Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
Reece rushed toward Delainey without a thought. She seemed to cross some sort of barrier, and her yelling stopped as if it had never happened. He reached for her, but she swatted his hand away.
“I’m fine. Get away from me.” She was on her knees, one palm flat against the warped floorboards.
He didn’t move back. He felt strange. His wolf was close to the surface in a way that it almost never was. He had control of that other form; he was the master, his wolf was under his command, but right now the balance felt off.
His senses were sharper. The room was dark, but to his eyes it may as well have been illuminated by moonlight. Every grain in the rough-hewn planks was visible to him, every rusty nail head, the dark seams of packed earth between the boards.
The walls were unpainted pine gone silver with age, and in the far corner a section of the ceiling sagged where water damage had softened the wood. His instincts were screaming at him, and when he homed in on Delainey, they said: Protect. Take. Mine.
He burrowed down and curled his fists until his fingers pricked his palm, his claws peeking out from what should have been human fingers. He had to look down to confirm he wasn’t partially shifted.
Somewhere in his rational brain he knew this wasn’t normal, but the rational part of his brain was not in control right now.
In the dim light, Delainey had gone a little gray, though he didn’t know if that was from whatever had just caused her to cry out in pain, or whatever had caused them to end up in this room in the first place.
Sweat beaded on her brow. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, then scowled at the large bracelet on her wrist. The metal was nearly as wide as her hand, its tarnished green edges pressing dull indentations into the skin above her wrist bones.
She hadn’t been wearing those when they were taken.
He remembered that. There was one on her other wrist too, and when he looked down at his own hands, he saw matching jewelry.
“What is this?” The words were hard to get out, like his tongue didn’t fit into his mouth. He reached up and ran his hand from his forehead down over his nose and mouth, trying to feel if he had grown a snout like he sometimes did in his partially shifted form, then ran it over his jaw.
No, it all felt human.
His jaw was square and rough with a day’s worth of stubble; the freckles on his cheekbones invisible to his own fingers, but the bones beneath them hard and familiar.
This was just more of his wolf taking the reins, making words feel foreign, like he was trying to translate them from another language and speak underwater at the same time.
Delainey curled her arms up like she was doing a bicep curl, or a Wonder Woman pose, and flashed the manacles at him.
“This is magic bullshit,” she said, turning the cuffs so the etchings caught what little light filtered through the wall. The symbols carved into the brass were dense and overlapping.
“None I’ve ever seen,” he managed, his voice coming out lower and rougher than it should have, more growl than speech, trying to rack his brain for anything like it. Had he learned… the thought trailed off.
“Yeah, one of us is the expert here.” She wiped dust off her backside, and Reece’s eyes snagged on the curve of it.
His wolf growled in satisfaction, and he had to clamp back the urge to reach out and touch.
No, that would be bad.
She might actually kill him for that. The man was trying to say something, to insist they stay away from this witch, but the wolf didn’t care what the stupid man had to think. Reece liked the smell of her.
Roses and fire, tantalizing even under dust and mildew.
He took a step closer. Too close, he knew, and inside her personal space.
He was a full head taller than her, broad enough that his shadow swallowed hers, and at this distance he could see the dust caught in the tight spirals of her curls and the small scratch along her jawline where the floorboards had scraped her skin.
Delainey glared at him, irritation washing over her face as she tilted her chin up to scowl. “Step back.” She planted one foot behind her, squaring her stance, her weight shifting onto her back leg like a fighter bracing for impact.
Reece couldn’t do it. His wolf refused, and he held his ground.
“Last warning!”
He didn’t move.
Delainey held up one of her manacled hands and flicked her fingers at him like she was shooing him away.
A wave of magic rammed into him and sent him flying across the room.
The force was like being hit center-mass by a battering ram, it caught him under the ribs and lifted his boots clean off the floorboards, his arms wheeling uselessly as his body traveled the full eight feet of the room in less than a second and a wave of excruciating pain crashed through him before he hit the wall.
