by Tanith Frost
“I’m fine. Sun will be up soon.”
“Oh, right.”
I shove the blankets around, making a nest for myself. “So about this trip?”
“Hmm? Oh, right.” I can’t see Violet, but the tension in her voice makes it clear that this isn’t a subject she’s eager to talk about. “The shortest explanation I can give you is that we need more income now that vampires aren’t covering our costs. Most members of the pack have jobs and live outside the sanctuary, but they’ve also got full lives. Some of the guys even have families. They can’t do much to pick up the slack or help us build our new home. I’m heading to Halifax to meet up with one of our associates who owns a company down there. He’s going to let me work remotely once we’re moved.”
“Doing what?”
“Graphic design. It’ll be nice to actually use my degree.”
I’m silent for too long. Violet laughs. “What, you thought werewolfing was my career? It’s not easy to go to school with a condition like mine, but Irene made sure I managed. She likes to know every member of her pack can survive in the human world if things go to shit with your kind.”
I don’t have an answer for that. Irene has good reason to worry, even now. “How is she?” I ask.
Violet sighs. “That’s more complicated. If it were up to her, we’d have moved already.”
“But?”
“But.” She’s silent for several minutes. The sun is rising now, and I have to pinch myself to stay awake until she speaks again. “Irene is sick. Has been for a while, even before you left us, but she was managing it fine. All of these changes are exciting, but they’re stressful, too. I’m taking on as much as I can—we all are—but it’s taking a toll on her. So the thought of moving away from the other pack and everything familiar, moving to a more remote area…”
“She’s nervous?”
Violet snorts. “She doesn’t give a good goddamn. I’m nervous. The pack needs our alpha. Moving right now seems too risky, but she’s adamant. Stubborn bitch.”
Her words would be shocking if they weren’t spoken with such deep affection—or for the fact that they’re literally true at least some of the time.
My eyelids are heavy. I could fight sleep if I needed to. And I should—it won’t pay to sleep too deeply when I’m this exposed. I won’t have much choice when morning comes, though.
“Mind if I listen to something?” Violet asks.
“Go ahead. I’m going to rest.”
Voices fill the vehicle. Not singing, but talking about current events. Politics. Human bullshit. Not so long ago, I would have cared. Even now, I should if only so I can more easily pass as human when I meet them. But the chatter passes by my ears with no more impact than the screeching of seagulls on the beach.
I hate this feeling of being in enemy territory on what should be my home soil. If there were vampires at the sanctuary, there could be vampires at the ferry terminal here or in North Sydney, all of them hunting me like a common rogue.
Miranda could have found a way to pardon me or to keep the clan’s focus on more important matters. She could have communicated more clearly what she wanted from me.
Maybe I’m wrong about all of this.
Sunlight glows between the flaps at the top of the box, and I pull the blanket up to hide my face. At least I can sleep knowing the rest of the goddamn corpses will have to call off the hunt until evening.
4
“Rise and shine.”
I pull the blankets tighter around me. I’ve been lost in my thoughts, only half-awake even after sunset, my mind filled with the dream I was having about Daniel. It wasn’t as pleasant as others I’ve had. This time I was searching and found him, but his beautiful face was mangled, his body broken. He begged me to end his pain by releasing him to oblivion, and I woke up feeling like I was going to vomit.
But that goddamn nightmare was still preferable to waking and facing the prospect of making my way into enemy territory, not knowing whether I’ll find him at all.
A rumbling chorus of engines echoes around us, and Violet starts the van. “Hey. You alive back there?”
“Close as I can be.”
“Good. I tried to get some rest, but I spent most of the day worried someone was going to find the corpse in my van. That would’ve been awkward.”
I roll over and push my hair out of my face. “Imagine how much worse it would have been for everyone when I woke up.”
Violet snorts. “Sit tight. I’ll pull over when we’re well away from the terminal.”
It’s hard to be patient. I try to remember the advice Taggryn once gave me—something about letting time pass over him, how that made it easier to wait, to endure. Impatience is a waste of energy. I know that. I also know that my muscles are stiff and I’m frozen from a long day in the bowels of a ferry. It’s a beautiful night. I can see the sky through the windows once we’re out of North Sydney and on the highway, and I ache to be out in the fresh air.
Violet pulls the van over some time later and slides the door open. “Welcome to Nova Scotia. Home of… fuck if I know.”
I break the side of the box in my eagerness to get out. The sky has cleared, and millions of stars shine down on us. I take a deep breath of air so cold it burns, then step away from the van—slowly at first, but my legs pick up speed as I descend the embankment beside the highway and then race up a hill into the woods. The trees here are mostly deciduous, and they look like a congregation of skeletons. My boots crunch over their discarded leaves as I run, stretching my legs, slipping, catching myself, racing onward into the night.
