Chapter 5 #2
You never can tell with these big, powerful creatures. They’re a lot moodier than you’d think. I know this too well, given I spend a lot of my time sleeping with one of them.
I keep walking, aware that Savi knows I’m here. This is a demonstration on her part. She wants me to know that she knows.
I choose to take this as a warm welcome and keep on going, trudging through the snowy forest until I find myself on the edge of a clearing. I pause there on the outskirts.
Sorcery requires drama, so maybe that’s why Savi lives in a sprawling, palatial sort of house that makes me think of pictures I’ve seen of places like Italy.
Greece. Or maybe ancient temples—and the moment I think that, I’m sure that’s what she was going for.
Still, it looks airy and open, stone and tile and bright, blooming flowers that should be dead this time of year.
Instead, they’re as vibrant against the snow and the night as if they think it’s high noon.
The moon is up now and still close to full, so I follow its silvery light as I move toward the house, transforming back to human form as I go. There’s a flicker in the moonlight, like its path changes as I walk it, and then I see her there before me. Standing at the entrance to her home.
Savi Wynn, sorceress of old, goes out of her way to make herself look fragile. Pampered, perhaps, but decidedly weak.
I don’t think she’s any of those things.
Anyone who’s spent any time around power can sense the intense punch of hers immediately.
It strikes me as funny that if anyone were watching this, they would see a girl underdressed for the December night—jeans and flip-flops and a T-shirt—walking from deep snow to grass that ought to be frozen, but isn’t.
Making her way toward a fragile-looking woman in cozy-looking sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt in a lovely rose-gold shade that glows against her dark hair and warm brown eyes and makes her seem almost doll-like.
Real power can be pretty. If it wants.
“How wonderful,” she says in that supremely musical voice of hers as I draw closer. “I love when friends drop by.”
I try to take her measure the way I would anyone else, but Savi is as unreadable here as she’s always been in Winter’s kitchen, or in any number of interactions I’ve witnessed with her before this fall. “I don’t think that you do.”
“You’re the first,” she agrees. “But in theory I’m not opposed. Necessarily.”
“I should have requested an audience.” Now that I’ve made it all the way here, chased by .
. . whatever the hell that was, I realize I definitely should have.
It’s one thing to run into her organically while she’s pretending to be an ordinary renter of cottages.
It’s something else to ambush her at home.
I know Ty would not appreciate something like this. “I realize that’s the usual protocol.”
“I think we’re past protocol, Maddox.” I get the impression that’s news to her but that she’s decided to go with it anyway. She smiles. “But if you encounter a sea of my acolytes, don’t tell them. There’s a certain amount of bowing and scraping that’s necessary to their existence, you understand.”
That makes me laugh. Then she turns around and glides into the house, waving her hand for me to follow her. And I might not have been in a sorceress’s house before, but I know not to look too closely at the things I see moving in ways they shouldn’t in the corners of my eyes.
Hell, no.
If I look straight ahead, I see a simple-enough hallway and courtyards that open up to the night sky.
I hear the sound of water fountains gurgling.
Or perhaps she has a whole creek running through this place, for all I know.
Either way, she leads me to a little table set up in one of the courtyards, thick with those impossible flowers, and when she sits down and motions for me to join her, she looks very much as if she was expecting me the whole time.
It’s some creepy-ass sorcery shit, so I pretend not to notice as I lounge in the seat across from her.
“Tea?” Savi asks.
When I look down at the table that was a pretty tile mosaic with nothing on it a moment ago, I find it covered.
There are pots of fragrant tea, a selection of plates filled with things I can’t identify that smell both delightful and very much not from Southern Oregon.
Some sugary, some savory, and I feel my stomach rumble.
Sadly, I was not raised to take food from magical things. Once you know that most fairy tales are more or less documentary renditions of actual unpleasant happenings, you learn to take a dim view of everything from witches in the woods to some fool with magic beans.
Savi laughs, clearly reading my mind. “If I was going to hurt you, I could have done that at any point over the last two months without bothering to feed you first.”
“True.” I study her for a moment. “But if you’ll forgive the implied insult . . . ?”
I tap my nose, and she sighs. Then waves her hand. “Be my guest.”
