25. CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 25
Noa
In the morning, Grayson rose when I did, but disappeared into the guest bathroom and showered by himself. I found him an hour later, standing in the kitchen, adding coffee grounds to the automatic like he’d been working in a coffee kiosk for years. He’d dressed in black jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt, with his hair still damp and curling.
He handed me a steaming mug with a perfect layer of foam, and said, “I added enough cream to turn it into warm milk.”
I frowned, sampled. The coffee was the way I liked it. “I don’t guilt you over food choices.”
“Coffee isn’t food.”
Outside, the sun was glittery, and snow melted like sugar in water as an unexpected warm front moved through. I glanced down at the hiking boots I wore. The jeans and sweater might be overkill for the changing weather, which was milder in Sentinel Falls territory, thanks to the strange energies affecting Carmag.
Did Westvale cross over a ley line? That might explain it.
“What are your plans today?” he asked mildly.
“Same as yours. Play the disruptor.”
“That’s never my intent.”
I smiled tightly and avoided eye contact. “Let’s not fight this morning.”
He turned back to the coffee machine. Busied himself by filling a mug for himself. “When are you leaving?”
“After you.” When he’d be stuck at the Gathering in Anson’s paneled meeting room and unable to leave.
“Are you allowing enough time?”
He meant it wasn’t safe to spend the night in Azul, even though some pack members had returned, wanting to resume their lives rather than remain in Westvale, dependent upon the Carmag. The necessary public services in Azul were back on—power and water—thanks to ingenuity and a punch of Fee’s puppy magic. It wouldn’t be a tragedy if I stayed in my old house along the lake... if it weren’t for the lack of security. And knowing Grayson wouldn’t be with me.
We’d had this discussion last night, when I wrapped myself in his arms. He’d tangled his fingers in my hair, and in the warmth of cuddling only, with no sex because I just wanted to be held… we’d tried talking.
The emotions hadn’t been as contentious then as they were now. Grayson had argued that the trek to the sacred pool would take time. Fee might have opened a direct passage to Azul to aid Anson’s evacuation of survivors, but the trek would take half an hour. From there, I’d use the passage leading to the meadow where we’d first encountered creatures, hike past Grayson’s hidden cave and go the last few miles to the pool. Grayson’s estimate of the time needed was between two and three hours, depending on how well the nymphs kept up, and whether we encountered anyone.
“I can have Mace send a security detail.”
“He’ll be busy with you at the Gathering.” Fallon, too. Anson would have his chief military advisor, Elijah Stone, at his side. Lec Rus told no one who he had with him, but they would all be posturing. I was certain someone would notice if a security detail was missing, then question why I needed the protection.
Besides, I didn’t trust the men not to have secret orders to get me back to Westvale at the first sign of trouble. And I wasn’t an idiot. Metis and Aine would be difficult.
“The nymphs don’t like males around their sacred pool,” I said. “No point in annoying them if we don’t have to.”
Grayson turned to lean against the kitchen counter, his gaze shuttered. “You’ll be out in the open for longer than I like.”
“Not really.” I set the coffee aside. “Fee opened a direct passage to the pool. He said it would take maybe an hour because of the distance.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “When did Fee do this?”
“He was here this morning while you were doing it alone in the shower.”
A flash of alpha canines. Gods—I loved that expression. I loved this man. Hated upsetting him.
I stood, went to him, and wrapped my arms around his waist. Pressed my cheek to his chest, listened to the pounding of his heart. “Soon, this will be over,” I whispered. “Please. Trust me.”
He pressed his fingers against the wolf rune on my wrist, dragged my hand to his mouth, and gently bit down. “This is your lifeline. I’ll always be here.”
I turned my face and pressed a kiss above his heart. “And I’ll always be here,” I said, believing with all my heart it was true when he turned to leave.
Effa and Caerwen arrived twenty minutes later, and after a trek through a cold, dim passage with curling ivy on the walls, we were standing near the sacred pool, listening to the dull thunder of the waterfall and staring at the smooth surface of the water. The sun was out. The ground was muddy, with patches of snow in the purple shade beneath the pines. But birds were pecking through the leaves and detritus on the forest floor, looking for the worms wiggling toward the warmth and away from the wet.
One sparrow hopped away as a robin swooped in and began tossing brown leaf bits in a greedy search.
Caerwen tightened her long coat around the diaphanous gown she wore. I didn’t think it was easy hiking in a dress like that, but she always wore gowns. She’d worn gowns when guarding her grotto in Wales. Probably wore them when she battled enemies who came to destroy what she loved.
Effa had chosen a dress that reminded me of the crocus that appeared in early spring. Her hands kept twisting. “It will be fine,” I told her.
“No one’s here yet.”
“I haven’t burned anything down yet. Besides, they aren’t afraid of questions.”