It’s not just the trees that are different here. I slow to a stop at the peak of the hill—technically the mountain, though worn and rounded by age—and focus on the energies around me. They’re present, but faint. Vague, and hard to perceive against the far-stronger void and fire I carry with me. I guess Susannah was right. I’ve spent the past few years in an unusual place without having any idea of how strange it was. We’re far from Newfoundland now, and from what she seems to believe is the source of those energies.
I turn and run again, nearly tumbling back down the slope in my unwillingness to slow down. The run doesn’t do as much to warm me as it would a living body, but it’s good to be free. By the time I return to Violet, I feel more like myself again.
She’s leaning against the side of the van, her breath coming out so thick and white that, for a second, I think she’s taking a smoke break. “Thought you were leaving again without saying goodbye.”
I grin and climb into the passenger seat. “Not a chance. I’m taking this free ride as far as it will carry me.”
Violet fastens her seatbelt and pulls back out onto the road. “Might be farther than you think. I’ve postponed my meeting for a few days.”
My skin prickles. “Is Irene okay with the delay?”
She turns to me and rolls her eyes. “She insisted.” I’m about to be flattered when she adds, “She appreciated the warning about your rival clan and the danger we could be in. Figures me getting you out there to stop them is good for us, too.”
“Sure.” My fingers pick at the fabric inside my coat pockets. “But I’m going to Ontario. Into another clan’s territory. It’s not safe for you there.”
Violet shrugs. “You want the ride or not?”
I think about it for long enough that Violet turns the radio on to fill the silence.
“As long as you promise you’ll leave if things start to look bad,” I say. “If I find vampires, they’re not going to be happy with me, but they might have reasons for sparing me. The same won’t be true for you. They’ll kill you without a second thought, and from what I’ve heard about this clan, they won’t make it quick.”
“Don’t I know it. Where are we headed? Toronto?”
“No. At least, not yet.” I reach into the back and haul my backpack onto my lap so I can pull out the pages Jia left for me. “I have no doubt there are a lot of vampires in that area, given the concent
ration of humans available to feed on. But I want to make another stop first.”
I flip through the pages until I come to a printed satellite image showing a more sparsely populated portion of Tempest’s territory, far north and east of Toronto. The grouping of buildings beside a small lake could be mistaken for a village, but the notation someone has typed next to it reads Camp Windy Acres.
More significantly, the photo is dated just before Halloween, when Maelstrom’s vampires were uncovering information on the Blood Defenders’ training grounds—the very place where Viktor sent Daniel and his crew.
“We’re heading toward Ottawa. Just outside it, actually.” I run my fingers over the picture. “We lost a team of vampires to Tempest there about a month ago. I want to find out what happened, see if there’s any indication of where the captives might have been taken.”
I know I’ll need to get deeper into Tempest to have a shot at finding the information I came for. But if I can find Daniel first…
“Ottawa-ish it is,” Violet says. “And I solemnly swear I’ll turn tail and run as soon as I catch a whiff of any vampire who isn’t you.” The van is warming up again, and Violet shrugs out of her coat. The familiar sounds of Christmas music have filled the vehicle. Familiar to me once, at least. I’ve ignored Christmas since my death—one thing I’ve managed to do like a proper vampire.
“Do you celebrate Christmas?” I ask. “Or any holidays?”
“No, but that’s not a general werewolf thing. Ask twelve of us about what we believe or celebrate, and you could get a dozen different answers. My family did when I was a kid, though, so I get a nice sense of nostalgia when I hear the music. Until the repetition starts to drive me insane.” She scowls at the speakers, which are now offering a modern take on an old Nat King Cole song. “There are definite advantages to removing oneself entirely from human society.”
“Like not having to listen to pop divas who need eighteen syllables to get the word ‘chestnuts’ out?”
Violet lets out a barking laugh. “Definitely. What about you? I mean, when you were alive. Were you into all this stuff?”
“God, yes. Total church kid.”
Violet groans. “I remember them in high school. They tried to make me a project, I swear. I mean, no offence. Nice bunch of people, most of them. I never wanted to talk to them about it when I started disappearing every month, so they just said they were praying for me.”
“Think it helped?” I want to be joking, but it feels as if there’s a carefully stitched seam in my heart that’s pulled tight and threatening to tear.
“Didn’t stop me being a werewolf, that’s for sure.” She turns the radio down and glances at me. “I’m really sorry I called you soulless when we met. That must’ve stung.”
I know she means well, but talking about this is picking at those threads. My feelings about my death and the loss of my soul—my connection to the light, a power that has rejected me as firmly as I once believed it embraced me—are something I think I’ve dealt with, but maybe I only buried them.
I clear my throat. “Ancient history. Maybe we should focus on what’s been happening since I left the sanctuary. Your pack needs to be prepared for whatever’s coming.”
Violet’s hands tighten around the steering wheel. “Guess you’d better start talking.”
The Blood Defenders’ camp was a hell of a job to find. Not that I didn’t know where to look— Xavier’s photo gave me an accurate view of the area. It was finding a road that would bring us to this remote lakeside location that was the challenge. Even the GPS in my car—rented thanks to Violet’s credit card and a promise that, if I survive this, I’ll pay her back every penny—gave up an hour outside the city.
