Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Iwoke in the bed with his arm across my waist and the fire burned down to embers.
My body ached in places I didn’t know could ache.
The rope burns on my neck hurt badly. My skull felt hollow.
Emptied out. Everything I’d been running on, power, rage, grief, burned through, and now there was just the space where it used to be.
Dietrich’s heartbeat pulsed slow and steady against my spine.
His breathing was shallow. The wolf in him working to stitch his body back together, knitting torn muscle and cracked ribs from the inside out.
Slow. So much slower than it should have been.
The axe wounds and pitchfork punctures and the gray wolf’s teeth had taken everything he had.
I turned my head on the pillow and looked at him. His face was slack and bruised. Fever heat poured off his skin, the wolf’s healing running overtime. The bandages I’d wrapped around his ribs before we’d collapsed into bed were already seeping.
I should change them. Should get up. Should do something useful.
Instead I lay there and listened to him breathe and stared at the ceiling and tried to feel something.
Nothing came.
Eventually I got up. Because the fire needed tending and the bandages needed changing and the blood on the floor needed scrubbing and the world didn’t stop turning just because two people were lying in bed broken.
I built the fire. Heated water. Tore clean cloth from an old shift. Found what was left of grandmother’s herbs, yarrow for bleeding, comfrey for bones, calendula for the wounds too deep to close on their own.
I unwrapped his bandages and cleaned each wound the way I’d cleaned a thousand wounds before.
Packed the deepest ones with poultices. Wrapped them tight.
He stirred but didn’t wake — just made a low sound in his throat when I pressed too hard on the gash across his shoulder, and his pain spiked into me and settled.
I felt something else too. Underneath the pain. A hollow ache that had nothing to do with his body.
Erik.
His father was dead. The monster who’d haunted this forest for decades, who’d killed and caged women and destroyed his own son’s chance at a life. Dead. And Dietrich grieved him anyway. Not the monster. The man Erik might have been once, before the hunger took hold. The father he never got to have.
I didn’t say anything about it. Just cleaned his wounds and let my hands be gentle. Whatever I had left to give, I gave it.
When I finished, I pulled the furs over his chest and sat on the floor beside the bed with my back against the frame.
My hands were in my lap. I turned them over.
Looked at them. The blood was still there despite the scrubbing.
Caught in the creases. Under the nails. Brown now but I knew which stains belonged to whom.
Klaus’s blood on my right hand from when I’d torn the axe away.
Erik’s from grabbing his hair. My own from my nose — the price my body had paid for pushing the power past anything it was built to hold.
I’d killed men. In the flesh. With my hands and my power. I’d felt their bones break under invisible force. I’d watched the life drain from Erik’s eyes while I crushed his heart inside his chest. I’d walked through a forest of bodies and meant every single second of it.
I waited for the guilt to come. The horror. The shame that a good woman should feel after taking lives.
It didn’t come.
What came instead was Anna. Seventeen years old, thrashing under black water while Klaus held her down. Sophia in Erik’s cottage for two years, her songs going quiet one by one. William walking into the forest with a smile, coming back in pieces. Thomas. Small and broken on my doorstep.
Every woman they’d hurt. Every child they’d taken.
The grimoire’s words came back to me. Our purpose is not to hunt. Not to destroy. Only to witness and record.
Every woman who’d written in that book followed that rule. Watched the horror. Wrote it down. Hid what they were and prayed the hiding was enough.
I didn’t hide. I didn’t watch. I hunted the men who came for me and I destroyed them.
Maybe that didn’t make me good. Maybe the women before me were better people than I’d ever be. Kinder. Softer. More willing to forgive the world for eating them alive.
But they were dead. And I was sitting on a floor with blood under my nails and a mate sleeping in the bed behind me and a forest that was finally quiet.
I could live with that.
Dietrich slept for two days.
I kept the fire going. Changed his bandages. Fed him broth when he surfaced enough to swallow. Watched the wolf healing do its work, wounds shrinking hour by hour, new skin spreading over torn flesh.
His dreams bled into mine. Dark and tangled. Erik’s amber eyes. The gray wolf’s teeth. Thomas’s small body. The sound of his father’s heart stopping under my power.
