Chapter Four
DIERK
Iwas going to kill this male and whoever came after him.
The morning had chewed me up. Failures smoked in my hair. A fresh blister blackened the palm I kept clamped to my leg. Hungry heat sat lodged in the hollow behind my breastbone.
I’d been sitting on that chair since dawn when the old male, Adelmar, had knocked at the cabin door. Not her.
“She’s busy,” he said when I asked why. “She’ll come later.”
Then we started.
How to safely access fire—I breathed wrong, and a flame burst out of my chest, singeing the sleeve of my jerkin.
How to control it—I spat a tongue that shredded a curtain fringe instead of lighting a candle.
How to keep steady the only flame I’d ever willfully called up—it sparked and sputtered, collapsing like a bad lung.
Nothing. Nothing held.
Heat sizzled under my skin, a scalding pressure that wanted out.
A metallic taste sat heavy on my tongue.
The air filled with smoke. My fingers buzzed with the urge to end things.
My muscles were coiled and ready to spring.
My wolf prowled under my ribs, ears pricked, hackles up, saliva thick at the back of the throat.
He needed out.
I needed out.
To move, to run, to tear, to rip. It was a bone-deep itch.
Adelmar’s voice tightened with every failure, becoming more clipped, impatient. He kept feeding me the motions. The mental images and tidy gestures a craftsman uses on metal.
But there was nothing real to work with here, only instinct I couldn’t shape. A part of me that had always eluded me.
Breathe. Channel. Contain. The words were damning nonsense against what lived inside me.
He taught technique, but I was hunger.
Breathe. Channel. Contain. Breathe. Channel. Contain.
The wolf was pushing. Against me. Against the fire.
Pushing.
Get out. Tear open. Forget the fire. Get out.
Breathe. Channel. Contain. Breathe. Channel. Contain. Breathe. Channel. Contain.
Pacing didn’t take the edge off.
The cabin felt too small.
The walls pressed in like a trap that smelled of wood and smoke and people.
A cage with food and warmth. But still a cage. Like my head.
I couldn’t open it, access it. Couldn’t get to the fire that was both a foreign road and part of me.
The light went thin. The air pressed at my throat.
I couldn’t squeeze out whatever raged inside me.
The wolf pushed and pushed and pushed, a vise on my skull, claws at the last rag of my calm.
Adelmar kept giving instructions my hands kept missing. The verdict screamed in his sigh.
The base of my skull tightened.
Salt-sick sweat stung my eyes.
The orders. The failure. The reaching for a place I lost so long ago.
It all blurred into need and rage and hot hollowness.
Adelmar said something. A snap of advice. Or counting breaths. Or something else.
I didn’t know. Didn’t care.
I snarled, teeth snapped.
I turned toward him too fast, the movement all wrong. My elbow caught the stack of plates and cups on a lower shelf. For a second they teetered, tilting like the brittle balance of my control.
They fell.
Plates shattered, cups clattered and skittered off the shelf and onto the floor.
The noise was obscene.
A thousand small explosions that filled my brain, leaving no room for thought.
Fire answered the chaos.
Heat slammed out of me, the world narrowed to its power. It rolled out like a wave, hot and wide. It swallowed half of the table. It blackened and collapsed with a sickening snap. A chair caught flame.
It didn’t stop when it found Adelmar on its way.
The male moved fast. He opened his palms in front of him as air shimmered, bending into a shield of pressure and flames. My fire tilted like grass before the gusts, but his shield wouldn’t, couldn’t extinguish them. “Control it,” he screamed as my fire pushed on, an angry current of raging flames.
I watched his hands as the heat hit them. As the brim of his beard flickered into flame. The smell of singed hair slithered through the smoke. Something like a snarl left his mouth.
I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop.
I moved with the wave, and it moved with me.
I was the bright thing that ate the room.
I was hunger, and release, and freedom. The blaze slid down the bench and into the floorboards, and for a moment, a terrible, magnificent moment, I felt no shackles at all.
I was fire. I destroyed. I took. I was free.
I barely heard the door slam. The steps of someone hurrying in. Good. More to feed to the fire. More to destroy.
“Dierk.”
I knew that voice. The command in it brushed against me. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the fire burning.
“Dierk. Listen to me.”
I didn’t have to. I would tear down this place and everything in it. I was strong enough to.
“Dierk.”
My wolf turned to the voice, and his order was a whisper I couldn’t ignore. Don’t hurt.
It distracted me. It confused me.
“Find my heart,” the voice said. “I know you can. Quiet everything, and find the rhythm of my heart.”
I didn’t care. Didn’t want to. But... it was there.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Steady. Sure.
“Follow it,” the voice ordered.