So I shift, then use every bit of werewolf magic I have on my side to determine that she’s telling the truth. There’s nothing on the table that will harm me, unless you count the carbs.
When I settle back into my chair, human again, she lifts a teacup to her mouth. “Besides,” she says before taking a sip, “I have no desire whatsoever to be at war with the werewolf alpha.”
“Whyever not?” I smile at her. “It’s so much fun that I do it all the time.”
She laughs at that, a real laugh I’m not sure I’ve heard before. And she doesn’t sit back and watch me eat the delicacies she’s laid out for me. She joins in, and that puts me even more at ease.
“I was married once,” she says. Then considers. “I suppose, technically, I still am. I can’t say I recommend it.”
She doesn’t elaborate, but she doesn’t have to. The fact that she’s been here since long before I was born with no sorcerer husband around is eloquent all on its own.
“A mating isn’t a marriage,” I tell her, sighing happily around a pastry that manages to be savory and sweet at once, but with flavors I’m not sure I’ve ever tasted before. “It’s not a union, and there’s no getting out of it. It’s total immersion. Pack first, pack forever, you get the picture.”
“More than you can possibly imagine,” she replies, and I believe her. I can hear it in her voice. I decided I liked her that very first day we all moved into the cottages, and I’m happy to discover that my instinct then was right.
Like all my other instincts are too, no matter what pushback I get.
We drink our tea. The courtyard is sweet and pretty, with the chatter of birds in the trees that grow here—though I decide not to look too closely to see if they’re real.
Just like I don’t breathe in deeply enough to tell if the flowers are, either.
Does it matter? This courtyard is a perfect oasis in the middle of a snowy mountaintop. I don’t need it to be real to enjoy it.
When Savi sets her cup back down on a small table, I can sense that the niceties have been dispensed with.
I don’t wait for her to ask me why I tracked her down here. I tell her about the skunk last night. And what felt like an escalation tonight. I tell her about that weird prickly feeling I got around both of those sacrifices, or whatever they were.
Then I tell her what I felt closing in around me on that rock, and all the way here.
She listens as I speak, interjecting nothing.
When I talk about that dark terror that chased me here, she gets that considering sort of look on her face again, this time tilting her head back as if she’s interrogating the night sky.
I toy with telling her about Winter’s dream starring Briar but dismiss it.
If Vin?a really does have her eye on Briar, that won’t matter until and unless the bitch escapes the lake.
That doesn’t mean Vin?a’s not causing trouble all the same. She’s a goddess. She can do all kinds of goddess-level shit—like not go away even when put away. For centuries at a time.
“What I have to wonder,” I say when Savi doesn’t speak, “is if someone down there at the bottom of Crater Lake isn’t quite as dormant as we’d like her to be.”
I realize that I expect her—or, more accurately, I want her—to dismiss my worry out of hand.
Instead, she makes a humming sort of sound. “Funny you should mention that,” she says after a moment. “I keep finding small, ritualistically dispatched creatures all over the place, lining the borders of my land.”
“Does that mean she’s stirring again?” I ask, my voice rougher than I’d like.
That it’s not only happening to me is . . . not good.
“She can stir all she likes,” Savi says after a moment. “But to transform her tantrums in the deep into dead things on land would require a lot more than stirring. I broke her down significantly. She didn’t die, but she’s not capable of simply rising as she is. It would be a process.”
A bloody and terrible process, I’m sure. “Involving?”
Savi blinks, like she’s paging through all the horrible resurrections she’s encountered in her time.
It takes her a minute. “A vessel, I’d imagine, and some kind of conduit—but that would be getting ahead of things.
There would have to be a ceremony, because there’s always a ceremony.
No doubt a sacrifice would be involved, but I doubt the blood of a handful of hapless rodents would be enough to ensure that a goddess might rise again.
Vin?a herself would surely scoff at such a downgrade.
” Savi smiles. “Remember, there is nothing more vain than a god. It comes with the territory.”
I think of that horrible blackness rolling behind me, eating the woods as it went. “Define ceremony in this context.”
She doesn’t. She lifts a shoulder. “I keep telling myself that if Vin?a was truly attempting to ascend again, the oracle would be the first to know.”