His shoulder blades struck first, the impact punching through rotten pine like cardboard, and splinters raked across his back through the fabric of his henley as the planks bowed and snapped outward. His breath was knocked out on impact.
He heard a crack and splinter of wood, a brighter shaft of sunlight piercing the room, but all of that was distant compared to the pain radiating out of his wrists and up through his chest. It was a deep, bone-level burn that pulsed in time with his heartbeat, as if the manacles had hooked into his circulatory system and were sending fire through his veins instead of blood.
Delainey rushed toward him, and as she got closer, the pain dissipated until all he felt was a dull throb from the impact. “Fuck! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that. You were just supposed to...” She reached for him and helped him up.
“Pain,” Reece managed to gasp.
“You’re hurt?” Her hands hovered over him like she was afraid to touch him. “Where are you injured? Fuck, did I make it worse?”
“No.” Words were still too hard. Full sentences were even harder. But he had an idea of what might have happened. “Stay,” he told her.
“Excuse me?” Delainey crossed her arms over her chest.
He didn’t know how to put his thoughts into words. He took a step away from her and held up his hand to keep her back.
Then another step. Another.
He managed about six feet of distance when the pain started radiating up his cuffs. Another step nearly sent him to his knees. He scrambled back until he was close to her again.
“Stay close,” he managed.
Delainey looked down at her manacles, then glanced at him.
“These things are keeping us close together.” She worked it out from his experiment and his few words.
“What was that, about six feet? That is not a lot of space. We’re going to have to get these off, because I think you and I might murder each other if we have to stay six feet apart for too long. ”
No, his wolf insisted.
He managed not to say it out loud. He wouldn’t harm her; his instincts were riding him too hard, and he refused to even consider the possibility.
She turned from him and looked at the wall.
“Well, looks like one good thing came out of that little display of aggression. I am sorry about that.” She tilted her head toward him.
“In addition to the six-feet-distance thing, we’re going to have to figure out…
my powers are going a little bit haywire. So we’re going to have to be careful.”
There was a large crack in the wall now. He could smell the forest outside, but from the angle of the light he couldn’t tell what time of day it was.
“Get behind me,” Delainey said, rolling her shoulders back and shaking out her wrists.
Reece didn’t want to. Every instinct said he should be the one in front, shielding her.
But she had an intense look in her eyes, one that said she would absolutely blast him again if he argued. He took a step behind her.
From here he could see the tension corded through her neck and the set of her jaw, the way she widened her stance. He could feel something tickle his wrist as Delainey closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Then she motioned at the wall like she was throwing a baseball, and a percussive blast expanded the gap where he had slammed into it.
The blast hit with a sound like a thunderclap compressed into a single flat crack, and the wall didn’t just break—it blew outward in a spray of splintered pine and rusted nails, the pieces tumbling into the undergrowth outside.
Cool mountain air rushed in through the ragged opening, which was now wide enough for both of them to walk through side by side. Light poured in. Before they had a chance to celebrate, though, the house started making very scary noises, groaning and cracking, and the whole place started to tilt.
Delainey reached back, grabbed his arm, and jerked him through the new hole in the wall just as the house, really more of a shack, tilted and then collapsed.
They stumbled out onto a slope of packed red clay and dead leaves, and behind them the shack folded in on itself with a long, drawn-out crunch of timber.
“I guess that wall was load-bearing,” she said as they surveyed the damage.
If the man were more in control, Reece might have smiled.
The shack, what was left of it—was little more than a heap of gray, weathered lumber and a half-collapsed tin roof, the whole pile no bigger than a single-car garage.
Reece looked around. He didn’t recognize these woods. The smells were not of the Southern Basin Pack. They were in the mountains somewhere, he could see that, and he would bet they were in foothills that rolled on for miles.
“Any idea who took us?” Delainey asked, brushing splinters from the sleeve of her denim jacket and then picking a long sliver of pine out of her hair.
Reece managed to shake his head.
“I don’t think we should stick around to find out if they come back.” She grinned at him. “Want to get out of here?”
This time he did manage to grin back, but it was wolfish. He chose a direction and started walking, and this time Delainey let him lead.