Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
The wolves were tearing each other apart in the center of the clearing.
But this fight was different from the last one.
I could feel it, Dietrich’s strength, amplified by the mating, my Forceweaving running through his blood like liquid fire.
The black wolf was faster than before. Harder.
His jaws clamped down on the gray wolf’s shoulder and I heard bone crack and Erik screamed, high and shocked, the sound of a predator discovering it was no longer the strongest thing in the forest.
The mating had worked.
Erik threw Dietrich off and lunged for his throat. The black wolf dodged — not desperately, but cleanly, with a speed that left Erik’s jaws snapping at empty air. Then Dietrich drove forward and his teeth found the gray wolf’s flank and tore, and the blood that sprayed across the snow was Erik’s.
But Erik was cunning. He feinted left, spun right, and his claws raked across the axe wound one of Klaus’s men had opened in Dietrich’s shoulder.
The black wolf staggered. Erik pressed the advantage — not with strength but with experience, with decades of knowing exactly where a wounded body would fail.
Pain. Dietrich’s shoulder buckling. His determination burning through it. The wolf refusing to go down.
I couldn’t just watch. I had Klaus’s men to deal with first.
I turned my back on the wolves.
Klaus stood fifteen feet away. Axe gripped in both hands. His face twisted beyond recognition — hatred and terror and something unhinged burning in his eyes. He’d stayed behind while the others scattered.
“They’re distracted,” he observed, nodding toward the wolves. “Your demon is wounded. When he dies, I’m taking your head.”
I looked at him. At this man who’d been the shadow over my entire life. Who’d drowned a girl for loving the wrong boy. Who’d whispered poison into every ear in the village until the whole town believed I was something evil. Who’d put a noose around my neck and pulled it tight and watched me choke.
“You can’t even stand,” Klaus taunted, raising the axe. “This ends now.”
He swung.
I cracked open.
It wasn’t Forceweaving. It was something older, something that lived in my blood, in the marrow of my bones, in the line of women who’d carried this gift for generations.
Grandmother. Sophia. Every blood-keeper who’d ever been called witch and burned or drowned or hanged for the crime of being born different.
It surged through me like fire through dry wood. Not the careful threading I’d been practicing. Not the controlled blasts the grimoire described. This was raw. This was rage given form.
I caught the axe in midair, with something invisible that wrapped around the blade and held it frozen. Klaus’s arms jerked to a stop. He stared at the axe motionless in the air, inches from my face.
“Anna was just seventeen,” I stated, rising to my feet. The power held me steady, filled the hollowed-out spaces with something hot and ancient. “She loved the wrong boy. That was her only mistake and you drowned her.”
“She committed a crime ...”
“She was a CHILD.” I ripped the axe from his hands. It spun through the air and buried itself in a tree. Klaus stumbled forward, empty-handed, suddenly defenseless.
I reached out with the power and grabbed his body. Lifted him off the ground. His boots left the snow and he rose, jerking upward on invisible strings, no rope, no hands, nothing touching him. His body twisted and writhed, arms clawing at nothing, legs kicking against air that wouldn’t let him go.
The vision.
The one from when I was ten years old. The man in the air who wasn’t flying and wasn’t falling. The invisible pressure. The face going red. It wasn’t a nightmare. It was a promise.
“You held Anna under the water until she stopped breathing,” I told him, and the words came out cold, nothing like the woman who’d been begging thirty seconds ago. “You watched a girl thrash and scream. And you went home and ate your supper. And came to me with your disgusting offer. Remember?”
“Let me down!” He was screaming now. All the bravado stripped away. A coward who’d only ever been brave with a mob at his back. “Please! Have mercy!”
“Did you show Anna mercy?” I asked.
The pressure built between my palms. This was not the threading. This was power that was older and wilder.
His face went red. Then purple. His eyes bulged and his mouth stretched open in a scream that never made it past his throat.
His head burst.
His body stayed suspended for one breath longer, still held by the invisible force. Then I released it and it dropped and hit the snow like something emptied out. Blood and worse soaking into the white ground.
The vision, fulfilled. More than twenty-eight years later.
I looked at what I’d done and felt nothing that resembled guilt.
