38. Isolde
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
ISOLDE
O ne minute, Isolde was leading the human man through the crowd by the hand.
The next, she was still holding his hand, and a white Wolf was dragging the rest of him away by the arm it had been attached to.
Isolde staggered back, wide-eyed, as blood sprayed from the stump of the wrist. The breath she sucked in was deafening in her ringing ears, louder, somehow, than the screams of terror erupting all around her. She bent down and laid the dismembered hand as gently as she could into a pile of snow.
“Isolde!”
A pair of arms circled her waist, yanking her against a hard body—and out of the way of a stampede of fleeing villagers.
Sound rushed back in all at once, and she snapped into motion.
Whirling toward the person who held her, she reached for the daggers strapped beneath her skirt. Was it the person who’d been helping the Wolf? The one with the nightsbane dagger?—
“Bastian,” she gasped, her hands flying up to grip the front of his tunic as soon as she recognized him. “The Wolf?—”
“Are you hurt?” he demanded, pushing her away from himself to look her up and down. His eyes were wide, frantic. “Isolde, are you hurt?”
“I’m fine!” she insisted. Someone rammed into her from behind in their haste to flee, knocking her into Bastian’s chest. “Did you get a look at the Wolf? Do you know who it is?”
He shook his head, clinging to Isolde to keep her upright, his gaze still tracking up and down her body like he thought she might bear some wound neither one of them had noticed. “It was moving too fast. I didn’t get a clear look.”
Villagers streamed past them, slipping in the snow and the spills of fresh blood as they fled.
As one woman bolted past a cooking fire, the hem of her skirt caught a stray spark and went up in flames.
She kept running, her screams swallowed by the panicked din, knocking people out of the way as the flames crawled up her back.
Blood poured down another man’s face as he ran blindly by, claw marks slashing through both of his eyes.
“We have to stop the Wolf,” Isolde gasped, lurching into a run in the direction the humans were fleeing from. “We need to kill it before it kills anyone else.”
“I need a sword,” Bastian said, catching her by the arm and tugging her back. “Come with me to the shop and then we’ll?—”
“There’s no time!” Isolde shouted. “I’ll go after it.
You get your sword and catch up with me.
” With trembling fingers, she unfastened her cloak and tore it off.
She hated to do this without it—to do anything without it—but for all the attachment she felt to the garment, the sense of safety it gave her…
it was just a piece of fabric. And it was only going to get in her way.
“Take this back to the forge with you. Don’t lose it. ”
By the look on his face, Isolde knew Bastian wanted to argue. But he took the cloak. “You have your knives?”
Isolde nodded. When Bastian didn’t let go of her, she slipped her hand through the slit in her skirt and pulled one free.
“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “Go!”
After one more beat of hesitation, of searching her face like he was trying to memorize it, he turned and sprinted off in the direction of the forge.
Isolde whirled around and ran toward the loudest screams.
More villagers barreled past her in the opposite direction from which she ran. Isolde had to fight her way through the crowd, clawing past people, knocked back three steps for every one she gained.
Isolde gave up on traveling through the streets and hurried toward the nearest building.
Sheathing her dagger, she made quick work of scaling the wall and hauling herself onto the roof.
From there, she began running again, using her preternatural speed to launch herself from one roof to the next.
Her boots slipped on an icy shingle as she landed, but she was running again before she could go down, leaping from roof to roof, tracking the direction of the panicked crowds through the village.
Finally, the angry shouts of men grew louder than the terrified screams. Isolde veered to the north, following the sounds?—
There .
Half a dozen human men had cornered the Wolf in the alley between the baker’s and the seamstress’ shop. A house blocked off the opposite end, the gaps between buildings far too small for the Wolf to slip through.
Isolde paused at the edge of the baker’s roof, assessing. As she watched, one of the men lunged forward, his sword drawn?—
The Wolf snapped out at him, dodging the sword, and closed its jaws around the man’s neck. With a snarl and a violent shake, the beast tore his head from his shoulders.
It flung the body one way, and the severed head rolled the other.
If Isolde had been human, she would have emptied the contents of her stomach off the side of the roof. One of the men below did just that—then dropped his sword, turned tail, and ran.
Isolde took that as her cue to drop down from the roof. She drew both daggers, prowling forward to stand alongside the four remaining men.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, girl?” one of them demanded. “Get the hell out of here while you have the chance.”
Isolde let her fangs slide free. She might as well use every weapon at her disposal.
