by Skye Malone
With burgeoning horror, she drew the remains of the rabbit away from her. “What’s wrong with me?” she whispered, staring around wide eyes. “Oh God, what’s wrong with me?”
Her voice was terrified, almost like she was begging someone to explain. On impulse, he started toward her.
She recoiled, dropping the rabbit and shoving to her feet, her bloody gloves leaving red smears on the white snow. For a moment, she stood frozen, her arms out from her sides and her entire body shaking.
And then her eyes rose to him, pained betrayal consuming her expression.
Without a word, she spun and fled from him as quickly as the snow would let her.
17
Lindy
She had to make this stop.
Lindy strode across the snow, her body feeling better than it had in days and her mind reeling. That hadn’t been human. Hadn’t been normal. Hell, it hadn’t even been sane. How could she have done that? Torn into that poor little rabbit like it was a sirloin steak?
She swiped a hand over her face, and her palm came away covered in blood. A shriek built within her, and frantically she wiped at her face over and over, the blood smearing across her sleeves and gloves alike.
A scream ripped from her. Tearing at her coat, she tried to throw it aside too, if only to get the blood away.
Wes circled in front of her quickly, barking at her, and she could hear the alarm in his voice. Without a coat, she’d freeze to death out here.
With a coat covered in blood, she felt like she’d go insane.
He barked at her again, a pleading note in the sound.
Unable to bring herself to even look at him, she stood motionless for a moment before drawing the zipper back up again with shaking hands. Trembling like a leaf in a hurricane, she started off again.
Covered in blood.
Panic throbbed like a drum beat in her chest. She couldn’t do this. Live like this. Eat like that. She’d known the changes were going to be bad, but this…
Do you accept this honor for which you have been chosen?
With all my heart, sir.
Her breaths came faster, fear giving away to something hot boiling within her, burning out through her core and limbs like she’d cracked the shell of a volcano. What the hell had been wrong with her as a child? What the fuck had she been thinking? Agreeing to this. Thinking giving up her soul would be a such a wonderful, amazing thing. Some high honor, instead of the depths of fucking hell. And all for what? To serve a bunch of apocalyptic psychos who just wanted to watch the world burn so they could rule over the ashes?
Soft footsteps came from behind her, and her head snapped around, her teeth bared in a snarl.
Wes watched her from twenty feet away.
She stared, trembling. Seidr quivered through her body like an electric current just beneath her skin. God help her, she could have hurt him. Killed him, even.
But how the hell had she even heard him?
Whirling fast, she kept walking, more sounds making themselves known now that hunger wasn’t beating a migraine rhythm against her skull. Rustling in the bushes. The call of birds so far away she couldn’t even see them against the sky. Every noise was amplified, every sensation like a dial turned to eleven.
What the hell was this?
Her snowshoed feet stomped through the drifts while her distant fear whined like a mosquito in her head. Wes should have let her starve. What had he been thinking, bringing her raw dead meat? That she was some fucking animal? Dammit. Damn him. She no sooner told him she was scared she was a monster than… what? His answer was to agree?
Goddamn that reckless idiot. For all he knew, she could have attacked him!
An ache pressed her chest like a sob trapped inside. She could have hurt him, that moron. She could have ripped into him and torn him to shreds, no matter how the mere thought made her insides clench like she’d been punched a hundred times. His beautiful body could be the one lying bloody on the snow right now, not some innocent animal that had only needed to die because Lindy was a fool who’d sold her soul to a doomsday cult.
Tears wanted to rise in her eyes but couldn’t, and it only made her feet pound into the ground harder. Maybe he’d leave now. That’d be the smart move—not that he was making those. Sleeping with her like she might not have driven him insane just by accident. Being so… so goddamn kind when it could have cost him everything. But maybe this would be enough. Maybe when she looked back, he’d be gone, having finally seen enough to get it through his thick head she wasn’t someone he wanted to be near.
Or be with.
She bit back a pained snarl. There wasn’t any “be with.” There wasn’t anything at all. Having sex in the apocalypse because they were the only two people for God knew how many miles didn’t qualify as a relationship, never mind how there couldn’t be any future for the two of them anyway. And yeah, sure, he was amazing. Gentle but strong. Funny. Caring and seemingly smart—current evidence notwithstanding. And fine, so he’d given her some of the best sex of her life, considering most of the guys she’d slept with before the world ended had thought the mere sight of their dick was enough to constitute foreplay. Wes was attentive. Compassionate. Basically everything she would have dreamed of, if the world had been different.
And thus he was an absolute fucking idiot for risking himself to stay near her.
She threw a glance over her shoulder and found him there, still pacing along twenty feet back with his pale-gray eyes locked on her.
“Why?” she shouted at him. “Why are you— Why won’t you just—”
His head cocked, questioning. He started to walk toward her.
“No!” She took a step back but he kept coming. “Dammit, Wes. Why the hell couldn’t you leave when you— I said stop, goddammit!”
He paused.
