Chapter 18
The women had not forgotten Alden Northwood, though they had long ago agreed to speak of him as seldom as possible.
The cold found him first.
As it had done these past mornings. The quickening burned hot through his veins, and when it receded, the January air rushed into the space it left behind with the ruthless march of an army seizing abandoned ground.
Lucien lay face down in a bank of snow, his cheek pressed against frozen earth, his body a catalogue of sorrows he had not yet summoned the will to read.
He did not open his eyes. Not yet. Instead, he breathed deliberately, testing the machinery of his lungs, his ribs, his back.
His smallclothes were in tatters, his hands were scraped raw, the knuckles crusted with something dark that might have been earth and might have been blood. His mouth tasted of iron and pine sap.
He was alive. That was the first certainty, and on some mornings, it was the only one he was granted.
Lucien opened his eyes.
Above him, the bare branches of a rowan tree clawed at a pale sky, skeletal and supplicating.
The sun sat well above the horizon, its light thin and unconvincing, and the realization that he had awakened past dawn jolted through him with a force that brought him upright despite the protest of every muscle in his body.
The moon was setting late. He could feel it still, a faint hum at the base of his skull, the last tremor of the quickening before it loosened its grip for another month.
The fifth and final day of the cycle always lingered, reluctant to release him, as though the beast resented the brevity of its reign.
He sat in the snow and tried to think.
Fragments surfaced from the darkness that swallowed every full moon night.
The cellar. Max’s face draining of color as Lucien threw the chains loose and asked his question.
The pursuit, Max bolting out the cellar, Lucien hard on his heels.
The quickening clawing at his consciousness even as he fought to hold it at bay.
He remembered bursting into the open air, the cold striking his bare chest like a blow, and the moment his hands closed around Max’s coat as they both went down into the snow.
After that, nothing. The familiar void, black and absolute, that consumed his nights and returned his body to him at dawn like a coat tossed carelessly over the back of a chair.
But—
Lucien went still. A flash of something was surfacing from the black water of his memory.
Not a thought. Not a decision. Something older, rawer, filtered through senses that were not entirely his own.
Gray fur. The impact of a heavy body against his own.
Teeth snapping at his throat, and the answering surge of a rage so pure and so consuming that it did not feel borrowed from the beast at all. He had been fighting a gray wolf.
In four years of transformations, Lucien had never recalled a single moment from the void. Not a scent. Not a sound. Not the faintest shadow of an image. The wolf took everything and gave nothing in return.
Until now.
The memory was fractured, incomplete, a shard of glass that showed only a sliver of the whole, but it was unmistakably real.
He had fought another wolf. Which meant that Max had indeed transformed, and the plan they had laid had been tested by a reality far more brutal than any of them had imagined.
Verity.
The name struck through him with the force of a musket ball. She had been out there. She and Ephraim, hidden in the trees, waiting with a rifle and three wolfhounds and a courage that he had not deserved and could not repay. If something had gone wrong …
He could not finish the thought. He simply moved.
The rowan tree stood at the edge of a crumbling wall, and Lucien recognized the tumbled stones of the Roman ruins that lay within the deeper reaches of Blackfen Woods. The ruins told him what he needed to know. He was perhaps a mile from Ephraim’s cottage. Two from the Castle.
He hauled himself up the wall, ignoring the scrape of ancient stone against his abraded palms, and from its top confirmed his bearings.
The woods spread in every direction, heavy with snow, but to the northwest, a thin thread of smoke rose from Ephraim’s chimney against the colorless sky.
He dropped back down, his bare feet striking the frozen ground with a jolt that traveled the full length of his spine, and began to run.
The cold was savage, and within minutes, his fingers and toes had gone numb.
He ran faster, forcing warmth into his limbs through exertion alone.
The flash of gray fur surfacing again in his mind.
Teeth, impact, fury, driving him harder with each stride.
He needed to know what he had done. What Max had done.
What price the night had extracted from the people he loved.
Ephraim’s cottage was dark, the fire banked to embers.
