35. Viktor
Viktor
I woke with a jerk in the night, when the magic started clanging against the inside of my skull. Daire had also woken behind me, gasping for breath as though someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over his head.
We both rolled for the edge of the bed, and I pushed up and headed for the dresser, only to be yanked back by the tether in my middle that attached me to Daire. My back hit the bed, and then my shoulders touched his, as the same thing had happened to him.
We turned, awkwardly, but instead of being annoyed or pained by the yanking, he was laughing, both hands covering his face, shoulders shaking and breaths ragged.
The laughter was only half actual amusement, and I knew it. It was too close to hysterical for it to be anything else, but I understood the feeling. This was all too much, too fast, too strange.
He had a wolf he hadn’t been born with, didn’t have the magic that was his birthright, was tethered by magic to a near stranger, and his mother wanted to kill him to steal it all for herself.
I thought every part of that was enough to be hysterical over, so the fact that he’d been mostly calm was impressive.
I turned and wrapped my arms around him, kissing the edge of his cheek, the only part of his face not covered by his hands, and just stayed there for a moment.
We didn’t have much time, though, so once his body stopped shaking, I sighed and let my arms drop. “Okay, we need to get dressed. Together. Then we need to get moving. Are the others awake?”
He nodded, steeled himself as he took a deep, fortifying breath, and stood.
We went to find clothes together, and I just grabbed and handed him the dirty things we’d worn the day before.
It wasn’t like we needed nice fresh clothes to fight with the witches.
Maybe I was presuming a fight, and they would come peacefully, but .
. . no. They’d come in the middle of the night, breaking the wards.
Anyone who thought the witches’ intentions were peaceful was so na?ve they couldn’t be helped.
So we dressed in silence, and then trooped down the stairs to find everyone else rushing alongside us. At least I wasn’t way behind everyone else because of my blunted senses.
Also, clearly, the wards had worked as intended, since the whole pack seemed to be awake.
When we got outside, though, that was when the true malicious intentions of the witches struck us.
We could barely make anything out through the trees, since the new homes we’d been building were nearly half a mile from the old ones, but even in the middle of the night, I could see smoke filling the sky.
The old square was on fire.
Daire grabbed my hand, and we started to run.
Yes, he was probably just holding onto me because of the recent experience with the damned tether and not wanting to be yanked onto his back again, but it was still . . . nice. That he was thinking of me in the middle of chaos and distraction.
Usually my mind seemed to turn off in a fight, and there was only survival instinct.
“You can sound an alarm,” he said, turning to glance at me as we ran through the woods. “Make sure everyone is awake.”
“They are,” I promised him. Not that I wanted to avoid magic, but I was certain of it.
There wasn’t a wolf in the pack who hadn’t been woken by the noise.
The ones who lived in the new clearing were running alongside us, and the ones who still lived in the old buildings were making enough noise that even I could hear it.
He squeezed my hand, frowning, then bit his lip.
“What?”
“You could . . . you could try to make it rain. Stop the fire.” He sounded uncertain. Like he was worried I didn’t want to try the magic.
So I nodded to him. “Tell me how.”
He took a deep breath and nodded. With the enviable stamina of a wolf, he explained while we continued running toward the old square. Another little rhyme, this one set to a meter that sounded like a children’s song, just repeating.
Rain, Rain, come our way,
wind so strong and skies so gray.
I suspected it was, in fact, a children’s rhyme, and would work better if it had been a part of my childhood, ingrained in me the way it clearly was in Daire. But I could do this. His magic was incredible. It had stitched Aleks’s hand back on. It could do anything.
He drew me through the usual visualization exercise, and those were getting easier as we went.
The magic was inside me, and it felt . .
. trained? As though I had some muscle memory from long years of practice.
I imagined it was the same way my wolf kept him landing on his feet whenever he fell.
Even if he didn’t know how to use it, it knew what to do.
Maybe I didn’t know shit about magic, but the magic knew. Daire had spent his whole life training it, even if he hadn’t been able to touch it yet. His years of hard work were now paying off for me. For my pack.
So I followed along with him, visualizing the gray misty energy of a rainstorm as he talked me through it.
He was so good with words, taking my mind right to a thunderhead rolling across the land, dousing everything beneath it.
Flashes of lightning in the distance, but not near us, since we were trying to put out fires, not start them.
Chanting the silly little children’s rhyme as we went.
I was panting when we reached the edge of the tree line next to the old square where . . . half of the buildings were on fire.
Thank fuck they hadn’t known about the new buildings.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and just as we broke through the trees, rain started falling.
Next to me, Daire froze, and I stopped running, turning to look back at him. He was staring up into the sky, which was very suddenly pouring rain down on us.
When his head dropped and he met my eye, his own were shining with emotion. “You did it. Fuck me, you did it.”
Well of course I had. I had his magic and he’d told me how. Hadn’t he expected it to work?