“Aine was very angry when we asked before.”
“Aine wanted nothing more than to discover what Amal had written in that book. She didn’t find out from my mother. Now she has another chance with the journal.”
The nymphs didn’t answer. Instead, Caerwen fluttered in and out of visibility. Effa hopped around like the birds.
“What are you two so nervous about?”
“They’re coming.”
I slid my gaze across the water, looking for a telltale sign of a disturbance. Then I searched the forest, waiting for Aine to make her entrance.
Effa whispered, “If Aine goes fracky—”
“And Metis turns fish-eyed,” Caerwen hissed in her grotto voice.
I joined in with the doom and gloom, a smile tugging my lips. “What a bullspitted mess. We’ll run for the hills.”
“We should run now.” Effa pointed at the pink, purple, and white flowers popping up through the mud, petals spreading like a time-lapse video running at a rapid speed.
Then Aine appeared, materializing out of a misty cloud. Butterflies flitted around her head. She’d woven her pale hair into a coronet, laced with pale pink flowers. The gown she wore reminded me of flowing blood—glistening, ruby red, darkening to black at the hem.
The material swished with each step she took. More and more flowers popped from the wintry ground, opening with an aggression that prickled my skin. Vines emerged to coil and unwind with a reptilian intensity, matching the Queen of the Forest’s tight smile.
And then competitively, because it could be nothing else, the surface of the sacred pool churned. The sentinels for the Lady of the Lake emerged on their platform, spears and helmets gleaming. Metis followed, not stepping through mist like her sister, but exploding with a bolt of bright, dangerous starlight.
The High Priestess for all water-based nymphs displayed the same regal arrogance as Aine, the Mother for all land-based nymphs. The gown Metis wore murmured with the surging song from the oceans. The material held the darkest blues, crusted with shells and crystals. She wore the familiar crown of diamonds, although the stones mingled in were sapphires this time and not amethysts.
Still, they burned with the same inner fire. A warning.
The Queen of the Forest sneered, “Always so theatrical, Meti .”
“Better than the cliché, Annie ,” the Lady of the Lake spat, adding to the insult with a wave of power that crusted the flowers in Aine’s hair with ice.
Aine’s lip curled, and it wasn’t even close to a smile. “Did you enjoy having your precious blade back?”
Metis mirrored Aine’s expression so perfectly I blinked.
“I should have cut your throat when you were a babe in a crib.”
“You always lacked imagination.”
And as entertaining as it all was, the fish-eyed frackiness, I intervened before the two trembling nymphs at my back freaked and disappeared.
“Ladies,” I said. “We’re here to talk.”
Aine flicked her hand. Smiled as flower petals fell in an avalanche from the sky, sticking in Metis’s platinum blonde hair, over her shoulders, melting into the fabric of her dress. Metis retaliated. Water poured over Aine’s head, drenching her.
I burst out laughing. “Gods—and they consider you two queens?”
“We can’t kill each other,” Metis gritted.
“A pity,” Aine agreed, her smile thinning her lips into a fine line.
Effa was fizzing. Caerwen was close to transparent, the poor dear, even with the heavy coat. I sighed, and shouted over my shoulder, “Fee, get your skinny ass out here. Tell them to behave.”
Frantic, Effa poked my back like she was a woodpecker. “You shouldn’t say things like that,” she whispered.
“Why not? He’s in this up to his bushy eyebrows.”
“It’s not… polite.”
Fee—Felix, the King of the Forest, the Green Man, the Garden Ornament—walked from the trees. He was wearing his ancient armor again, glinting in the sun.
I shook my head, unable to believe the future of the Selkirks depended on this trio of characters, powerful beings who’d been around so long they’d forgotten how to take themselves, or this situation, as seriously as they should.
Immortality did that, distorting the meaning of life, creating endless, endless days until only the most outrageous broke through the boredom.
“Are you finished?” I snapped, unable to believe I’d allowed Metis to intimidate me. The same with Aine.
Both women glared, and it was probably wise to remember who they were. “I asked you here because—”
“What was that rubbish you sent, anyway?” Metis picked a small, long-legged ocean crab from her gown, tossed it back into the fresh water. I doubted it would survive long.
“Nothing more than a child’s drawing,” Aine added with a snort.
“Runes,” I said. “Surely you recognize a rune?”
“Not that rune.”
“Funny, because Amal kept a journal after the vampires turned her. When she still recalled the details.” I wasn’t sure how much they knew, but neither female acted surprised. “She drew that rune pattern. Wrote in code.”
“Fascinating,” Metis drawled.
“We had it decoded. Twenty pages where she wrote: the nymph queen knows.”
“Well, of course we know things.” Aine swiped at the wet petal sticking to her cheek. “We’re queens.”
