Chapter 22 #3
Someone was screaming. Not from pain but from pure terror.
One of the men who’d been thrown clear was crawling backward through the snow staring at me with his mouth hanging open and the whites of his eyes showing like a spooked horse.
Another was on his knees crossing himself over and over so fast his hands blurred.
A third was just standing there with piss running down his leg and his torch sizzling in the snow where he’d dropped it.
“Daemon,” one of them whispered. Then louder, splintering: “DAEMON! Libera nos a malo, libera nos a malo, libera nos ...”
“Shut your mouth, Gregor!” Klaus roared from somewhere behind me. He was on the ground. The blast had thrown him back but he was already getting up.
I turned and threw the Forceweaving at him before he could stand. It hit him in the chest and launched him backward into the snow. He skidded ten feet and slammed against a fallen log and stayed down.
The clearing erupted. Men who could still stand ran in every direction.
Some crashed into each other trying to get to the trees.
One tripped over Jakob’s body and went face first into the snow and scrambled up and kept running.
The man who’d been praying in Latin hadn’t moved, just kept crossing himself and muttering with his eyes squeezed shut like if he couldn’t see me I couldn’t see him.
I got to my feet. My legs were shaking. The rope burns on my neck throbbed. My hands were bloody from clawing at the noose.
But I could breathe. I could breathe and I was angry.
The fear was gone. The grieving was gone.
The begging was done. The grief was still there.
It would always be there, Thomas’s small body, the smell of Emma’s soap in his hair.
But a fury had shifted beneath it. A fury that had been sleeping since the first time my power woke, since the first time I’d tasted what it felt like to push back instead of being pushed.
The Forceweaving crackled around my hands. Blue-gold threads visible in the morning air. The men who hadn’t run yet froze where they stood. The praying stopped. Even the wind seemed to hold still.
“I am not a demon.” I straightened my spine and let them look at me. Let them see the rope burns on my neck and the blood on my hands and the power sparking between my fingers. “I am a witch. I am a blood-keeper. And you are going to listen to me.”
“I won’t listen to ...” Klaus was pulling himself up against the log.
I threw a threading that hit the snow at his feet. The ground exploded upward and he fell back down.
“I am done,” I roared, “being interrupted by men who think I don’t matter.”
The clearing went silent. Even the man with wet trousers stopped shaking.
“I didn’t kill Thomas,” I declared, and let it carry.
“There is a wolf in this forest. A gray wolf. Larger than any natural animal. The same creature that killed my husband and six men sixteen years ago. The same creature that has been hunting in these woods longer than most of you have been alive.”
“Lies ...” Klaus started.
I threw another threading. This one cracked the log he was leaning against clean in half. Both pieces fell away from him and he sat in the snow with nothing holding him up and nothing left on his face but fear.
“That wolf killed Thomas,” I continued. “Killed him somewhere in the forest and dragged his body to my doorstep to frame me. To bring you here. To turn you into weapons against me while he watches from the shadows.” I looked at each face in turn.
“You were played. Every single one of you. Manipulated by a monster who knew exactly what you’d do when you found a dead child on a witch’s doorstep. ”
“If this wolf exists ...” Klaus managed through chattering teeth, “, where is it now?”
The howl split the air.
Deep. Resonant. Triumphant. The sound of a predator watching its trap close perfectly.
The gray wolf stepped from the trees.
It was enormous in the daylight. Twice the size of any natural wolf. Silver-gray fur with darker markings across its shoulders. Yellow eyes burning with intelligence, with malice, with satisfaction.
Its muzzle was still dark with Thomas’s blood.
The mob saw it and the panic hit them like a wave. Men who’d been ready to hang me were now backing into each other, tripping over their own feet, grabbing at weapons they didn’t know how to use against something that big.
“That’s him,” I told them. My neck was burning from the rope and my hands were bloody and I didn’t care what they thought of me anymore. “That’s the monster who killed Emma’s son.”
The gray wolf’s lips pulled back from stained teeth. Almost a smile. Then it lunged at the mob.
Men scattered screaming. The gray wolf tore through the clearing, snapping at legs, driving them apart the way a herding dog splits a flock.
It wasn’t killing them. It was playing. Enjoying the panic, the noise, the chaos of grown men falling over themselves to run from the thing they should have been afraid of all along instead of stringing up a woman.
I was watching the gray wolf when the blow came.
Klaus hit me across the back of the head with a piece of the log I’d split in half.
I went down face first in the snow and the world went bright white and then spotty and I could feel blood running warm down the back of my neck and into the collar of grandmother’s dress.
I tried to get up and my arms buckled and I went down again.
The gray wolf stopped.
I lifted my head from the snow and it was standing forty feet away and its nostrils were flaring and its whole body had gone rigid. My blood. Blood-keeper blood, open and flowing, the scent pouring off me in the cold air.
It forgot the mob. Forgot the game. Those yellow eyes fixed on me and it started walking toward me with that slow, deliberate stride I’d seen before. The stride of something that had stopped playing.
“See!” Klaus was shouting behind me, backing away, pointing at me and the wolf with a shaking hand. “See how the beast comes to her! She commands it! She called it here! The witch and the wolf are one!”
The gray wolf was twenty feet away. Fifteen. Its mouth was open and I could see Thomas’s blood on its teeth and I tried to summon the Forceweaving but my head was splitting and the power was guttering and I couldn’t hold the threads together.