Tears spilled from her eyes, searing and impossible and freezing to her cheeks in tiny rivulets of ice. He shouldn’t be this worried about her. Shouldn’t for a thousand reasons. After all, she wasn’t the victim here. She’d agreed to this. Wanted it back then. Hell or not, she’d brought it on herself.
Carefully, he walked toward her.
The ache in her chest grew worse, and she gasped against it. “Don’t,” she sobbed.
He gave a soft whine, worry and care somehow so clear in the sound, and it stabbed her heart like a knife.
“Please,” she begged. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Turning, she made herself walk away from him and refused to look back when she heard his footsteps following even closer than before.
Time crept on, the world passing around them in endless white and gray. Occasionally, she came across vehicles abandoned in snowdrifts, the owners frozen inside or else long since gone, and every so often she saw a house with smoke still rising from the chimney. A motley assortment of starving dogs crossed their path when the two of them circled the frozen expanse of a lake, the animals baring their teeth but continuing onward when they laid eyes on Wes in wolf form.
Though, to her great discomfort, they’d whined and scurried away even faster at the sight of her.
Gradually, signs the two of them might be nearing the city began to appear: more houses, businesses, and dead stoplights over intersections. She didn’t recognize the street names, but that didn’t mean much. Dad and Frankie moved to Minnesota around the time she started college, and though she’d flown into Minneapolis a few times, she hadn’t explored everything around the city itself.
But her family lived over an hour’s drive north, out beyond the city where it turned to rural land again, and she had no idea how long a walk that would be.
Or what she’d find when she got there.
Her feet slowed as they reached a bridge over what might have been a frozen river beneath the snow, and heaviness settled over her as she looked to the east. Far in the distance, the horizon seemed to stop short of where it should have been, as if the ground fell away, taking everything down with it.
She sw
allowed hard, nausea rolling her stomach. So much for hoping Fenrir’s destruction hadn’t reached this far.
Wes came up beside her, bumping her gloved hand lightly.
A sharp breath entered her lungs, and she tensed with the warring urges to reach out to him and yet retreat.
Not looking at him, she started walking again.
Hours slid by in a blur of aching muscles and far-off sounds she couldn’t understand how she could hear. She knew she should have been more tired than she was—snowshoeing was laborious in the best of times—but still her body continued on. In the distance, amid the darkness encroaching on her mind, she could sense the draugar and the Order deeper inside Minneapolis. Whether that group had made it out this far was anyone’s guess, though from the broken-in doors and occasional bodies lying in the snow, it seemed likely. People were still around, though, that much she could tell. She’d seen more than a few curtains twitch closed when they passed, and murmurs of low voices reached her ears, muffled though they were by walls.
And it worried her. If the house they’d stayed in last night was any indication, food was scarce, and whatever these people had left after so long buried in snow couldn’t be much.
There was every chance they’d attack her for supplies, or Wes in order to make him into dinner.
She cast a quick glance at him. The two of them needed somewhere safe before night fell, for both their sakes and the sake of the humans who probably wouldn’t survive the error of trying to hurt them.
Wes met her eyes. Somehow, she got the impression he worried about the same thing.
Chewing her lip, she kept going, and as the last light began fading from the overcast sky, she spotted somewhere that could be an option. The restaurant’s windows were still intact, though the door was busted in. Snow filled the entryway, and when she climbed past it to see inside, it was clear the food had been taken as well. But the door was still usable, and all that snow was better than a deadbolt, in some ways. And best of all, a fireplace stood in the center of the room, with a few wooden chairs still present to give them a fire, at least for a little while.
It was undoubtedly the best they were going to find that night.
Swiftly, she set to spreading blankets near the fireplace while Wes went into the back and shifted. When he returned, he broke down the chairs without a word and then started the fire before finally sitting down next to her.
Silence hung between them, and he seemed in no hurry to break it.
Even if someone had to, eventually.
“I think it’d be best if we went our separate ways,” she said, not looking at him.
From the corner of her eye, she saw him turn to her. “What?”
“Because of today.”
Wes gave a small chuckle. “Come on, I’ve eaten my fair share of rabbit over the years.”
“In human form?”
His humor seemed to drain at the flat tone of her voice, and he sat quietly for a moment. “It’s okay.” His voice was soft and so heartbreakingly kind that it brought those impossible tears to her eyes. “It doesn’t make you a monster, and if it’s what you need to survive, then so be it.”
She looked away, hugging her knees to her chest. She felt more when she was with him, though she had no idea why.
But it hurt.
Silence fell between them, broken only by the crackle of the fire.
“I asked for this, Wes,” she said softly.
He was silent.
She didn’t take her eyes from the flames, the truth pressing at her. She had to tell him. He had to know.
Maybe then he’d understand why he should leave.
“I was trained by the best the Order had to offer. Grand General Dal Hegnar, slayer of…” Closing her eyes, she shook her head. “So many wolves. He taught me everything. How to fight.” Pain throbbed in her chest. “How to kill. And when the day came and they were ready to pass on the mantle of their weapon, he chose me out of all the Initiates. Mom was so proud.”
Disgust twisted her lip, though for herself or her mother, she wasn’t sure.
No, she admitted to herself. For both.
