15. Viktor
Viktor
I changed my mind, in that moment.
I did hate Ermengarde.
In fact, I was going to kill her. Or see her dead, whoever might do the deed personally.
It had been obvious, over the course of .
. . Daire’s and my acquaintance . . . fine, us fucking in a dirty cave—that he’d had some romantic notion of this moment.
Maybe chocolates and roses and then a beautiful awakening of his magic, that he’d been waiting his whole life for.
Instead, he got fucked by a wolf in a dirty cave, and then the fucking wolf got his magic, because she’d decided to screw around with the laws of nature.
The sawdust in my soul had never been sawdust at all. It had been Daire’s magic, still dormant for the most part, so it had felt inert to me.
Now, with mutual orgasms under our belts, I could feel it. It was no wolf, but it was . . . it was soft and sweet and light, like Daire himself. Just thinking of him made the light in my palms glow brighter, probably because it was his fucking magic, and it belonged in him.
He smiled, this tiny, strained smile that said this was one of the worst nights of his fucking life, and I wanted to tear his mother to bits with my teeth. Wolf or no, I just wanted to go utterly feral on that bitch like Leo had done to Ivan.
Daire was a gentle, sensitive soul, and she’d taken away his dreams. Left him fucking like an animal in a filthy cave with a wolf no sane man would have ever chosen as a lover.
Still, he braced himself instead of bursting into tears and falling apart, nodded, swallowed hard, and went on.
“Okay, so we need to do a cloaking spell. It will hide us from scrying, both visual and tracking spells like Mother will be doing. She’s had her last eyeful of werewolf ass, if she’s already done it. ”
I blinked, uncertain of what the hell he was talking about, but he blithely continued on, his misery shoved down deep. It reminded me of Leo, and the way he used to blather on for hours about nothing just to fill silences he found uncomfortable.
“Okay, so first what we need to do is the opposite.”
The opposite of . . .
“You’ve summoned the light,” he said, smiling and cupping my hands again, holding them up between us as he resettled himself across from me.
“Now we need to turn it into darkness. Not overwhelming pitch black. Just like a nice soft twilight. Imagine the sun slanting through the trees as the sky turns orange and pink and purple. A safe kind of darkness, where you can still see, but maybe some of the details are obscured by shadow.”
It painted a vivid picture, and I could imagine exactly what he wanted, so I closed my eyes and tried it. Twilight in my hands.
“That’s amazing!” he exclaimed a second later, and somehow I could hear the smile in his voice.
When I opened my eyes, it was to look at his face, not what I was doing. He was the sunniest day, bright and sweet, with a crisp breeze. He wasn’t twilight at all. His eyes shot up to meet mine, a furrow between them.
“Is it hard to hold onto?”
I glanced down to find that the light in my palms looked as bright as before. Right, because I’d been thinking that. I shook my head and pursed my lips. “No. I just . . . got distracted. My fault.”
“No, you’re doing great. I mean, you never expected to have magic. Who could expect you to get everything right instantly? It takes time and practice, and this is going better than I could have imagined.”
“You’re a good teacher.”
He flushed pink and glanced away, and even with my blunted sense of smell that could barely parse any emotions, much less complicated ones, I could tell he was abashed.
He thought I was exaggerating or lying to make him feel better, even though anyone who knew me would have told him I wasn’t capable of that.
They were wrong.
If I’d thought it would keep him smiling, I’d have said anything at all in that moment, lie or not.
Still, I shook all that off because distraction was what had taken the smile off his face to begin with. Twilight. I was thinking of twilight. I looked down at my hands and thought of the creeping shadows of twilight.
“Perfect,” he whispered after a moment. “Now imagine the twilight surrounding us, not just our bodies, physically, but our minds. Your wolf. My magic. We’re obscured. hidden in the trees at dusk. No one can see us except each other. And it . . . him? Is your wolf a whole other person?”
I shook my head. “He isn’t. He’s me. We’re the same.
It’s why your mother’s plan will never work.
If he agreed to work with you, to help you, it’s because he likes you.
Because . . . I like you. And because he’s been inside your head and knows you’re good.
You’re worth helping. That would never happen with her. ”
Daire’s throat clicked, and I looked up to find his eyes glassy again. Dammit. I kept making him cry.
I cleared my throat and looked back down at my hands, focusing on the request at hand.
Both of us, completely. The magic, the wolf, our bodies, even tiny little Drew, because I couldn’t leave him out.
We could see each other, but everyone else would struggle to find us.
We were obscured in the darkness while their eyes were adjusted only to the light.
Daire’s blood. No one could see that.
With a tiny quirk of amusement, I wondered if that would make it harder for Ermengarde to see herself. Her, I thought, and focused hard. She was the most blinded of all. She was in the middle of a clearing, the sun still glaring down at her.
She saw nothing at all.
When I looked back up, Daire was smiling. “You did it, didn’t you? I . . . felt it, sort of. Not like I did the spell, but a spell happened. I can . . . smell it?”
“Ozone,” I agreed. “Spells smell like lightning strikes.”
The smile fell off his face as he turned his head toward one wall of the cave. “You . . . I’m sure you did it. But I can hear cars. Destiny’s voice. We need to go. Now.”
I nodded, pulling us both to our feet at the same time and handing him my shirt.
Maybe I didn’t care about wandering through the woods half or fully naked, but he was basically a human, and they weren’t comfortable with that.
At least my shirt would help. I pulled my pants on and poked my head out of the cave.
Drew looked up at me, a little nervous and a little curious, but he hadn’t left.
Of course he hadn’t. It seemed like everyone I knew, including the wildlife, were more selfless than healthy.
Looking less harried and miserable, Daire came out of the cave behind me, my shirt covering him down to mid-thigh, so that wasn’t too bad. He smiled up at me. “So what now?”
“We walk,” I explained. “Can you?”
He scoffed. “What, like I’m gonna let you carry me? Let’s go. As long as we don’t have to run again. Maybe ever.”
I shook my head and . . . was that laughter coming out of me? It felt a little like laughter. Strange. I didn’t know when I’d last done that. Even Drew was giving me a funny look.
We started walking. We could handle twenty miles, as long as Daire had the will for it. He grabbed my hand as we went, squeezing it and holding on. How odd.
I wasn’t sure what it meant, but maybe he just needed reassurance I wasn’t leaving. Not that I could. We were tethered together by this spell, and wherever he went, so did I.
Strangely enough, that didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.
Well, not until a few hours later when we got to the edge of pack territory and realized the witches’ next play. They hadn’t been able to track us, so they’d gone to where they knew we would go: their SUVs were parked all along the dirt road that stood between us and pack lands.
The road we would have to cross, to get to my people.