Ten feet.
The black wolf hit it from the side.
It came out of the trees so fast the snow sprayed in a wall behind it.
The black wolf slammed into the gray wolf’s flank and they went rolling across the clearing in a tangle of teeth and claws and fur, black and gray.
The gray wolf snarled, twisted, got its jaws around the black wolf’s shoulder.
The black wolf drove its teeth into the gray wolf’s throat and they crashed through a snowbank and kept fighting.
The men should have run. Some did. The rest grabbed what they had, axes, pitchforks, torches, and went after both wolves.
They didn’t care which was which. Two monsters in their clearing and they wanted both dead.
One of them buried an axe in the black wolf’s left shoulder while it was locked with the gray wolf.
Another drove a pitchfork into the gray wolf’s flank.
A torch came down on the black wolf’s back and the fur singed and the smell of it filled the clearing.
The gray wolf ripped free. The axe wound and the pitchfork and the mob pressing in from every side had broken the fight apart. The gray wolf scrambled backward, bleeding from its throat and its flank, and bolted for the trees. It was gone in seconds. Swallowed by the forest.
The black wolf stood in the middle of the clearing with an axe wound in its shoulder and burns on its back and men closing in from three sides.
It didn’t attack. Its golden eyes tracked the tree line where the gray wolf had disappeared and I could feel Dietrich, the pull, the need to chase, to end it, to finish his father before he healed and came back.
The men were nothing to him. The gray wolf was everything.
But the men were circling. Raising their weapons. Getting brave because one wolf was easier than two.
Kill them. I pushed it toward Dietrich with everything I had. They tried to hang me. They’re going to kill you. Kill them.
The black wolf turned.
It happened fast. The man with the axe swung and the black wolf caught his arm in its jaws and I heard the bone go.
The man with the pitchfork drove it forward and the black wolf twisted sideways and the tines missed and then its teeth were in the man’s leg and he went down screaming.
A third rushed from behind and the black wolf kicked backward with its hind legs and the man flew into a tree and didn’t get up.
The remaining mob scattered. Running for the trees, dropping weapons, scrambling over each other. Klaus and his remaining followers ran deeper into the forest. The wrong direction. Away from the village path, toward the northern ridge.
The black wolf stood in the clearing panting. Blood running from the axe wound. Burns across its back. Its golden eyes found mine.
Go. I pushed myself up to my knees. My head was pounding and blood was still running down my neck but I was breathing and the Forceweaving was coming back, flickering between my fingers. Go kill your father.
The black wolf pinned me with its gaze for one more second. Then it turned and disappeared into the trees after the gray.
Emma and Heinrich hadn’t moved. Still kneeling at the clearing’s edge, still clutching Thomas between them.
I stumbled toward them on unsteady legs.
“Emma.” I could hardly get it out. “Heinrich. There’s another path. Through the eastern woods. It’ll take you back to the village safely.”
Emma looked at me. Her eyes red and swollen and utterly destroyed. “You — you didn’t ...”
“I didn’t,” I confirmed. “Go. Before the fight moves this way. Take Thomas home. Bury him properly. Mourn him.”
“The others ...” Heinrich’s granite facade had cracked. “Klaus and his men went the wrong way ...”
“I know.” I looked toward the northern ridge where they’d disappeared.
I felt nothing — empty of pity, empty of concern.
These were the men who’d drowned Anna. Who’d dragged me by the hair.
Who’d put a noose around my neck and kicked me while I begged.
“They chose their path. Let the forest decide what happens on it.”
Heinrich stared at me. Then nodded once.
Emma took one step. Then stopped. Turned back with something new burning through the grief. Something old and dark and iron-hard.
“Promise me,” she demanded, low and fierce. A mother’s fury dressed in funeral black. “Promise me you’ll make that beast pay for what it did to my boy.”
I looked at Thomas. At his small still face pressed against her collarbone. At the blood dried dark on his clothes.
“Emma ...” I started.
“Don’t.” She cut me off. Tears ran fresh but her mouth was a hard flat line. “Don’t tell me to grieve and move on. Don’t tell me God will sort it out. I’ve prayed every night of my life and God let that creature rip my son apart.” Her body shook. “So I’m not asking God. I’m asking you.”
I held her gaze and felt what she wanted.
“I promise,” I declared. “I will hunt that creature down. And I will make it suffer in ways it didn’t know a body could suffer.
I will break it apart piece by piece until it’s screaming for a death I won’t give it.
Until I’m good and ready. Until it’s felt every single thing Thomas felt and worse. ” I bared my teeth. “For Thomas.”
Emma’s chin trembled. A sound came out of her that wasn’t quite a sob and wasn’t quite relief.
She reached out with one hand, the one not holding her dead son, and gripped my wrist. Her fingers were ice cold and strong as rope. She squeezed once. Hard enough to bruise.
“On your life,” she whispered. “Swear it on your life, Red.”
“On my life.” I didn’t flinch. “I swear it.”
She held on for one more heartbeat. Then let go.
She turned. Heinrich put his arm around her and they walked toward the eastern path. Toward safety. Toward home. Toward burying their child.
I watched them go until the trees took them. Then I turned toward the woods where the wolves had disappeared.