She ordered.
Princess.
Don’t hurt, the wolf repeated.
“I know you found me,” she said. “Now find yours. Your heart, Dierk. Find it.”
I didn’t want to. Didn’t care.
But... There. Under the roar of the fire. Hidden by the noise of rage. Booming. Hurried. Frantic.
“Match your heart with mine,” she said.
My wolf sat, maybe whimpered, his ears tipping toward her.
“Listen to my heart. Follow it with yours.”
I did. For the calm of it. The steadiness.
It didn’t snatch or tug. It soothed. It steadied. It cooled.
It was good.
It felt good.
And I let it fill me.
ELSKE
I’D NEVER DELUDED MYSELF into thinking he would be easy to teach. But this...I did not expect this.
With Vargan and Skarr gone, I spread the old maps across the library table and spent the morning marking the weak spots in the patrol lines and the gaps in the watchtowers.
Tracing the best routes to get to my sister to aid her, if need be.
She had been given to a noble completely loyal to my father and just as cruel.
When the time was right, I wasn’t going to let her stay with him.
I was going to free her. And so, now that I was alone, I planned, and studied, and memorized.
Then I shifted and left my wolf run the way she ached to. Wild and unjudged. No one to measure my stride or sneer at my joy. Just the forest with its reds and yellows and golds, and me.
Until I got close to the cabin.
I smelled the smoke before I saw it. It was acrid, biting at my throat. It curled from the windows, leaked from the doorframe, hot and greedy. My wolf’s ear caught Adelmar’s order, his frantic shout that had gone unanswered. I sprinted, shifted back, and pushed inside.
Half the cabin was in ruins.
Adelmar stood braced behind a shield of compressed fire, sweat carving tracks through the soot on his face, as a roaring torrent of fire slammed into him.
Dierk.
His eyes blazed gold and feral. The fire didn’t look wielded by him at all. It owned him. It poured from him in an endless, senseless onslaught, unchecked and wild. There was no direction, no thought.
He was fire, unrelenting, merciless.
The fury of it was so blinding, so absolute, that doubt stabbed at me. I wasn’t sure even my fire could rival his if it came to heat against heat. No. I couldn’t fight this. I had to reach the man lost inside the blaze, or Adelmar wouldn’t survive.
“Dierk,” I called.
Nothing.
“Dierk, listen to me.” Still nothing, so I pushed more force into my voice. “Dierk.”
My wolf let out a low whine. The sound snagged his wolf, a faint ripple beneath the chaos.
I felt it–his wolf turning toward us–a crack in the wall of fury.
So small, but all I had, so I seized it.
Reason wouldn’t work. He was instinct now, blood, rage, and hunger, and I had to meet him somewhere real, somewhere beyond the mind.
“Find my heart,” I ordered, my wolf adding a steady chuff.
For a moment, the flames only howled louder. Then, a fraction of their bite eased. My shoulders sagged, just slightly, in relief. “Find my heart. I know you can. Quiet everything and find the rhythm of my heart.”
I felt the resistance in him, instinct thrashing against the spark of control I was trying to fan. His heartbeat was frantic, savage, but as I held my own steady, I could hear his begin to slow. “Follow it,” I urged. “Now find yours. Your heart, Dierk. Find it.”
Pulling him back to humanity was a knife-edge, and I held my breath as I whispered, softer than a prayer, “Match your heart with mine.”
His beats shifted, stumbling, then falling closer to mine.
“Listen to our hearts,” I ordered gently. “Follow them.”
The fire didn’t vanish in an instant. It ebbed, faltered, and finally guttered out, leaving only smoke and heat. Dierk stumbled, dazed, as though surfacing from a long, violent drowning. He collapsed on his knees onto the glass-littered floor.
Adelmar dropped his shield. He brushed at the half-burned ruin of his beard, sighed, and straightened. “Well, then. Now we know how strong his fire is.” His mouth twitched with reluctant approval. “As strong as the rest of him.”
“Are you alright?” I asked.
He waved my concern off, taking stock of his beard.
I let out a long blow of air and went to the male, kneeling by his side. “Dierk.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, pressed unsteady fingers to his temples, and dragged them through his hair. “I lost it.” His voice was a rough growl.
“I noticed.”
“That is quite the understatement,” Adelmar said, picking up what was left of a cup and letting it fall again.
The growl from Dierk intensified, the heels of his hands pressed on his eyes. “He kept pushing, and pushing, and yapping.”
“Yapping,” Adelmar sputtered. “Yapping. Now, you listen to me, young wolf–”
The snarl was so loud, so vicious and feral, it stopped the Feuermeister cold. And to be honest, even my wolf stepped back from such violence.