14. Isolde
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ISOLDE
“ A re you alright?” Bastian’s voice was strained, like it was an effort to leash himself.
“Fine,” Isolde said shortly. Her eyes were still pinned on that carved piece of wood, with its sharp, pointed tip and embellished handle. “Is that yours?”
“Of course not,” Bastian spat. Isolde could see his shoulders heaving out of the corner of her eye.
With Everett gone, and the adrenaline fading, reality set in. Isolde’s hands began to shake.
“He was going to kill me,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow to her own ears.
He’d had the stake against her breast, for God’s sake. If Bastian had been a second slower—if that hawthorn stake had pierced her heart—Isolde would be dead.
The way he’d taken her by surprise… the way he’d seized her and thrown her to the ground…
It was too similar. Horrifically similar.
The memory of a different pair of hands, on a different day, ten years ago, stole Isolde’s breath. The crack of bone as the man struck her. The tearing of crimson silk as they cut away Isolde’s dress—her favorite one. Rough hands on her jaw, blood in her mouth, pain and cold and numb ? —
“Isolde.”
She blinked, and Bastian stood before her. He dipped his head, leaning down to look her in the eye. “Where did you just go?”
Isolde swallowed, shaking her head to clear the last of the memory away. “Nowhere,” she said.
“You’re breathing too fast.” Bastian frowned. “Look at me.”
“I’m fine,” Isolde insisted. She didn’t meet his gaze. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
The last thing she wanted to do was fall apart in front of him right then. Hadn’t she just vowed to herself never to show a hint of vulnerability to him again? And here she was, vulnerable as can be, barely holding herself together.
Bastian reached for her, and she flinched.
He froze.
“Alright,” he said softly, backing a step away.
Isolde wound her arms around her middle. She felt shaky, unsteady on her feet, like the slightest nudge might topple her. If Bastian so much as asked her what was wrong, she was going to crumble.
It was all too much. The killings. The nightsbane. The sun in her eyes, bruising hands on her shoulders, a stake against her heart. Isolde couldn’t fucking take it anymore.
“I never realized Vampires breathed,” Bastian said, backing slowly away from her.
Isolde blinked. “What?”
“I just figured you didn’t need to, is all.” He shrugged one shoulder. “You know, since you’re…”
“Dead?”
Bastian shot her a wry look. “Well, yes.”
Isolde’s felt the panic recede—just a fraction. She stuck out a hand to steady herself against the wall as she slid down to sit on the bottom stair.
“Does your heart beat, too?” Bastian asked.
“Yes,” Isolde told him. “Just much, much slower than a human’s, usually.
It speeds up when I’m frightened or excited or…
” Aroused, she’d almost said. A vision of Bastian’s eyes, smoldering as he gazed up from between her legs, chased the last vestiges of that old memory away.
Isolde cleared her throat. “It’s the same with breathing. ”
“And the sun? You don’t burst into flames if you go out in the day?”
Isolde startled herself with a laugh, of all things. Bastian looked startled, too, like it was the last sound he’d expected her to make. “Obviously not, or I’d be a pile of ash on your floor right now.”
“But clearly the sun affects you.”
“Yes, but it’s not instantaneous. In small doses, it just burns my eyes and hurts where it touches my skin. Longer exposure is more like a dose of slow-acting poison. It gives us a sort of wasting sickness, like consumption.”
Bastian turned to stare at the patch of sunlight Everett had tossed her into—at the stake that still lay in it. “Is that fatal?”
“With enough exposure, yes,” Isolde told him. “But I should be fine. Even if I do get sick, I wasn’t in the sun long enough that I wouldn’t recover.”
Bastian nodded. Isolde couldn’t see his face.
Crossing the forge, he stooped and plucked the stake off the floor.
Isolde’s panic surged anew. She leapt to her feet, backing away—but there was nowhere for her to go. Her back hit the wall, and all she could do was cower in the shadows, her eyes pinned to that deadly weapon.
She was trapped. She couldn’t flee the shop in the daylight. The only place she could go was up the stairs, back into Bastian’s apartment, where she’d still be trapped, but at least maybe she could get her hands on a weapon. Maybe up there she’d have a fighting chance.
But Bastian didn’t come toward her with the stake. He held it loosely, where she could easily see it, his other hand raised in a placating gesture. Slowly, as though trying not to startle her, he walked toward the blazing forge.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Isolde,” he said.