I didn’t pull away from the dreams. Stayed with him through every one. Let him feel me there in the dark places.
On the second morning he woke properly. Sat up in bed and looked at me across the room. His color was better. The fever had broken sometime in the night. The worst wounds had closed to angry red scars.
“How long?” he rasped, his throat sounding like gravel.
“Two days.”
He stared at me. Then at his hands. Then at the bandages wrapped around his ribs and shoulder.
“You stayed.” Almost a question.
“Where else would I go?” I replied, crossing to sit on the edge of the bed.
His face softened. Deeper than a smile. He held out his hand and I took it. His fingers laced through mine.
“I felt him die,” he admitted, keeping his eyes on the far wall. “The old bond. Parent and child. It snapped when you ...” He stopped. Swallowed. “I felt it snap.”
“I know.”
“He was a monster.” Testing the shape of the words.
“Yes.”
“I still felt it.”
I squeezed his hand. “That’s because you’re not like him. You can grieve someone terrible and it doesn’t make you weak. It makes you the human half.”
“I’m not human,” he whispered roughly.
“The part of you that grieves is.”
He looked at me then. Everything he was feeling hit me at once, relief, sorrow, guilt, and underneath all of it his love for me. Still there. Still burning. Unchanged.
“You killed them all,” he observed, pulling me closer. Not an accusation.
“Yes.”
“How do you feel?”
I gave him the truth because I couldn’t give him anything else. “Like I’d do it again. Every single one. For Anna. For Sophia. For William and Thomas.” I paused. “Does that scare you?”
He tucked my head under his chin and wrapped his arms around me.
“It makes me glad you’re on my side,” he murmured against my hair.
On the fifth day, I went to the village.
Dietrich walked me to the tree line and stopped.
I looked back at him, standing between two pines with his hands at his sides and his expression uncertain in a way I’d never seen before.
He’d fought his father. He’d faced down a mob.
But walking into a village where people lived ordinary lives and ate ordinary food and asked ordinary questions, that stopped him cold.
“You could come,” I offered.
He shook his head slowly. “I’ve been watching that village from the trees half my life. I don’t know how to walk down the street.” He stepped closer, fingers curling around my hip. “Stay where I can scent you. If anything feels wrong, you come back.”
I caught his face and pulled his mouth to mine.
He resisted for half a breath, then his hands found my waist and dragged me against him.
His teeth caught my lower lip. I made a sound against his mouth that I’d never admit to later.
He kissed me like I was already gone and he was trying to memorize the taste.
I pulled back. His hands stayed on my waist.
“I won’t be long.”
I stepped out of the trees alone.
Smoke rose from chimneys in the gray morning air. The smell of wood fires and bread baking. Life going on the way it always did after terrible things.
Heinrich was splitting wood behind the smithy. He saw me and set the axe down slowly. Just stood there with sawdust in his hair and exhaustion carved into his face.
“Heinrich.”
“Red.” His eyes moved past me to the tree line, then back. A question he chose not to ask.
The front door of his house opened.
Emma’s daughters appeared first. Lotte, the older one, had Heinrich’s broad shoulders and Emma’s dark eyes. She held her younger sister’s hand. Margit was small and quiet, her face blotchy from crying that hadn’t stopped in weeks.
They saw me and froze on the step.
“Auntie Red.” Lotte’s chin crumpled. She let go of Margit’s hand and ran toward me hard enough to knock me back a step. Margit followed a second later, both of them pressing into me, arms tight around my waist.
I held them both. Lotte’s shoulders shook against my chest. Margit didn’t make a sound, just gripped my cloak with both fists and wouldn’t let go.
“I missed you.” Lotte pulled back and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Her eyes were red and old in a way no child’s should be.
“I missed you too.” I brushed the hair from her face. “Both of you.”
Heinrich crossed the yard and put a hand on each girl’s shoulder. “Inside,” he told them gently. “Let your mother talk to Red.”
Lotte looked like she wanted to argue. Margit just tightened her grip on my cloak.
“I’ll come see you before I go,” I promised, squeezing Margit’s hand. “I won’t leave without saying goodbye.”
Margit studied my face for a long moment. Then she nodded and let go. Heinrich steered them back through the door. He glanced at me once, then went back to his woodpile.