“I’m more than capable of handling myself,” she informed the human. He took one look at her fangs and didn’t argue any further.
The Wolf snarled, eyeing their brandished weapons as it paced the length of the alleyway where it was trapped. When one of the men edged closer, slashing at it, the Wolf snapped back. This time, it sunk its fangs into the man’s arm—and ripped it clean out of its socket.
The man let out a guttural scream, blood spraying from the place where his arm had been. He collapsed, falling against the alley wall, and slumped into unconsciousness.
“We need a unified attack,” Isolde rushed to say. She adjusted her grip on her daggers, widening her stance. “Everyone, on my count.”
“That’s what they tried on the full moon,” one of the men argued, his voice thick with panic. “Now Holden Palmer is blind in one eye.”
“Shut up, Reeve,” growled the older man who’d spoken to Isolde. “Do what she says.”
The four of them readied their weapons, edging closer to the beast. It snarled, blood and saliva flying from its mouth as it snapped its jaws.
“Ready,” Isolde murmured to the others, clutching her daggers so tightly her knuckles ached. “Now!”
They lunged in perfect unison, but the Wolf was ready.
The older man died first. The Wolf slashed at him with its claws, gutting him from his lungs to his groin. Next went Reeve, his throat torn out in a spray of blood. The third man lost his leg. The fourth had his chest torn open and was dead before he hit the ground.
The Wolf lunged for Isolde next.
She leapt out of the way, slashing with her knife as the beast went for her legs?—
Isolde’s feet left the ground and the world inverted itself. Stone cracked against her skull, and then she was sliding down a wall of rough stone, her head spinning as she hit the ground.
Somehow, she still clutched her daggers. Isolde scrambled upright, holding them before her as she got her bearings and struggled to catch her breath.
The Wolf blocked her way out of the alley.
It had caught her skirts in its jaws and flung her over its back, cornering her between those three walls instead.
Blood dripped from the Wolf’s maw as it stalked toward her. Its claws scraped against the cobblestones with every prowling step, echoing along with the snarl it released. Dark eyes tracked her every move, filled with a rage that was all too human.
Isolde’s breath sawed in and out of her chest. She eased into a crouch, adjusting her grip on her daggers, just the way Selene had showed her in those days after she’d turned.
“Come on, you bastard,” she muttered, letting her muscles coil with anticipation as the beast came closer. “Let’s fucking end this.”
The Wolf lunged.
So did Isolde.
She slid onto the ground, using the icy cobbles to speed her along as she slashed for the Wolf’s underbelly.
It leapt high, aiming for the place where her throat had just been.
She was close—so, so close, the tip of her dagger ruffling through the long, bloodied hairs of its belly as it soared above her.
And she missed.
The street shook as the beast landed behind her once more, a howl of anger tearing from its mouth. Isolde rolled onto her belly, scrambling to her feet?—
White hot, searing pain tore across her back, from just below her shoulder blades, all the way down to the curve of one hip. She fell to the cobbles, her scream shredding her throat.
Fighting through the pain, roaring against it, she tried to force herself back up. The Wolf only planted a paw on her back, right in the center of the slashes it had just made, and pinned her down.
Isolde could only scream, then. She thrashed, swiping out behind herself with her one remaining dagger—she’d lost the other one at some point—and met nothing but air.
She was going to die. S he was going to die.
All those vile, untrue things she’d said to Bastian— I’m immortal, you’re not, I don’t want you —because she’d been convinced that it was him who was going to die and leave her alone in the world, and now she was about to leave him .
My mortal life is too short not to spend the rest of it loving you.
She should have told him she loved him, because God knew she did. She’d had her chance to tell him, and she hadn’t, because she assumed she had thousands of years left on this earth, while he only had a hundred.
The truth was, she’d only had another hour.
I don’t want you, she’d told him.
Now he’d never know that she wanted him more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. More than she wanted to be human again, even.
The Wolf’s breath singed the back of her neck. She couldn’t see it, but she knew the moment it opened its mouth, readying for the kill.
Isolde closed her eyes. Bastian’s face filled her mind, and she wished her last memory was of him smiling at her, not staring at her with his broken heart written all over his features. She braced for the pain, prayed for it to be swift.
It never came.
A familiar voice rang out, echoing down the alley. Selene’s voice, calling something that Isolde couldn’t make out. Her name, maybe.
The weight disappeared from her back.
When Isolde lifted her head, Selene and the Wolf were both gone.