The gamekeeper was not there. Lucien found one of Ephraim’s greatcoats on a peg beside the door, smelling of gun oil and dog, and pulled it on over his ruined smallclothes.
There were no shoes because he had forgotten to return them, so he wound strips of sacking around his feet and ran on.
The root cellar door was closed but not latched. Lucien seized the handle, hauled it open, and descended the stone steps in three strides.
What he found stopped him dead.
Verity knelt on the flagstones beside a figure Lucien barely recognized.
Max Dray lay on the ground. He was exposed, his clothes were ripped from the change, and he was bound at the neck, wrists, and ankles with the silver manacles, and so pale his skin had taken on the color of tallow.
A rough bandage was wound around his left shoulder, soaked through with blood so dark it appeared almost black.
His breathing came in shallow, irregular draughts.
Ephraim sat against the far wall with the spent rifle across his knees. The wolfhounds were arranged in their customary formation, and even in the crisis of the moment, Lucien registered the details as a man who had learned to read his hounds the way a sailor reads weather.
Verity looked up as Lucien descended the steps, and the relief that broke across her face was so raw and so unguarded that it struck him with physical force.
She was wearing men’s clothing, and there was blood on her hands and deep shadows beneath her green eyes, and she was without question the most extraordinary woman he had ever known.
“Thank the Lord,” she breathed.
“What happened?” Lucien crossed the cellar and dropped to his knees beside Max. Up close, the ruin was worse than he had feared. The blood pooled on the flagstones told a story of hours spent losing what could not be replaced. “How long has he been like this?”
Verity told him. Her account was precise and unhurried: the tackle, the dual transformation, the gray wolf’s leap toward her, the crack of Ephraim’s rifle.
Lucien’s wolf circling the fallen creature.
Ephraim shooing the black wolf into the woods.
The muzzle, the bandaging, the long vigil, and the agonizing reverse transformation that had left Max as he was now.
“He changed back within the last half hour,” Verity said.
Lucien looked at Ephraim, who met his gaze with grim steadiness.
“He’s not long for it, m’lord. Lost too much blood. And the silver …”
The gamekeeper shook his grizzled head.
Lucien turned back to the man who had been his companion since boyhood.
His confidant. His only friend during the darkest years of the curse, the steady hand that had fastened the chains and waited through the interminable nights.
The man who had betrayed him so completely that the full architecture of the deception had not yet finished revealing itself.
He placed his hand upon Max’s chest and felt the faint, stuttering rhythm of a heart that was losing its war.
Max’s eyes opened. They were gray, a pale and wintry gray that Lucien had never thought much about.
But now the color struck him with a force that rearranged everything he understood about the face he had known for twenty years.
Gray, not the gold of the Northwood line.
But his uncle Alden had had gray eyes, suggesting a kinship that ran deeper than service and friendship and shared nights in this very cellar.
“Max.” Lucien kept his voice low and even, though the effort of it threatened to crack something open inside him. “I am here.”
Max’s cracked lips moved. The voice that emerged was barely a whisper, scraped thin by pain and the slow withdrawal of life. “Come to watch … then. How fitting. A Northwood standing over a Dray … at the end.”
Lucien ignored his remark. “When did the transformations begin?”
A sound escaped Max that might have been laughter had there been enough breath behind it.
“Christmastide. First night of the full moon. Woke in the snow … naked as the day I was born.” His gray eyes fixed on Lucien with an intensity that his failing body had no right to produce. “Knew then. Knew what ran in my blood.”
“Why did you not come to me?” The question tore itself free before Lucien could temper it. “I would have helped you. I would have understood, better than anyone?—”
“Helped me?” Max’s whisper hardened. “The way yer father helped mine? The way yer grandfather helped? With a silver blade and a shallow grave beneath a pile of stones?”
The cellar seemed to contract. Lucien was aware of Verity’s sharp intake of breath behind him, of Ephraim going very still, of the wolfhounds’ ears pressing flat against their skulls. But the sounds were muffled, distant, as though reaching him through deep water.