I focused on the Queen of the Forest. The butterflies had disappeared from around her head. Her hair was dry and perfect after Metis’s deluge, but the pink flowers had washed away, leaving that one petal she’d brushed off like a bug.
I waited until she’d settled. “Then tell me how the kings destroyed the queens.”
Silence.
“You’re all demigods. You possess druid magic. The kind of magic needed for something as life-altering as stripping away a queen’s wolf.”
Aine blinked, her black nymph eyes glittering. “Is it a confession you’re expecting?”
“Do you value anything beyond your rivalries? Because Amal is up in the Cariboo right now, trying to discover the magic. She’s capturing alphas, cutting away their tattoos. Killing them. And if she duplicates what the kings did, she’ll destroy the only power standing between you and her vengeance. A wolf can kill a vampire. But a man without a wolf is no more threatening to Amal than a sprite.”
“She won’t be able to do it,” Metis said.
“But if she does? Amal won’t stop with destroying the packs. Her revenge extends to a nymph queen, and I believe that’s because one of you—maybe all of you—were involved in what the kings did.” I paused, then added, “So which one of you gave the kings the magic?”
Aine sputtered, “It was centuries ago. Longer. Everyone had magic back then—no one cared where the kings got it. The queens were burning everything in their path and we were all grateful when it stopped.”
I turned my gaze toward the Queen of the Forest; her expression tightened as I raised my hands. An instant later, a tree burst into flames. The next target was near the waterfall. With a zapping sound, a section of rock crumbled, then caved away, disrupting the water with enough force to push waves around the Lady of the Lake’s feet.
“I have all day.”
“Bitch,” Metis hissed, but not at me. She glared at her sister. “What did you do?”
“You left me in charge,” Aine said as if she was bored. “Don’t complain about it now.”
“You used that witch, didn’t you—the soul stealer? The one they call La Loba.”
I refused to shudder. They were talking about the effigy I’d seen in the Farmer’s Market. The mythical woman who stole wolf bones and tried to resurrect them.
“I used what was available,” Aine spat.
I challenged her. “For what reason?”
“The queens were destructive.”
“I’m descended from the queens. I can be destructive, Aine. And vindictive.”
“If you’d been alive back then, you would have understood.”
“Paint a picture for me, Aine.”
She plucked at her gown. “Fee’s magic failed, allowing abominations into the world. The kings used the queens to push them back below the earth, but the queens liked the power too much. They were greedy creatures, selfish, ruining everything. Forests were disappearing. Rivers fouled. They threatened the kings, who naturally wanted to control the queens, put them in their place. The kings came to me for aid. I asked a powerful sorceress for a solution and she obliged me.”
“How did she do it?” More importantly, was it something Amal was likely to stumble across, then duplicate?
“The sorceress was a seidr witch, a seer. The kings went to her. She told them what fate had planned. How the queens, if left alone, would become forces of chaos. A battle would ensue that the kings would lose. Everyone would die. Their world would be lost. And the kings responded with a request to neuter the queens, but not destroy them.”
“What went wrong?”
“Nothing.” Aine’s wintry smile reminded me she wasn’t human. “ Seidr magic requires a ritual, and to be successful, both parties must have the same desire.”
“The kings desired the ritual to control the queens?” I guessed.
“And the sorceress convinced the queens that they, too, wanted the ritual.”
“How—by showing them their future?”
“By revealing the desire of the kings, and how the ritual would actually grant the queens power.”
“Pitting them against each other, while wanting the same goal,” I guessed. What both parties wanted, to enhance their own power. Create the future they desired at the other’s expense.
“S eidr magic allows deceit, although there is a risk.” The nymph queen studied her long fingers. “It’s easy to convince one person to want what the other desires. The kings were already on board because it would nullify the queens. The nudge to the queens wasn’t worth the effort. They stumbled over each other to get the gift first.”
“What kind of ritual, Aine?”
“One presided over by a seidr practitioner,” she said. “A sorceress who knows the chants and how to create the right runes. The kings carved the marking into small stones—the same rune Amal drew—and the queens painted the runes with their blood. The blood ignited the magic, and the magic claimed the price.”
I shuddered. Grayson paid a price when he inked the moonstone runes on my skin. He’d said magic wasn’t free. Was it the same magic?
“What happened to the wolves?”
“They followed the blood into the runes and remained locked in the stones—or their essence remained. Their spirits,” Aine clarified. “The overjoyed queens wreaked havoc until they realized they’d been de-fanged. Their human forms were no match for the kings. All hell broke loose.”
“I can imagine,” Metis sneered with distaste.
Aine nodded, for once agreeing with her sister. “The sorceress disappeared with the rune stones. Over time, the queens went crazy. The kings banished them, claimed it was punishment, then sent out hunters to find the sorceress. They wanted to destroy her. Destroy the stones. They wanted no way for the imprisoned wolves to be reclaimed. The sorceress turned to me for protection. By then, she called herself the Wolf Woman. Over time, people called her the Bone Woman, or the Gatherer, because that was the price she had to pay for misusing the magic. To roam for eternity, gathering wolf bones, trying to resurrect what she’d destroyed.”
