Chapter 8 #3
“What is this called?” I ask, taking in my reflection—my wind-chapped cheeks, tangled hair, and dirt-streaked skin. Unlike Diggory’s handheld mirror, this one is large enough to take in all my features at once. Dozens of unfamiliar tools and instruments are scattered on the tabletop beneath it.
Vivian smiles when our eyes connect in the mirror. “A vanity.”
A laugh bursts from my mouth. “It’s literally named after being conceited?”
“Or a makeup table,” she says, winking. “But give me an hour and you’ll see why.”
“Makeup?” I repeat.
Vivian nods and picks up a hairbrush out of the first drawer. “You’ll be obsessed with yourself almost as much as Lucan is.”
My cheeks heat. “He’s not obsessed with me.”
The words somehow die as they exit my mouth, like I don’t necessarily believe it myself, or maybe more that I wish it were true.
Because I’m certainly obsessed with him.
But I have no way of knowing if this… thing between us is permanent or simply an exciting fraction of his centuries-long life for him.
I’m not permanent, that’s for sure, not with Arad’s venom slowly inching through my organs and turning them to stone. Why would Lucan be so taken with someone he can’t have forever?
But Vivian purses her lips in amusement as she starts to brush through my knotted, wind-blown hair. “You know why you couldn’t hear all our mental voices before, only his?”
“No,” I confess.
“Lucan ordered us not to shift.”
“What? Why?”
“He didn’t want to confuse you.” Vivian snorts. “Or so he said. I think he just wanted to keep you all to himself, from the moment he first heard your voice.”
I blink at her, even more confused now. “But even that first moment I put on the necklace, I didn’t hear any of you. Only him.”
“Oh,” she says, beginning to play with the edges of my hair with a casual touch I’ve never experienced from a friend before, “we used to take turns patrolling, stalking around the Wall looking for a way in. Lucan just liked to take as many shifts as he could, especially around the time of the blood moon, so he was on the receiving end of your necklace the night you put it on for the first time.” She drops her voice to mutter under her breath, “And every night after.”
“So the howls?” I ask, incredulous. “Before a few months ago, it wasn’t just Lucan who haunted Xantera… but all of you on rotation?”
“Yeah.” Vivian’s laugh now is a howl in and of itself. “Could you imagine if it had been Soren on duty that night you first put on the necklace and you’d fallen in love with him instead?”
I scrunch my nose playfully, but the word love rattles around in my brain.
I’m not sure what the rules regarding that particular emotion are, but I don’t think I would have felt the same toward Soren or anyone else.
The fact that it was Lucan that night, that he decided to be there every other night after, from the moment he first called me a nightmare…
Vivian’s watching my expression in the mirror as if she can see the thoughts racing across my eyes, so I give a little cough. “You and Merrick then?”
She sighs, taking the bait for a change of subject. “Definitely love him.”
“How did that… happen?” I ask, unsure how most romantic relationships even begin. Probably not with a blood-infused necklace connecting you to a deep voice that awakens your soul.
“Childhood friends, really, that experienced everything together,” Vivian tells me.
“When we were kids, life was pretty carefree. We didn’t really know we lived in a ghost town that used to border something so much greater, because this was all we’d ever known.
These ramshackle houses might as well have been castles, and the Wall might as well have been the edge of the world. ”
Through the mirror, I watch her gather sections of my hair and begin to twine them together in a beautiful pattern I’ve never seen before. She continues talking, oblivious of my awe while her fingers work magic.
“Lucan, Merrick, Soren, and I, we all would get into so much trouble. Jumping off cliffs into the river, daring each other to see who could climb the tallest tree. But one day, after finding a ravine north of Eversnow Peak, Lucan and Soren raced off ahead, and Merrick and I made about a hundred trips back and forth trying to find them. By the time night started to approach, we realized we were lost. Together. Just the two of us.”
“That’s romantic,” I say earnestly.
Vivian laughs. “I didn’t think so at first. Merrick had never been more than just a friend to roughhouse with, but that night, we had to…” In the mirror, her cheeks take on a bit of pink. “Sleep next to each other.”
“What?” I ask with a cocked eyebrow. “There was only one cave?”
“We slept on a flat expanse of rock beneath the stars, thank you very much,” Vivian huffs, then smiles.
“Most beautiful night of my life. We talked until we both drifted off… and then we shared a traumatic experience later on when we found our way back to the town and every single werewolf chewed us out for about ten hours straight.”
“Had Lucan and Soren made it back?” I ask, trying to imagine the scene she’s painting as if I’d been there, too. As if I actually belong.
“Of course. They were about as smug as you’d expect.
Back then though, Lucan didn’t have all this weight on his shoulders.
