Chapter 14 #2
She moves aside so I can enter the pantry.
She does not leave. I fill a glass from the filtered tap and pretend to concentrate on it, because my wolf, who has been silent for days, has stirred just enough to register that this woman is in my space, and I am not quite ready for the conversation that is clearly about to happen.
“How are you doing?” Lydia asks. Her voice is gentle.
I almost drop the glass.
“Sorry?” I turn toward her slowly, the filled glass in my hand.
“I was just wondering.” Her smile is warm. Sympathetic. Nothing in it that should not be there. “Your friend left today. I thought it might be a little harder around here without him. It must have been nice having someone from home here with you.”
“Oh.” I blink. “Yes. It was.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet him properly,” she says, leaning a hip against the counter. “I heard he was very nice.”
“He is.” I take a sip of my water to buy time. “He’s a good friend. A colleague from the pack house. We work in the same building, you know. Seeing a familiar face was…It meant a lot.”
“I’m sure.”
A long pause.
“I wish I’d had more time to show him around,” I hear myself say. Filling silence has become a reflex in this house. “Silvercrest is beautiful.”
“Thank you.” Her eyes crinkle. “You know, if you wanted to show him something really beautiful next time, there’s a lovely lake quite deep in the forest. Most people don’t know about it. It’s not on any map.”
“A lake? I saw one, but it was pretty small and seemed manmade.”
“No, not that one. This is a cove, really. Spring-fed. Birches all the way around. It’s pretty any time, but”—she pauses, and an almost mischievous look flickers across her face—“at midnight, on a clear night, the algae along the bottom catches the moonlight, and the whole basin glows. Pale blue-green. Like something out of a storybook.”
I find myself interested despite every instinct I have about this woman. “That’s real?”
“It’s real. Lucas and I used to sneak out there when we were kids. I still go there sometimes.”
When they were kids. Another reminder that the history Lydia shares with my fated mate is deeper than anything he and I had.
“I see.”
“It’s a pity your friend left,” she says lightly. “The two of you could have gone tonight. There’s going to be a clear sky. No telling when the next clear night will be. The weather’s been a little cloudy lately.”
“Mm.” I watch the water in my glass as I swirl it. “Well, too late now.”
“I could take you.”
My eyes flick up. Lydia is watching me, perfectly composed, perfectly kind.
“I thought the forest wasn’t safe,” I say slowly. “After the convoy attack, Monroe said nobody should go in without security.”
“Not the eastern stretch, no,” she agrees.
“But the path to the cove goes north. Completely different patrol zone. It’s fine, Sienna.
You just need to know which way to go.” She sets her milk down and uses a finger on the counter to trace an invisible map.
“Out the kitchen garden door. Down past the old pump house. There’s a deer track that runs along the stone wall; follow it until the wall ends.
Then, you cut left at the three-trunked birch.
The track picks up again on the other side and goes straight to the cove. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty.”
I watch her finger move across the counter.
“I’ll take you,” she repeats. “I can’t tonight, but maybe the next time the sky is clear. It’d do you good, honestly. It’s the kind of thing you need to see when you’re having a hard time.”
I feel one side of my upper lip twitch. “When you’re having a hard time.” Said so softly. Said by the woman currently wearing his ring.
I smile to conceal the twitch. “That’s really kind of you,” I say, and it comes out perfectly even. “Let’s see if we can do that. Thanks, Lydia.”
“Of course.” Her smile does not dim.
She picks up her glass and glides out of the pantry. I hold the door ajar and watch as she heads down the corridor and then up the far stairs.
I stand here for a moment or two with my glass of water and make up my mind.
I am never going to go with her. I am never going to go with anyone. But a glowing cove? In the dark, with no human voices anywhere near it? I need that. I need to stand beside something beautiful for an hour and feel anything at all besides nothingness.
I’ll go alone.
I head upstairs and change into warm, comfortable clothes. It is eleven o’clock by the time I head out, carrying a backpack to stuff everything in if I want to shift and run.
The moon is high and full, and the sky is full of stars, exactly as clear as Lydia said it would be. I decide to walk.
I find the pump house more easily than I expected.
The stone is dark with moss, and the old wheel mount has rusted through, but it is exactly where Lydia’s finger traced it on the counter.
I follow the wall from there, one hand trailing along the top of it, the stones rough and cold under my palm.
The wall goes on for longer than I thought it would.
I even count my steps for a while, for lack of anything else to do.
The stone wall ends at a tangle of old roots where a tree must have fallen years ago and was never properly cleared.
I look up.
The three-trunked birch is right there. Moonlight catches the pale bark and makes it glow silver, and my chest relaxes at the sight of it. I had half expected to get lost. Half expected to turn back.
I turn left instead.
The path appears in front of me, narrow and soft with old leaves. I walk toward the dark trees, and my wolf, for the first time in days, lifts her head to pay attention.
Good, I tell her silently. Come back to me.