Ice crept into my spine. “Didn’t the kings curse the queens and all their daughters to never have a wolf? Isn’t that why we’re failles? ”
“Well, that’s the problem with seidr magic,” whispered Metis. “It spreads like a nightmare, with a mind of its own. Especially if deceit is involved.”
“I offered the sorceress a wrinkle,” Aine said while staring at the mist from the waterfall. “A prison, since the rune stones became too disruptive to leave alone.”
“She kept them with her?” I asked.
“Insurance. In case the queens found her. An exchange for her life.”
I rubbed my stiff arms. “Where is this prison?”
“Where else?” Metis said with a sharp laugh. “In the Carmag. That’s why Fee’s magic screws up.”
Aine brushed at her gown.
Her sister warned, “She’ll find a way out.”
“She won’t.”
I turned to the man in armor. “Did you know about this?”
Metis scoffed, “Isn’t it obvious? That doddering old fool doesn’t know what he had for breakfast.”
The doddering fool’s armor creaked as he changed his position. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with his befuddled expression as Fee asked, “Where is she, Aine?”
“Her power is too corrupted to let her out.”
“She’s corrupting everything in the Carmag.”
“Anson keeps himself busy fixing it,” Aine retorted, and I could have sworn Metis—that sea witch—was laughing.
I was trying hard not to burn down another tree because my pulse pounded with the same question. Was the seidr witch a seer-witch like the Gemini Witches? And the woman in the Farmer’s Market, who was part of the coven because she was gods-damned selling effigies of the Wolf Woman—Bone Woman—whatever.
Her magic crystal, the one that turned into ash—that had to be a theatrical trick. Along with the “ liminal spaces between worlds,” and the “ what you seek exists there” comments. Had she been convincing me that my desires matched hers? To find the Wolf Woman and free her from prison?
And I’d taken the bait. Hot on my I-need-to-help-Grayson crusade. My cramps were back, twisting with the stress, and Grayson was not around to ease them.
Effa bounced behind my back. Caerwen’s hand pressed on my arm. I glanced down. A small patch of grass had blackened beneath my feet and still smoldered, sending up wisps of gray smoke.
I gritted my teeth and said, “We really have to do something.”
“What?” Metis and Aine said in unison, and the wave of absurdity had me closing my eyes.
“The forces of chaos,” I said. “Who needs wolf queens with you two around?”
The nymphs fell silent. Even Fee stopped his creaking. The waterfall thundering in the distance was white noise, drowning out Effa’s squeak.
“How do we undo the seidr magic?” I asked Aine.
“Why would you want to undo it?”
“Because a wolf spirit cannot survive, locked in a rune stone for centuries.”
“The wolf is near mad by now, insane.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Why worry about the wolf if your goal is to kill Amal?” Aine asked. “The wolf will die at that point, regardless.”
I hated the out-of-body sensation that made thinking difficult. But a plan was developing, one that involved finding the Wolf Woman, getting Amal’s rune back, and somehow returning her wolf—during which a dread lord and a faille would have to work together. Find some way to disarm her. End the insanity.
Or make the situation a thousand times worse…
“Where is the wrinkle?”
“I’m afraid I don’t recall.”
“Amal is destroying my world, Aine. Why shouldn’t I destroy yours?”
She said nothing. Another tree burst into flame, crackling like dried tinder and spiraling black smoke into the air.
Metis turned to Fee and asked unkindly, “Can you find the wrinkle, old man?”
“Can you swim, old woman?” he answered back, light sparkling in his eyes. “Someone was careless with that sacred blade of yours. Be grateful I saved it for you. Otherwise, a very nasty cyclops would have used it to cut up his sheep.”
My eyes closed. I was drowning in the incredulity. My feet were numb because I was fighting with the rising power that wanted to explode into fireworks. One burning tree was not enough. And I didn’t know what to say, how to explain it to them. They were nymphs with no way to understand the wolf’s relationship with the man, or woman. The torture would be unbearable, having that part of yourself ripped away.
But then to realize the rune was a stone prison, and you had willingly added the blood that locked away the wolf—the guilt would tear me apart. Amal’s emotions were a mystery. She might not realize what she’d done. But to let her suffer when I could fix it? Let her wolf suffer? I wasn’t sure I had it in me to do that. Wouldn’t it be more merciful to reunite them and then end the torture in some humane way?
And since when was killing humane, Noa?
In my chest, the answer tugged. And in the distance, thunder rolled. Grayson’s thunder. I turned to Effa and Caerwen and said it was time to go home.