Hunted

by Quinn Blackbird

  “I mean no offence,” I tell her. “I only mean to ask if your household should want wolfsbane, too. Given your obvious dislike of me, I doubt you should want my help.”

  “We want nothing from you,” spits Catherine.

  Literally—She spits at snow my boots are half-buried in.

  All pretence evaporates and my face cracks. A lethal look settles on my stony face and I take a step towards her. Colton slips between us, but I have eyes for the spitting woman only.

  “You must be a bold woman yourself to spit at witch’s shoes.” I turn my gaze on Colton. Under the heat of his stare, I don’t so much as blanch. “Should you want any favours from me, hunter, I shall want my own fulfilled.”

  I want my ingredients. And if the blacksmith household want even a dusting of wolfsbane near them, he must procure what I need.

  Colton lifts his chin and straightens his shoulders to intimidate me. It is not as effective as he might hope.

  Colton’s face is grim as he says, “You could have warned me. I saw you in the woods the very day of the attack on the widow, and you ran right by me. All day I spent out there, and when I returned, it was to a dead village.”

  Surprised, I raise my brows. I hadn’t thought to warn him. I hadn’t considered that it would be dangerous for him in the woods during the hours of the sun. Night’s hours are for the wolf—then again, how much do I know about them, and how little does Colton?

  “I was in a rush.”

  Colton’s lip twitches, as if to sneer. “Yes, I know,” he says, the words rolling over his tongue, slick with meaning. “Every week, the same hour. I have seen him come and go. Tell me, what services does he purchase?”

  There is no shame on my cheeks. I raise my chin and meet his stare with as much defiance as I feel lashing inside of me. “A patron’s business is their own, not mine.”

  After a heavy glare, I trudge away through the snow.

  I make it to the well before I am caught by the arm and turned around.

  He stands before me, skin like moonlight—a glossy sheen to its pallor—and lips so pink and swollen that all their dirty deeds come springing to mind.

  “Dante,” I whisper, aghast. Wrenching my arm free, I take a step back and glance around at the sprinkle of onlookers. “Whatever do you mean, grabbing me like this in the Square?”

  “Wolfsbane,” he says, his eyes dancing to match his wicked smirk. “That is what you will offer us, is it not, healer?”

  I fight a smirk. It would be the giveaway those onlookers search us for.

  In a loud voice, he says, “I demand the most potent and largest of wolfsbane you can procure, Red.” Then, with that wicked smirk of his, he inches closer and says, “I shall collect tomorrow night, one night before the moon is full.”

  “Of course.” I curtsey. “Yours will be the first I bottle.”

  There is a huff nearby, an irritated onlooker who undoubtedly resents Dante’s place in the hierarchy of our village. The son of a Knight may do as he pleases here.

  He walks away, catching many girls’ gazes as he goes. The fur shawl on his shoulders and the thickness of his velvet cloak bulk him up, some. The ensemble gives him the appearance of Colton—muscular and broad-shouldered. Yet, underneath it all, he is slender and fine.

  I hum to myself then return to my home.

  It is plenty fine that I started my own brew of wolfsbane this morn. Otherwise, I would never be able to meet demand before the full moon is at its fullest.

  13.

  I’m in need of more wolfsbane. I realised that after I scooped the pasty residue of the brew into small phials, then used the last of what I had to fill the cauldron for a second brew.

  Grandmother might spare some more from her garden. I hope for her generosity as I hike against the chilly wind that tries to push me back down the path to the village. Uncertainty seeps into my mind the quieter the woods become around me.

  Wolves are beasts of the night, but should that suggest they do not lurk in the hours of the sun? Their bites, so long as the venom enters the bloodstream, are fatal to ordinaries. A witch can survive it, but I wonder if it hurts as much as it hurts the ordinary people who suffer days before death.

  Grandmother waits by the ajar door, her arms folded under her bosom. She watches me shuffle through the gate and up the path with narrowed eyes.

  I expect her to say something, but she just ushers me through the door, then closes it behind us.