As I go deeper into the forest, I begin to smile. This feels like an adventure. Maybe it’s a bit reckless going into the woods at this time of night, but there are patrols, so nothing bad will happen. Excitement fills me.
Just then, I hear the sound of a twig breaking, and I prick up my ears.
It’s what I don’t hear that makes my brows knit together.
The owls are gone. There’s no rustling of mice in the undergrowth. Even the tree branches have stopped their ticking. What is left is not exactly quiet. Quiet is restful. This is something pressing down and holding still and waiting.
My wolf snaps to attention so fast, it almost knocks me over.
She is not curious. She is not sniffing at the dark with any trace of the excitement I felt thirty seconds ago. She is flat against the inside of my ribs with every hair raised and her eyes fixed on something I cannot see, and she is not making a sound.
Because prey makes sounds.
The patrols run these woods in wolf form. The creatures here know their scent, have known it for generations. A Silvercrest wolf passing through would not do this. The birds would not care. The mice would not hide.
This is something the forest does not recognize.
My legs have gone cold from the knee down, and my heartbeat is very loud in my own ears. Louder still is the terrible thought arriving too late: nobody knows I am out here.
Leave, Sienna. Go back. Go back now.
I turn around slowly.
A body comes flying out of the dark to my left. Too broad. Too fast. I hurl myself off the path and into the ferns, and it misses me by a hair’s breadth. I hear teeth snap shut on air.
I scramble to my feet. I hold my breath and listen, but there is nothing to hear.
I run.
I am not a fighter. I am not trained for this. I know how to spar, but I’m a strategic advisor, not a warrior, and right now, I am fleeing down a forest path in the dark with my heart slamming against my ribs and my wolf screaming at me.
Shift! Shift! Shift!
Another wolf separates from the trees ahead. I veer off the path again, crashing through bracken, branches whipping at my face. My backpack snags on something; I tear free and keep going.
Where are the patrols?!
Another wolf. On my right.
I count five. Three are moving through the trees—not running at me directly but fanning wide. My stomach drops because I understand what that means. They are not chasing me. They are herding me.
I stop. I press my back to the nearest trunk and breathe. Four seconds in. Four seconds out. My wolf is not snarling. She is whimpering. A low, desperate sound that I have never heard from her. It terrifies me more than anything moving in the dark.
One of the wolves steps into a slant of moonlight.
His eyes are…wrong. Flat. Lightless. The same stare I saw during the convoy when those rogues attacked us: like the life has been emptied out of them. My legs go liquid underneath me.
He lunges.
I shift.
It is not graceful. The backpack rips and falls to the ground. My knees hit the moss, and I am done before I even finish falling, my wolf wrenching control from somewhere deep and furious. I come up on four paws, shaking.
He is already on me.
His teeth rake my shoulder before I can turn. I yelp. But the sound that comes out of me next is different. It is something older and uglier. I twist and get my jaws around his foreleg. I bite down until I hear a crack, and he jerks back, screaming.
Good.
The second wolf hits me from behind, and I go down under his weight. My legs scrabble at the moss. I have no training for this, no technique, nothing but the rage that has been sitting in my chest for weeks with nowhere to go.
I let it out. All of it. I buck and thrash and get my teeth into the nearest piece of him I can reach. I do not let go until he does.
I get up. My shoulder is agonizing. My ribs don’t feel right. I do not care.
I spin toward the next wolf before he can reach me. I rake my claws across his muzzle, and he pulls back, reassessing. I feel a mean, furious satisfaction at that. At making a creature that came here to kill me think twice about it.
But all of a sudden, there are six of them.
I’m running on anger instead of skill, and anger has a bottom to it. I feel myself reaching it.
My wolf is not whimpering now. She has become vicious and fierce and very focused, stripped of everything except the will to stay on her feet for one more second. And one more after that.
I brace myself for the next attack, and as I’m thrown to the ground, I see a figure watching me. For a moment, I can’t make out any features, and then, he moves. It’s a man, and I know him. I’ve seen him before.
Shock overtakes me. What is he doing here?
I don’t have time to think about it because one of the wolves gets his teeth into my flank and drags downward. The pain is blinding, and I fall to the forest floor.
This time, I cannot get up. I try. My legs will not cooperate.
I can smell the blood that is pooling dark and warm beneath me. I feel claws slash my belly, and I whimper. Teeth sink into my throat, and I realize that this is it.
All the fight is beginning to leave me now, my body turning cold. I kick my legs in a desperate bid to run, but I’m being held down as they tear me apart.
Lucas.
The name comes to me unbidden, a broken thought as my mind goes blank. His name. The name of the one who abandoned me.
A tear slips out.
Then, from behind me, a roar shakes the ground.
A wolf, dark and vast, clears me in one bound and slams into the wolf holding my neck. I feel the impact through the earth under my cheek.
It’s Lucas.
He’s here.
He came for me.
This is the last thought I have before my world turns dark.