And pitched the wooden stake into the fire.
When night fell, Isolde and Bastian set out to track the beast—and the human helping it.
After Bastian burned the stake, which had both shocked the hell out of Isolde and elicited a reaction in her gut that she most certainly did not feel like examining, he’d gone right back to work.
Isolde had crept back up to his rooms and spent the day listening to the agitated pounding of his hammer against steel.
They didn’t speak any more until Bastian came upstairs at dusk and suggested they retrace their steps from the night before, with the aim of finding where the beast had escaped to after Isolde was poisoned.
Isolde didn’t relish the idea of going back to that place in the woods, but she had to admit it was a decent plan. At least the knife wound to her chest had healed—faster than she expected, actually. Her wounds always closed quickly, but usually it took a few days for all traces to disappear.
But when she peeled back the bandage Bastian had tied around her chest, she found nothing but pale, smooth skin. Not so much as a faint scar remained.
That seemed odd, after how slow it had been to clot, but she put it all down to the nightsbane finally working its way out of her system. Partway through the afternoon, she’d felt her head clear, like a fog had been burned off.
Now, as she and Bastian traipsed through the trees, she felt strong in a way she usually only experienced for the first few hours after feeding.
Warmth thrummed in her veins; every stride she took felt graceful and sure.
She could see every tiny, minuscule detail of the forest—individual needles on pine trees, small creatures scurrying across their boughs, the intricate pattern of every tiny flake of snow that drifted down around them.
And Bastian’s scent…
Isolde could smell his blood, even as he simply walked beside her, his cloak covering his neck.
She could practically hear his pulse beating beneath his skin, and her mouth watered at the memory of his taste.
Like cherries and cardamom and forest. She had to fight to keep her canines from sharpening.
She could understand, now, why Vampires had hunted Wolves before the Bleeding War. That scent, his rich, unique flavor… Isolde could easily become addicted to it.
Which was yet another reason why nothing more could ever happen between them. Why she could absolutely never feed from him again.
“We’re getting close,” Bastian said, holding a tree branch out of the way for Isolde to pass by. “I remember this clearing.”
“Do you suppose it’s a human who’s helping the beast?” Isolde wondered aloud, trying not to let the memory of the previous night take over her mind.
“I don’t see how it could be,” Bastian replied. “What’s to stop the beast from killing the human, just like the others?”
“That assumes the beast is some mindless animal, killing without thought. And if it was, what would stop it from killing a Vampire or a Wolf, just the same as the humans?”
Bastian huffed a sigh, his breath clouding in the cold air. “I have to admit, the scenes of the murders, especially with that farmer last night...” He shook his head. “That’s how it looks when a Werewolf makes a kill.”
Isolde’s head snapped to the side as she gaped up at him. She had nearly forgotten the dead farmer in all the pain and terror of the last day. But that wasn’t what had shocked her.
“You’re saying you think it could be a Wolf?”
Bastian stayed silent for a long moment. He clenched and unclenched his jaw, hesitating. “I don’t see what else it could be. You’re right that it doesn’t make sense for it to be a wild animal, but it was clear enough last night that whatever it is, it has an animal form.”
“You didn’t get any better look at it than I did?” Isolde asked.
All she’d been able to make out was a blur of white fur on four legs.
Bastian shook his head.
Now it was Isolde’s turn to hesitate, afraid to voice the possibility that had been circulating in her brain all day.
“You don’t think,” she said slowly, “it could be Everett, do you?”
“No,” Bastian said, his tone firm. He caught the skeptical look Isolde shot him, and added, “Trust me, I thought of that. Everett might hate Vampires, but he’d never kill an innocent human. Besides, I’m telling you, Isolde, we can’t shift when the moon isn’t full.”
“But you just said you think the killer is a Wolf.”
“I said I didn’t know what else it could be, but I still don’t see how that could be possible.”
Now it was Isolde’s turn to puff out a frustrated breath. “So that gets us nowhere, then. Not about what—or who—the beast is or who could be helping it.”
“Could it be Selene?”
Isolde stopped short.
The accusation wouldn’t have bothered her—she had just accused Bastian’s own brother of being the killer, after all—if it weren’t for the tone of his voice.
There was something in it, something just derisive enough to make it abundantly clear what he thought of her kind.
To remind her of it. Even if he had burned that hawthorn stake.