  “Eat.” Her voice is tough, the way it roughens at the dawn of a cold.

  Grandmother sits on the armchair, leaving me with the couch and a bowl of…

  “What it this?” I ask, stirring the green sludge in the bowl. I lift the wooden spoon and watch the goo slap back into the bowl in blobs. “Repulsive,” I add.

  “Eat,” she says again.

  At her demanding tone, I quirk my brow at her and sip from the spoon. A shudder runs down my spine before I even swallow the first glob. I was right. Whatever it is, it is repulsive. Under her stern stare, I finish half. I stop to dry-retch and that is when she snatches the bowl from me.

  “I will put some in a flask and you will have more with your supper tonight,” she tells me. “It is a blend I concocted for you—for the pair of us.”

  “For what purpose?”

  Grandmother stands and gestures for me to follow. I shadow her to the back of the cabin to the Secret Room.

  “Grandmother?” I say uncertainly. She is and has always been a stern, sometimes unreadable woman. But today there is an unsettling touch to her, the way her lips purse together, the manner in which her eyes crinkle whenever I speak the only name I have ever called her.

  My grandmother. My only family.

  She curls her fingers around the handle and looks at me.

  A pause.

  I inch closer, itching to know what lies beyond the door she touches. But I am afraid to push her some, to ask her to open it. One wrong move and she could draw away from it and forever change her mind.

  “Behind this door, Ella,” she begins, holding my gaze, “is the truth. Yesterday, I told you the wolf is gone. That statement remains true. I know this because…” She takes a moment to inhale, then turns to the door. Grandmother pushes it open and steps to the side. “Because I killed him myself.”

  I stand at the doorway, frozen.

  Eyes wide, I stare at the beast opposite me. Across the room, a wolf’s head is mounted on a pike….and not just any wolf. The sort that tears through villages at night and is man by day. Its head is large, larger than I’d imagined. From the point between its ears and the curve of its neck, I could fit my whole forearm. Yellow eyes, like sunflowers, stare back at me, though they are dead—as dead as can be.

  Beneath it, in a cage, is what I assume to be the beast’s body. Only, it’s a human body without a head. Naked, blue and purple in some places, yet not a mark of rot touches the flesh.

  The shudder returns, and I feel the aftertaste of the concoction with it.

  “Grandmother,” I whisper. “What is this? What do you mean by showing me this?”

  Her gaze is heavy on my face. She reaches out and brushes away a lock of stray hair from my cheekbone. “You are so beautiful, my dear.”

  I turn to her, eyes wide, brows drawn. Never once has she said such things to me. Compliments from her are not welcome. I am unsettled and it shows in the way I tangle my fingers together.

  “Are you feeling all right, Grandmother? You are not yourself today.”

  “Not myself,” she repeats and looks to the Secret Room. “I’m afraid you do not know me as well as you might think, Ella. Come.”

  I hesitate a moment before I shadow her into the room I have wished to enter my whole life. Even those time I forgot about the Secret Room, a flame of itch lingered within me, buried deep in the embers of other dreams and wishes.

  Inside, there is no odour of rotten flesh to greet me. All I can sniff out in the stagnant air is musk and pine needles.

&n
bsp; A table is tucked to the side of the door, hidden from me until I am inside. Some folded letters are propped up in a velvet-lined box, and there are two portraits in oval frames that I notice.

  “This,” says Grandmother; she stands beside the cage with the headless corpse and hits her palm a few times on the wooden edge. “This is my former love, Silas.”

  No words. I have no words.

  As still as the corpse opposite me, I stare at her.

  “Silas and I,” she begins, then falters a moment. “We met in the village, a long time ago. I was there on errands, and he approached me to let me know…” A shadow of a smile reaches from her lips to her distant eyes. “…I had my moon blood. A few drops had leaked to the back of my dress, and Silas offered me his cloak to save me from eternal humiliation.”

  “That was kind of him.” My voice is quiet, a mere whisper, and I am uncertain she heard me at all. Her eyes are so far away that I wonder if she knows I am here with her.