The power should have been fading. Should have been running dry after the blast that levitated Klaus and the force that burst his skull.
But it wasn’t. It was growing, fed by the bond, fed by the mating, fed by revenge.
Whatever ceiling had been containing my Forceweaving for weeks of training, the exhaustion, the collapse after every precise threading, it was gone.
Shattered by what I’d done and not rebuilding.
I could feel the difference in my bones.
This wasn’t the woman who’d bled from the nose after cracking a single boulder.
This was beyond anything I’d done. Power the grimoire had warned about in passages I had not understood: a blood-keeper reaching her full power.
I’d reached it. And it was terrifying.
A sound behind me made me turn. Jakob was dragging himself through the snow, his shattered arm trailing behind him, leaving a smear of red where he crawled.
I followed him.
He heard me coming. Looked over his shoulder with eyes that were all white around the edges.
“Please,” he gasped. “I didn’t. I was just following Klaus ...”
“You got Anna pregnant,” I corrected, walking slowly. He wasn’t going anywhere. “You loved her in the dark and denied her in the daylight. And when they dragged her to the river, you stood with your arms crossed and watched.”
“I didn’t have a choice ...”
“She didn’t have a choice.” I caught his ankle with the Forceweaving and dragged him backward through the snow.
He screamed. His broken arm caught on a root and the sound made the birds scatter.
“She was carrying your child. When you refused to help her, she had to do something. And then you pointed the finger at her.”
I dragged him to the creek. The water was shallow, four feet, maybe less, running dark beneath a crust of broken ice. Cold enough to stop a heart. Cold enough to steal every thought and replace it with the single screaming knowledge that you were going to die.
The way Anna had died.
I grabbed his hair in fist and forced his face into the water.
He thrashed. His good hand slapped at the frozen bank. His legs kicked. His body bucked with the desperate, animal strength of something that didn’t want to drown. Bubbles rose from his submerged face, fast at first, frantic, then slower.
I held him there. And I counted.
One. For the night he’d told Anna he loved her.
Two. For the morning he’d denied it.
Three. For the finger he’d pointed.
Four. For the arms he’d crossed while she went under.
Five. For the bubbles that had risen from Anna’s mouth while the village watched.
Six. For the silence that followed.
Seven. For the supper he’d eaten that night.
His legs stopped kicking.
I let go. His body slumped into the creek face down and the water ran around him and didn’t care.
I stood and wiped my hands on my dress. For Anna. All of it.
The rest of them were still in the trees. I could hear them crashing through the undergrowth, trying to find a way home through woods they’d never learned because they’d always been too afraid to venture past the tree line. They sounded like cattle. Stupid and loud and bumping into everything.
I went after them.
I found them one by one. Behind boulders, behind logs, pressed flat against tree trunks like the bark would save them.
I killed them the way you pull weeds out of a garden.
No speeches. No explanations. They knew what they’d done and I wasn’t interested in hearing them beg because Anna had begged and Sophia had begged and I had begged on my knees in front of Klaus and none of it had ever mattered to any of them.
My nose was bleeding by the third one. A steady stream running down my chin and dripping onto the snow and I kept going.
My vision swam between kills and my legs were getting heavier and each time I used the Forceweaving it cost me something I couldn’t get back.
But Dietrich’s strength was feeding mine through the connection and I drew on it without asking and felt his willingness pour through.
Take what you need. Take everything. Just come back alive.
I came back alive. They didn’t.
When the last one was done I stood in the silent forest with blood on my hands and blood on my face and blood on grandmother’s dress and I breathed. My nose was still bleeding and my head was pounding from where Klaus had hit me and every muscle in my body felt wrung out.
Then something hit me and I stumbled. Dietrich had the gray wolf pinned.
I could feel it — his jaws clamped on his father’s throat, the gray wolf thrashing and twisting under him trying to break free and failing.
He was winning. He was actually winning and I needed to get there before the fight turned again.
I ran.
The black wolf stood over the gray, jaws locked on his father’s throat, not killing but containing.
Erik thrashed and snarled but Dietrich held firm, the mating-strength visible in the way his muscles didn’t shake, the way his grip didn’t falter, the way his body absorbed Erik’s desperate clawing without yielding an inch.