Because God knew she’d been proud too.
“How old were you?” Wes asked.
“Twelve.”
A breath left him.
“The Order was all I’d known.” Guilt tugged at her because it wasn’t an excuse. Not really. She’d still signed up to kill the enemy and never once questioned who that truly was.
Wes took her hand, and her breath caught. She looked over at him, alarmed at the risk, but she couldn’t quite make herself pull away.
She felt so much more alive with him.
Even if she knew it couldn’t last.
His other hand came up, brushing back her hair beside the knit cap on her head. “It’s not your fault.”
“I agreed to it. Wanted it. How is it not my fault?”
He appeared pained, like he wasn’t sure what to say.
She turned back to the small fire, watching the broken pieces of a chair crackle and decay in the flames. The darkness in her mind churned in the distance, hungry, waiting.
“Would you blame Frankie?”
At Wes’s quiet words, she looked back. “What?”
“Frankie. He’s thirteen, right? Just a year older than you were. And if it was him instead of you, would you be this hard on him? Hold him responsible for what grown-ass adults in the Order convinced him to do?”
Discomfort made her shift slightly.
“You were a kid, Lindy. And you didn’t know any better. And for what it’s worth—” He shrugged. “Maybe you need to let yourself off the hook.”
Her brow furrowed as she looked at the flames, a weird ache passing through her like a chain loosening around her chest. So many years, and she’d never once thought about it like that. Looked at her brother and imagined if the Scythe of Niorun was him instead. Mostly, she’d just been grateful it wasn’t. That he’d escaped before the Order could sink their hooks too deep into him. She’d spent years feeling relieved that Frankie, at least, got the chance to be a kid instead of a weapon-in-training, sworn to a bloody cause and taught to despise any life but the brutal one with which he’d been charged.
But she’d never wondered.
And she knew the answer.
A breath left her, ragged, harsh. Of course she wouldn’t hold Frankie responsible. Of course she’d blame the goddamn adults who’d talked a kid into sacrificing more than that child could ever understand. And why had the Order chosen a kid anyway? If it was such an honor, why hadn’t Dal Hegnar and all the rest been clamoring for the mantle?
Because it wasn’t. Because they wanted to be the ones holding the reins while they stripped another human being of their soul. The other Allegiants, the grown Allegiants… they didn’t want to give up who they were. No, they’d just brainwash a kid into doing it instead.
Bastards. Cowards. Doomsday scum.
Her fingers curled into fists as her heart pounded. All these years, she’d blamed herself. Cursed herself for how much she’d once wanted this so-called honor. But was it really her fault? Yes, she’d agreed, but by God, what child didn’t want to please their parents? What kid didn’t want the approval of their favorite teacher, the one whose praise was like gold only because it was so rare?
But Dal Hegnar and her mother… they’d used that. Yes, she’d been a damn good student. Best weapon they had in training, so caught up in trying to prove her worth, it’d never occurred to her it was a bad thing that all the Order saw in her was a tool. And if her position and Frankie’s were reversed, she never would have blamed him for that. She would have hated the adults.
And ached with sorrow for her baby brother instead.
Pain tangled with her rage, throbbing in her chest. Drawing her knees up tighter, she hugged them while in her mind, the darkness churned, uncaring about her pain. Waiting to devour it all.
The Order took so much from her, back when she was young. Thin
gs she hadn’t understood. Things she would have wanted—a life, friends, a future—if only she’d known what they were. And now it was on her to make sure the Order didn’t take everything that was left. Now all she could do was cling by her fingernails to her self and her sanity, determined to keep them from one last victory of making her their weapon and killing everyone she loved.
If she could hold on.
Chills crept through her. “Wes?”
“Yeah?”
“I need to ask you to do something for me.”
He hesitated. “Okay…”
She drew a breath. It was the only answer. The backup. He may be an idiot for staying with her, but if it all came down to it, maybe he was also her only hope.
“If—” She cleared her throat. “If I can’t hold out against this or if it starts making me do… terrible things, and I can’t stop myself…” Resolutely, she turned to him. “I want you to kill me and take my family back to Mariposa.”
His eyes went wide.
“Please, Wes. Your wolf could—”
He pulled away sharply. “I’m not going to—”
“What if that had been you today instead of a rabbit? What if next time it is? If I have to use seidr again and that one time is the last straw, I could—” Her breath hitched. “This was always the plan, Wes. My plan. I’ve been running out of time since…” She sniffled sharply. “Since I was twelve years old, and—”
“Lindy, we’ll find an answer. Either from your dad or someone else, but we’ll find one. You don’t—”
“There isn’t an answer. Not besides this. I don’t want to become their monster. I don’t want to do the things that are waiting for me when I lose this fight. But if I can’t get to my family in time, or if I can’t stop myself before I…” She shook her head, pain throbbing in her chest. “Please.”
He looked agonized.
“I’m begging you, Wes.”
Without a word, he drew her to him, and after a day of fighting it, she let herself fall into his arms.
“Please.” She gripped his coat as he held her close, hanging on his warmth as if it could drive away the world. “I’d rather die.”