No one depended on him. Then we got older, Lucan’s father, Warren, died, and Lucan took his place.
We grew up quickly. Responsibilities shifted.
But Merrick and I have always been bonded in a way I can’t explain since that night. ”
Lost in thought for a moment with a far-away smile, Vivian finishes braiding my hair down my back. When she’s done, she swivels my chair around and grins. “Not that there are many options in our pack. Only two or three bloodlines, so Merrick’s one of the only werewolves who isn’t my cousin.”
“Lucan is?” I ask, eyebrow raised.
“Yeah. Second, technically. And Soren’s my first.”
As Vivian fusses with the waves of hair that frame my face, a question bursts from my mouth before I can stop it.
“Do I have to worry about the ones not related to him?”
It sounds childish, but Lucan is hundreds of years old.
Surely, he’s made a connection with another female before he met me.
And even after he met me, what if he never thought he’d see me in the flesh and continued to have other relations, believing there would always be a Wall between us?
I chew on my lip nervously, and Vivian sighs.
“We’re friends, okay? So I would never lie to you,” she says. “Lucan’s our alpha, and he’s definitely not a virgin angel.”
“Your what?”
“Virgin angel?” she asks, eyebrows pinched.
“No.” I flush. “The other word you just said.”
“Oh. Alpha.” Vivian looks relieved that she doesn’t have to explain what a virgin is.
“It means he’s the leader of our pack. That, combined with his stunning looks I hear enough about—which he gets from my side of the family, by the way—and the few females he’s not related to throw themselves at him. ”
My heart feels like it grows bristles sharp enough to puncture my lungs. “Right,” I say.
But Vivian calmly cleans my face and picks up a tube of some substance that matches my skin tone.
“Werewolves have very good hearing, just so you know,” she says, glancing at my chest, where the necklace still lays against my sternum without a connection to Lucan and my heartbeat thumps erratically.
“You have nothing to worry about. He’s always been too obsessed with bringing down the Wall.
And then ever since you found that necklace, he’s been too obsessed with you. ”
I try hard to keep the idiotic, immature smile off my face as Vivian applies something to it with a brush.
But this is what it must feel like to fall.
To care who the person you love is thinking about.
To care if they feel the same way as you do.
It feels dangerous and messy, yes, but I can only hope it’ll be more rewarding than any partner the Guardians could have assigned me to.
“Close your eyes,” she instructs me.
They flutter closed to the sound of her little containers snapping open. For a minute, we’re both silent while she brushes something across my eyelids, but my own awkwardness builds again.
To keep myself from blurting out any more questions that completely give myself away, I ask, “What else are werewolves really good at?”
“Everything,” she says with a smile in her voice as she switches to my cheeks. “Along with our hearing, our sense of smell is amazing. We’re exceptionally strong and fast. Great at sex, of course. And best of all, we’re loyal. Unlike your Guardians.”
My eyes fly open. I shake my head slightly, but Vivian fusses at me to stay still.
“They’re not my Guardians anymore,” I insist.
“Regardless,” she says, pulling out a black tube that she opens and paints over my eyelashes.
“We’re just as superior as them in every way.
Maybe more so. If they hadn’t had the element of surprise, we’d have won that damn war.
It’s the only way they managed to kill our king, and they would have succeeded in killing all of us if Taika hadn’t helped our ancestors escape. ”
I try to open my mouth, but Vivian taps my lips. “No talking while I apply lipstick,” she says before dragging a red waxy stick across my upper and bottom lip.
She steps back, admiring my face with a tilt of her head. Reaching up, she adjusts a piece of my hair.
“Anyway,” she adds, beaming at whatever she did to my face with her makeup. “Next time it won’t be an ambush.”
Then she spins me back around to face the mirror, and my gasp echoes through the room.
“Vivian…” My voice trails off. With my mouth hanging open, I’m speechless.
I look like myself, but more exaggerated.
My eyelids are a shade darker than my now flawless skin, and my eyelashes are so long I can feel them when I blink.
A rosy hue dusts my cheekbones, accentuating the curve of my face.
Everything looks natural, just my own face slightly enhanced staring back—except my lips, which are plumped and blood-red.
“This is…” My brain can’t process what I’m taking in. “...makeup.”
“This is makeup,” Vivian says with a nod, looking at me through the mirror with a pleased tilt of her own lips. “Oh, and one more thing!”
She reaches over my shoulder and picks up a glass bottle before she sprays a plume of mist against my neck. I cough at the sweet scent that fills my nostrils, but Vivian only smirks.
“Now you’re ready for your first pack meeting. And when every pair of eyes can’t stop staring at you, Lucan will go absolutely feral.”