cloth against my bleeding nose.
I leaned into him without meaning to. My body tilted toward his warmth the way a plant tilts toward the one crack of light in a dark room.
My shoulders were against his chest, my face inches from the hollow of his throat where his pulse beat steady and warm beneath the beard.
I could smell him. Pine and smoke and the musk underneath that still made something in my belly tighten despite every argument I’d had with myself about it.
My body didn’t care about arguments. My body remembered his hands and his mouth and the sound he’d made when I’d sunk down onto him and it wanted, it wanted —
I pulled away. Stepped back so fast I nearly fell again.
“I’m fine,” I insisted, too quickly.
“You’re about to collapse,” he corrected, but he let me go.
His hand dropped to his side and curled into a fist and I knew, knew from the way his teeth clenched and his nostrils flared, that my scent had done the same thing to him that his had done to me.
That the space between wanting and having was destroying us both from opposite sides.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, and walked past him into the cottage.
I sat on the bed and buried my face in the pillow and waited for my heart to stop hammering.
My body was a traitor. Sixteen years of celibacy and it had woken up and now it wouldn’t go back to sleep.
Every time he was near me, every time his heat reached my skin, every time I caught the animal smell of him beneath the pine, it responded. Tightened. Remembered. Wanted.
I wanted to hate him for it. Wanted to blame the wolf, the instinct, some magic in his blood that called to mine.
But the truth was simpler and uglier than that.
The truth was that I’d touched him and he’d trembled and I’d felt powerful and tender and alive in a way I hadn’t felt since William, and my body didn’t care that the man it wanted turned into a wolf when the moon rose.
My body just wanted to feel that way again.
I pulled the pillow over my head and refused.
He rebuilt the shelf that evening while I read by the fire.
I hadn’t asked him to start tonight. He just did it — measuring wood with his hands, cutting joints with the knife, fitting the pieces together with quiet, practiced movements.
His hands knew wood the way my hands knew herbs.
The work came from his body, not his mind, and I found myself watching despite my best efforts not to.
The way his forearms flexed when he drove the pegs in. The width of his hands, the scars across the knuckles. The concentration in his face — brow furrowed, lower lip caught between his teeth, eyes tracking the wood the way they’d tracked my body in the clearing.
I looked away. Turned a page I hadn’t read.
“The grimoire mentions the Fae,” I announced, because talking about ancient mythology was safer than watching his hands and remembering where they’d been.
“Hmm?” He didn’t look up from the shelf.
“The source of everything. Blood-keepers, Sanguinarians, werewolves, all of it traces back to the Fae. Ancient beings who were here before humans. Their presence seeped into the earth and woke the blood of the women who lived closest to the old places. That’s what blood-keepers are, Fae power, diluted, carried in mortal blood.
” I traced the cramped handwriting with my finger.
“The Sanguinarians were the Fae’s mistake, they tried to pour their power directly into humans and the bodies died but wouldn’t stay dead.
Came back wrong. Beautiful and cold and needing blood to survive.
And the Sanguinarians made werewolves to hunt us down. ”
“My father told me the story when I was young,” he replied, fitting a shelf bracket into place. “Called the Fae the ones who started the fire and walked away from the blaze.”
“The grimoire says a blood-keeper who reaches her full power can kill a Sanguinarian,” I continued, reading. “Can kill a werewolf.” I looked up at him. “Can, in theory, wound a Fae.”
He stopped working. Turned to look at me.
“That’s why they hunt us,” I went on. “Your kind. The Sanguinarians. All of them. It’s not just hunger or instinct. It’s fear. Every generation, one of us is born stronger than the last. And we terrify the things that were designed to control us.”
His eyes caught the light. “Good.” He spoke so quietly it pulled me in. “Be terrifying.”
I looked at him a beat too long. Felt the pull — the magnetic draw of his body across the room, the tug in my chest, the hum beneath my skin that intensified when his eyes were on me. My body leaning toward his the way it always did, traitorous and relentless.
I looked down at the book. Turned another page.
He went back to the shelf.
We worked in our separate corners while the fire burned and the wind pushed against the boards and the night settled around us.
He finished the shelf and loaded grandmother’s surviving jars onto it, the ones that had escaped the fight intact, lining them up the way they’d been before, labels facing out.
I watched him place the sage jar, the one I’d opened that first day, the one that had dropped me to my knees with memory, on the bottom shelf, exactly where grandmother had always kept it.
He remembered where it went. He’d been living in this cottage for a long time and he remembered where an old woman had kept her sage.
The anger loosened. Just a fraction. Just enough to let something else breathe underneath it, something I still wouldn’t name but could no longer pretend I didn’t feel.
“Thank you,” I offered. “For the shelf.”
He nodded without turning around. “Tomorrow we train again. Earlier. Before your power drains from practice.”
“All right.”
“And I want to show you something about the wolf,” he added, his back still to me. “How it moves. The patterns. The tells you can read before it attacks. My father and I fight differently but the instincts are the same. If you learn to read me, you’ll be able to read him.”
“All right,” I repeated.
He crossed to the fire and lay down on his furs.
I stayed on the bed with the grimoire open in my lap, everything swirling through my mind, the Forceweaving entry, the combat techniques, the Fae passage, the memory of his hands on the shelf brackets and the sage jar in its proper place and the way he’d caught me when I fell and the way I’d leaned into his chest before I could stop myself.
Erik was out there. Healing. Coming back. And when he came, he’d be stronger and smarter and he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
I had to be ready. Had to be precise enough to thread the Forceweaving into a spear that could punch through a wolf’s skull. Had to be strong enough to do it more than once. Had to be fast enough to hit a target that moved like smoke.
And I had to do all of it while standing next to a man whose proximity turned my concentration to rubble and whose hands I could still feel on my skin every time I closed my eyes.
I closed the grimoire. Blew out the candle. Pulled the furs to my chin.
“Dietrich.” His name fell into the dark.
“Hmm.” The sound came from across the room, low and rumbling, and my body responded to it the way a string responds to a tuning fork, vibrating at a frequency I couldn’t control.
“When Erik comes back,” I began, staring at the ceiling. “If we fight him together and we win, what happens after?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve never thought past keeping you alive.”
“Start thinking,” I told him.
More quiet. Then — “What do you want to happen?”
I didn’t answer. Because the answer was complicated and contradictory and involved wanting things I wasn’t ready to want from a man I wasn’t ready to forgive, and the wanting was tangled up with the anger and the grief and the memory of Sophia under the birch tree and the question I couldn’t stop asking myself, was this love or was this instinct?
Was I choosing him or was my blood choosing his blood? Was there even a difference?
“I don’t know either,” I finally replied. “But I want to be alive to figure it out.”
“Then we train,” he concluded.
“We train,” I agreed.
The new door held. Somewhere in the forest, a wolf howled, and I didn’t know if it was wild or something else, and the not-knowing sat in my chest like a second heartbeat, familiar and frightening and impossible to ignore.
I closed my eyes. Him across the room. Steady and even and close.
I didn’t sleep for a long time.
And from the way his breathing never quite settled, neither did he.