Chapter Eight
The wind picked up and Gudarīks’s ears pricked, catching fragments of a new sound. Distant singing and raucous laughter to the north.
He tilted his head upward and sniffed. Campfire. Alcohol. Body odor.
Trespassers three nights in a row?
The idiotic daring...
Fury twisted Gudarīks’s insides, gripping him in ferocious, rage-fueled hunger.
He’d know no peace until he found those that dared to enter his forest after dark.
The forest’s snow-laden trees were just blurred silhouettes of black and white as he raced toward the intruders, their unwashed bodies and drunken revelry a fetid beacon in the crisp winter night air.
The closer he got to his quarry, the worse the stench.
He ran and ran, his olfactory senses burning.
Any moment now and he’d see them.
A dark smudge in the snow caught his eye, and he snapped his head in its direction, spying the ashes and cinders of a dying campfire, encircled by empty beer cans. He slowed. There was a small pile of cigarette butts, too, the vile things. Although he didn’t see any hikers, he could practically taste the heady scent of them on the air.
He stalked forward, eyes flitting all around, watching for movement.
They should be right here.
But the night was still.
Gudarīks followed the tracks they left, searching until the yellow fingers of dawn crept up over the horizon. He found nothing.
They simply, and impossibly, vanished.
The next morning, Gudarīks paced the boundaries of his domain, avoiding the trails and daytime hikers. Back and forth, back and forth, all day long. How had the humans evaded him? It should’ve taken them hours in any direction to escape the forest. Stood to reason that they were still in it, hiding somewhere, somehow, but here he was, wearing a trench in the snow, a day wasted with twilight quickly approaching, and not even a whiff of their potent odor or a whisper of their drunken revelry.
It was maddeningly confounding.
“ Guuudaaarīks .” A singsong voice called, sickly sweet. Tensing, he snapped his head in the direction of the sound.
Two fiery red eyes stared back at him from the shadowy, immaterial silhouette of a woman. But in a blink, she, it, whatever it was, was gone. An apparition. Or fuzzy memory? There was something strangely familiar about it.
He suddenly felt very tired and foggy. The call of his den—to lie down and rest and forget for a while—beckoned with a long, crooked finger. Maybe he was due for another long hibernation. A century or two of rest. He needed those once every one to two millennia.
But the pretty snow-haired witch...
Not fully human, but not fully creature either, she didn’t have centuries to spare. Not unless she chose the hag path like her mother.
He shook his head, trying to clear the fog.
This was not a good time to disappear from the world and take a long nap. He wanted to see her again, just be near her for a little while and fill his head with pleasant daydreams.
Then he’d return to his den and sleep—not a whole century, but maybe a week.
Mind made up, he let muscle memory bring him to the sleepy little cottage with smoke drifting from its chimney. Always a warm aura amidst a frozen landscape. Coming here each night was one of the few constants he had.
He lingered outside the gate, near the tree stump where she always left generous offerings and found new wards hanging from the witch’s fence posts.
Gudarīks flicked one. His claw sizzled in response, sending up a plume of smoke, but while he disliked the protective magic’s sting, as deer and rabbits disliked marigold planted in gardens, it wasn’t enough to keep him out.