11. Viktor
Viktor
Daire was . . . it was kind of annoying to think he was cute in that moment, when he was basically telling me he’d rather die than continue walking.
But he was. Even though he was acting like a child and not thinking clearly or being rational, he was cute.
His green eyes, always the brightest color in the room, were lowered, like he couldn’t quite look me in the eye while saying what he was saying.
His hair was falling over his forehead, and almost into his face.
His arms were crossed over his chest, and hands balled into fists where they were hidden under his triceps.
I wasn’t quite sure what it all meant, but he was dealing with more than one emotion, and . . . well, that much made sense.
His own people had been planning to murder him.
I wasn’t surprised by any level of monstrosity the witches displayed, but he was. He was younger than me, both literally and emotionally. Apparently, even with a mother like the ice-cold head witch, Daire was still somehow an innocent in ways I wasn’t sure I’d ever been innocent.
Maybe it was the difference between our cultures, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like Daire was a wildflower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. Something that had decided to exist not because of, but in spite of his surroundings.
And part of me didn’t want to change that.
On the other hand, if the witches found us, they were going to change the part where we were alive. And since he firmly believed he could be tracked, I had to believe it too.
I headed over to the mouth of the cave, but when I reached the exit, he made a tiny sound behind me. When I looked back, there was hurt in his eyes.
He thought I was leaving, like he’d said to.
Like I’d stepped on the flower growing where it shouldn’t.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him, meeting his eye steadily. “I’m going to see if I can hide this cave’s entrance.”
When I turned and left, he was blinking rapidly. I wasn’t sure if crying was acceptable among witches, but I decided not to comment on it regardless. It was none of my business.
The problem arrived when I got just outside the cave and felt a yank in my middle that stopped me in my tracks. From inside the cave, Daire made a noise of shock.
So I turned and went back inside to find him staring at me, eyes round. “I . . . I thought maybe I’d imagined that, before.”
“Imagined . . . ” I prompted him, though I had a sinking feeling I knew precisely what he was saying already.
He swallowed hard, and suddenly, the arms wrapped across his chest were less holding back strong emotions, and more self-protective, like he needed a hug.
“When you stopped and started talking about how easy it is to jump over an eight-foot wall,” he whispered, and I didn’t care enough to correct him.
Maybe he knew he was being hyperbolic, and maybe he truly thought I’d been saying he should be able to leap eight feet straight up.
Either way, it didn’t matter in the moment.
“I stopped because I felt like something jerked at me.”
He lowered his hand to just above his belly, right under the spot where his ribs ended. Exactly where I’d felt the yanking, but from behind.
Because I’d been the one walking away.
I considered for a moment, then reached out to circle my hand forward, to try to indicate he should continue. “Explain this with magic.”
He just blinked at me a moment, before shaking his head. “I told you I can’t—”
“Are you saying you don’t understand magic, or simply that you cannot do it?”
“I . . . you want me to say what’s happening.”
“You study magic, yes?” I tried to make my face as blank as possible, or at least neutral.
Leo sometimes told me I had resting murder face, and I took that to mean that the expression my face came to naturally indicated some anger or violent intention, even when I had none.
Daire, I thought, would be especially sensitive to the idea that I was angry with him.
After growing up with a woman like his mother, how could he not? The woman had clearly intended his death. She, as a point of fact, did have violent intentions.
He took a sudden, deep breath, sucking it in like he’d forgotten to breathe for a moment, let his eyes drop closed, and nodded, but he didn’t let go of the self-hug that seemed to be preserving him.
For an insane moment, I thought perhaps I should hug him. Maybe that would make him feel better. By the time I’d blinked that bizarre notion away, he was breathing more regularly, and opened his eyes again.
“Okay, so . . . Mother, she . . . They want a witchwolf. They decided to steal your wolf to make it. Magically, that means she needs to mix together magic and wolf. She targeted you, and—and me. So your wolf, my magic. She needs to make them into one thing. So they’re .
. . we’re tethered. By the spell she was casting, that she didn’t get a chance to finish because we ran away from them.
” He continued to sit there, blinking, and for a moment I assumed he wasn’t finished.
But no, he was. That was it. We’d run off in the middle of a spell intended to smash my wolf and his magic into one entity, and then, I presumed, imbue it in someone else entirely. Herself, I was sure.
Like Ivan or Grant, she didn’t seem the type to offer someone else power when she could take it for herself. Maybe she’d even chosen Daire for the spell because she thought it likelier she could force his magic into her, since they were related.
There was just one problem with the whole concept.
Maybe I wasn’t a witch, and didn’t understand how magic worked, but .
. . my wolf was mine. He had been born inside me, and couldn’t simply be made into someone else’s wolf, even if he was inside of them.
He was literally a part of my soul, and we weren’t truly separate entities.
I wasn’t a man and a wolf. I was a manwolf. That wolf could never be Ermengarde.
Dakota Morris’s wolf was his. It was part of him.
I could have been wrong, but I suspected this entire plan would simply never work as she wanted it to. You couldn’t properly make two people into one person in the way she thought she could, and then you certainly couldn’t stuff that abomination into a third person and expect it all to work.
Dakota Morris was a natural creature, who had accepted the wolf and the magic, both mentally and physically. Most witches simply weren’t capable of doing that. Such an unbalanced creature as Ermengarde couldn’t cheat her way into that perfect balance.
Or maybe I was wrong about everything, magic was as unnatural as she seemed to think, and she could do whatever she liked with it.
I just didn’t think so.
I sighed and shook my head, because that line of thinking didn’t actually help me or Daire. It wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to us whether Ermengarde could use our magic or wolf, if she’d killed us both in the spell to wrench out half our souls.
I nodded. “Fine.”
“Fine?” He’d been staring at the ground, but at that, his eyes flashed back up to me. “What about this is fine?”
I rolled my eyes at him. Americans were still strange to me, even after years of living in the country.
“Complaining about what we cannot change is pointless. So we work with what we are given. You cannot control my wolf, so you cannot shift and run with me. You cannot do magic, so you will not. You cannot run, so you will not. But we also cannot stay here.” I motioned toward Drew, then looked back up at him.
“You will carry Drew. I will carry you. We will go.”
He stared at me like I’d just told him we had to eat the raccoon, so I motioned to Drew again. “You must carry him.”
Did I need to pick Drew up and hand him over? What about this was confusing? What was I missing?
“You . . . you can’t just carry that much dead weight indefinitely. That’s crazy.”
I waved him away. “It will not be indefinitely. Only back to the pack.”
“That’s like thirty miles!”
I had no idea why he had such an inflated sense of how far we were from pack lands, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t dismiss the only remaining possibility. It was all we had, so it was what would happen.
What else could there be?
He bit his lip, looking away again. “You could . . . you could awaken me.”
It was my turn to stare at him. Awaken. I knew this term. Aleks had used it. The witches had said it before. The Crescent wolves had said it too. “You want to have sex. Here. Now.”
“No!” He looked hurt by the very idea, his green eyes luminous and wet, and he pulled his lip into his mouth to chew on it.
“I—I don’t. Not even a little bit. Not like this.
But you’re right. We don’t have a lot of choices.
If I need to do magic, well, then I need to have access to my magic.
That means I need to be awakened. It’s a better answer than you carrying me thirty miles through the woods, isn’t it? ”
And honestly, I had no idea if it was a better answer. But it was the first solution he hadn’t dismissed outright. So maybe it was the only solution we had access to.
Sex was the only solution. If we hadn’t been running and hiding for our lives, it would have been laughable.