  “I did not know what Silas was, but of course him having the nose of a wolf,” she says with a light shrug. “He knew the moment he smelled my moon blood. To him, it held a scent of fertility. That is what he told me.”

  This talk, even for myself, has my cheeks burning hot. For a man to smell—and comment on the odour of—my moon blood, I might die from mortification.

  “I loved Silas, very much. And I believed he loved me. Wolves are drawn to witches for one reason, Ella. Lineage.” She looks at me, a heavy stare than means more than I can read right now. “Only a witch can birth a wolf.”

  Narcissus.

  The wolf who pursued her, the cause for her sudden abandonment of the book, her old life. Grandmother speaks my slow-paced thoughts—

  “It comes from the old world we once lived in, it binds us here. A wolf’s only option for a mate is a witch. That is why they seek us out.” She strokes the cage once, a gentle caress as though she is touching a live, breathing Silas. “Naturally, I imagined that is what the future held for Silas and I. Until he married someone from the village.”

  “Why would he do that?” My frown returns. There is a bead of sweat rolling down my temple that I swat away. It isn’t hot in here, still I itch to remove layers and dunk myself in a fresh bath. “You said, but a moment ago, that a wolf needs a witch as a mate,” I add. “So what could drive him to…to…marry another?”

  “His chosen wife was the best of the two witches in the village. He chose the witch who concealed her gifts, attended church every Sunday, and who was a friend to most in the village. He chose camouflage.”

  I swallow back a trickle of stomach bile that has somehow managed to crawl up my throat. It must be the goop that has made me unwell.

  “I let him go.” She turns to me and levels my gaze. “And months later, I birthed your mother from his seed. Silas paid no mind to her. She was a girl, a witch, and he wanted a boy.”

  “He wanted a wolf,” I say, my hand on the table to steady me.

  “Werewolves…You’ll find they are not so different to the regular man-filth around here.” She catches herself and clears her throat. “Many years passed. Your mother loved, then she died. And you were brought to my care.”

  I smile.

  “Only, you were not the child in her womb. My daughter’s child died in labour.”

  My smile fades. “Pardon?”

  “You call me Grandmother,” she says gently, and draws away from the cage. “I am, in many ways. I reared you as my own, I clothed and fed and bathed you. I taught you all that I know, dear Ella. But you are not of my blood and flesh. Your mother was not my daughter.”

  I have sunk back to the wall where I grip the skirt of my dress so tight my knuckles whiten. “Wh—what? Whose else could I be?”

  “You were born an ordinary child.”

  Has she slapped me on the face? It feels so. My cheeks burn with flames beneath my skin, and the same fire courses through my veins. I am very hot. I am dizzy. The wall keeps me upright.

  Is it her words worsening my health, or was it the green goop?

  I am unsure, but it cannot be good, for I must frown at Grandmother just to see her properly.

  “There are ways to make a witch out of an ordinary,” she tells me. “But your blood is ordinary, my dear. The magic in you was a gift from me—a mere touch of what I could spare.”

  I know the magic she speaks of. It is in the book, not something I have seen, but I have heard of it from Aunt Marge, Grandmother’s sister. A witch can give a piece of her power to an ordinary. It is how we keep the witches alive when our numbers dwindle.

  I know of the magic, but I never thought it could have been done to me.

  “You lie.” It is all I can manage to say. “You are a liar!”

  Grandmother hears not my words. She takes another step toward me, and I shrink further into the wall as though she is the beast. “Ella, I killed Silas to protect you. He knew what you were, and then he caught the smell of magic on you. It was easy enough for him to realise what I had done.”

  I wipe the back of my hand over my forehead; it comes away damp. That blasted bile comes up again and burns away any words I had in me.

  “You see, Silas bore a son with his wife. Not so long after you were brought to my care by the Priest.”

  I snap my gaze to hers, my chest heaving as I ache for breath.

