5. Leo
Leo
I didn’t get the chance to head out until late afternoon, because as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t simply drop everything and ignore my work to run off into the woods in search of purple flowers.
I didn’t even want to imagine how much everyone would laugh about the very idea, let alone actually deal with it in person.
So I cut and carried wood for most of the day, then as the sun began its slow trek downward, I found a convenient time to slip away, searching out a basket Mama sometimes used to go gather raspberries from the wild vines about half a mile west of the house.
I also took a moment to grab my jacket before heading out, just in case it took a while. It was getting into fall, and nighttime in Idaho could get bitterly cold.
I paused in the back mudroom of the house, slipping my shoes on—yes, of course I was going out the back. I didn’t need anyone to see me and comment. My favorite jacket was red, for fuck’s sake, and I was carrying a basket.
My brothers weren’t assholes or bullies, but would anyone be able to resist the opening to make a red riding hood reference? Something something, little red and the big bad wolf at the same time?
Whatever.
I needed the damn basket, and I would not be embarrassed.
Much.
I slipped off into the woods without anyone noticing, though, which was one of the first times everything had gone perfectly all day, so I counted myself lucky.
Unfortunately, that was where my spate of luck ended.
I found lots of plants, obviously—I was in the woods, and that was inevitable.
But I didn’t find a single thing flowering, let alone the specific little purple flowers I was looking for.
I didn’t remember what time of year it had been when Polina had showed me the plant.
Maybe I was looking at the wrong time of year, and Henry would have to suffer all winter for me to come up with a little help.
I hated to imagine that, since it seemed like his pain always got worse during the cold months, but I couldn’t make plants grow out of season.
Could I? Maybe if I built a greenhouse .
. . Except I didn’t know how to do that, and even if I did, I didn’t have the materials. It required lots of glass, didn’t it?
Plus I had no idea what the flowers were called.
Polina hadn’t even given me the Russian name, let alone an American one, just showed me the plant.
I could try to draw it, take it to someone who worked with plants next time we were in town, but my art skills were sadly lacking, and I doubted I could draw a good enough representation to do the job.
I started muttering to myself as I stalked through the woods, sending small animals scurrying away from me in all directions, but I couldn’t help it.
This always happened to me. The best intentions, but always, always, poor execution.
Saved Evie? Killed a man in front of her and set off an intra-pack war.
Sure, it had worked out for the best, but I’d put my brothers in a position to fix things because I’d screwed up.
No, they had never said that, never even implied it, but that didn’t change facts.
I was always the awkward one, always the one who went off half-cocked, always the one who acted before thinking and ended up screwing up my brothers’ carefully laid plans.
Why couldn’t I get my shit together?
It took me too long to realize that the woods around me had gone quiet, and not just because of my clumsy trampling through the underbrush. The kind of silence that came not just with a terrifying predator in the woods, but with that predator stalking prey.
Me.
I had just barely slowed my stride as I realized something was not quite right, when a body crashed into mine, bowling me onto the forest floor before me, crushing Mama’s poor basket beneath me.
I reacted instantly, flipping to my side and curling inward to protect my vulnerable belly, but the predator on me wasn’t reaching for that.
No, he was grabbing my hair that had grown just a little too long—long enough to get a handful of—and yanking my head to one side, baring . . . my neck?
I had a split second of reaction time, the flashing image of long, sharp fangs, and my body reacted almost faster than my mind could, reaching back with claw-assisted fingertips to grab the man by the shoulders, latching onto a shirt that felt rough beneath my hands and leaning all the way forward, pushing with my back and pulling with my hands to flip the attacker all the way over my back and right into one of the last patches of sun on the dappled forest floor.
The man didn’t react like the predator he was, though. He didn’t leap and spin and attack again. He lay there for a second, like he’d been winded by the toss, and then screamed like I’d lit him on fire.
When smoke started to rise from his skin a second later, I realized maybe I had.
Long teeth, headed for my neck, rather than attacking the actual vulnerable bits in order to gut me.
The shadows I’d been standing in at the moment of the attack.
Smoke and screaming and the smell of searing meat in the sun.
Without really thinking about it, I lunged forward, grabbing the man by the tattered shirt he was wearing, and tugged him backward into the shadows he’d attacked me in a moment before.
“What the hell am I doing?” I asked myself in Russian as I dragged him. “Saving the person who’s trying to kill me. I really am the naive child Viktor thinks I am.”
The man’s eyes went wide at the sound of my voice, and oddly, he struggled against my grip, even as I tugged him toward safety. What the hell? Did he not feel the sudden lack of sun?
I got him all the way out of the sun and then let go, and the moment I did, he was pulling himself away from me, using his hands to drag his body, even as twigs and leaves dug into his legs. Legs that were inadequately covered with tattered pants.
He looked . . . he looked like an extra in a medieval prison movie, and I didn’t know what to make of that.
He wasn’t unkempt, precisely, as his hair and beard were neatly trimmed, no overgrowth of anything.
But the clothes were too old to be wearing, and hung loose, as though either they’d been made for someone else, or he’d once been quite a lot bigger.
He kept crawling away until his back was against a tree, and his eyes were so wide I could see the whites all around lovely deep red-brown irises. He was pretty, I could see under the layers of grime and terror.
Terror. Of me.
Dude had just tried to take a chunk out of my neck, ruined Mama’s raspberry basket by shoving my bulk onto it, and he was scared of me?
How annoying.