  “And Silas,” she says, closing the distance between us, “knew what you were. A made witch. One that would lure in his son with the deceitful scent of magic, but a witch who can never birth a wolf. Silas sought to remove you from his son’s path. He came to this cabin to enact his treachery. And I was waiting for him.”

  Through the fog that has settled in my head, I fleetingly remember the garden, the wolf, me at the window. And Grandmother, in this room. The Secret Room.

  “I cornered him,” she tells me. “I killed him with a bucket of wolfsbane to protect you, my child. Whether you are a true witch or a made one, you are a child I came to love as my own over time.”

  I can barely manage to speak without my breaths catching in my throat; “Why… Why are you telling me this? What…what have you done to me?”

  “You were two and three bits when I gifted some of my magic to you,” she says. “Too young to remember the effects. Now, you are old enough.”

  I try to focus my sight on her, but she blurs before me. I see only my lashes lowering on a cloudy haze, like the day sky outside.

  “You did it…again,” I croak, slipping down the wall. “Didn’t you?”

  “I did.” She is not sorry. I need not see her eyes to know that. It is in the strength of her voice and the way her blurred silhouette nears me with determination. “Fret not. Grandmother is here.”

  And I slip.

  I know not if I hit the floor or if Grandmother catches me.

  I only know an agonising darkness.

  14.

  I wake to Grandmother curved over me. Her lips are set tight and her brows hang low above her creased eyes. She doesn’t relax as I pry my own eyes open and blink up at her.

  “Ella,” she says softly—as soft as she can manage with her voice as rough as rocks. She touches her hand to my cheek a moment, then withdraws. “How do you feel?”

  I swallow back a dryness in my throat and fix her with my hooded gaze. It’s an easy answer. “Betrayed.”

  Grandmother relaxes and rises from the edge of the couch. With a haughty hum, she turns her back on me to the now-empty soup pot. “Betrayed,” she mutters, though I hear her just fine. She turns and points a wooden stirring spoon at me. “It would have been betrayal to leave you weak against a beast that lurks near your home. It would have been betrayal to let Silas tear you apart when you were but a child. Betrayal,” she says evenly, “is what the vulnerable feel when those around them do not coddle them. You have not been betrayed, Ella. You have been gifted.”

  Weight on the heels of my palms, I try to shift myself back in the couch to lean against the sturdy arm. After man
y grunts and muttered curses, I recline against a fluffed cushion and eye the back of Grandmother.

  “Does it hurt?” I ask. “To give me pieces of your power?”

  Her answer follows a pause of thought. “No. It hurts to receive it, which is why I slipped valerian in the concoction, too.”

  I nod. Understanding is quick to blossom in me. Really, I should have known. Almost every day, I work with the potent plant, and I am so familiar with its effects that I can recite them at any moment.

  Still, the drowsiness was second to the truths Grandmother told me. I had no focus to spare the valerian, I only had focus for what she told me.

  I let my eyelids droop. “Why do it again?”

  Grandmother moves to the portrait where she retrieves the book. “My magic is dwindling,” she tells me. “A sign of poor health in a witch.”

  “A real or a made one?”

  Her eyes snap to mine and she whips the book open. “All the power within any witch will fight off sickness and old age for as long as it can. Then comes the day there is no more magic left to use, and only sickness to fill the body.”

  “That’s happening to you?” I stir and turn on my side to face her. “Grandmother, are you unwell?”

  “Of course I am unwell,” she says with a cackle. “You truly are a silly girl, Ella. The first gift from me to you was to protect you, to offer you a sense of belonging in the world. And now, I give what I can afford. It isn’t much, but you will now have the power of a true witch…on the weaker of sides.”

  So, I will be stronger. Still not strong enough to be a true witch, never as strong as Grandmother, but stronger.

  “What is your sickness?”

  “Oh, I could list for days.” Grandmother waves her hand dismissively. Then her hand comes down on a page and she runs her finger over words I cannot see. “Ah, there.”

  Grandmother uses an ink-dipped quill to scratch something onto the page, then sets the quill aside.

  “There. Now your name is in the book alongside my own.”