I was almost glad when it did. Even that level of computational technology and wireless transmission was giving me a headache.
But we’re here. I’m not feeling any signs of human life. More importantly, I’m not getting any sense of vampires in the area. Whatever happened here, it looks like we’re alone now.
Still, the hair on the back of my neck is standing on end as we walk up the road toward a cluster of moonlit buildings. Small structures covered in whitewashed wood siding, hard-packed dirt paths, a boathouse on the water… the scene should feel peaceful, but nothing has felt right since we entered Tempest’s territory.
A breeze blows toward us, and Violet stops to sniff the air. Her senses aren’t as acute in this form as they would be if she were a wolf. Maybe it’s just habit.
“What do you think?” I ask.
She coughs into her elbow. “I don’t know. There’s nobody here if that’s what you mean.”
The journey has taken a toll on her. Of course it has—the only sleep she’s had for days has consisted of naps on the ferry or in the van’s passenger seat while I drove at night. The dark circles that shadow the skin beneath her eyes shouldn’t be any surprise. But she’s been quieter than she normally is. The cough started up some time after we crossed the border into Quebec and has grown steadily worse.
That gradual change reflected the one I’ve felt in our surroundings, though I didn’t notice it right away. I had to work to feel the presence of supernatural powers in Nova Scotia, and I didn’t want to waste my energy searching for them along the way. But some part of me knew. The void, my fire, the combination of them… they felt the change, and they passed along this feeling of apprehension that’s only grown as the journey toward the heart of Tempest’s territory progressed. And now that we’ve reached our destination, now that I’ve opened myself to whatever might be out there, I understand.
I feel nothing here.
No magic. No fire. Nothing aside from what Violet and I carry within ourselves. I’ll grow weaker the longer I go without feeding just as I would back home. Violet has no such need, but her current illness makes me wonder whether she draws on some other source I’ve never considered, anchored by the presence of her kind. I spent a year with werewolves and never saw one of them sick like this. It can’t be a coincidence.
This place, this emptiness, is the realization of Viktor’s dream for Maelstrom and its non-void energies. It’s only now that I feel their absence that I realize how strong those energies were on the island I left behind. I feel like a city kid spending my first night in the relative silence of the country.
Or like a dead woman waking up without a soul—she never knew what she had because she’d never been forced to live without it.
I shiver, and Violet gives me a strange look.
“Do werewolves come this way for work when they’re not at the sanctuary?” I speak quietly though I’m sure there’s no one here to listen in.
“Hell no.” Violet looks around suspiciously. We’ve reached the buildings now. Still no signs of life, but the place is full of dark spaces and potential hiding spots. “We stay in your clan’s territory when we can—and I can’t tell you how much we appreciate you all mostly keeping to yourselves in town at those times. Some of us fly out west for three weeks out of the month to work. Werewolves don’t exactly have a good history with vampires in other clans, but we can sneak around under their radar if we’re not undergoing the change on their turf. But we never risk Ontario or southern Quebec. Werewolves were exterminated here long before I was born.”
“And out west, and most other places.”
“Yeah, but this was…” She frowns. “In other places it was a job. They wiped us out because they had to, got it done with that damned efficiency your kind seems so partial to. But we still tell stories about things that happened around here. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why?”
She glares at me as we pass an open garage door. “Because I don’t want to remind myself of how much I should hate you for what you are.”
I’m about to answer when voices reach me—distant, but shouting. Angry. Without thinking, I throw myself at Violet, half-pushing, half-throwing her into the shelter of the garage. She stumbles, and we crash into a pile of life ja
ckets and rowboat oars.
She leaps to her feet, teeth bared like a wolf, shoulders hunched—not at the noises outside, but at me. I turn my back on her and creep toward the door. Violet leaps forward and grabs my arm, spinning me around to face her. The fire that’s always present, pulsing through her veins with every beat of her heart, is practically palpable in the air around us now.
“Let go and get down!” I order. The shouts are gone, but I pull free and crouch beside the open doorway, watching for enemies. “And calm the fuck down. If anyone out there can feel the werewolf in you…”
She obliges, stepping into the shadows, but she’s moving slowly. “Aviva… there’s no one out there.”
I turn to her, not trying to hide my disbelief. “How can you not have heard them? It sounded like a fight. Or… Oh. Shit.” I sit on the concrete floor and rest my head in my hands, eyes closed.
The voices are gone. She’s right. There’s no one here.
Violet crouches beside me and lays a hand on my arm. “Tell me you’re not hallucinating.”
“No.” I stand and brush the dirt off the back of my pants. “This hasn’t happened to me recently. I don’t fully understand it, but I guess I pick up on energies left behind by people when they died—especially if there was supernatural involvement in the death. I see things, hear things, get a sense of what was happening.” I squeeze my eyes shut again for a second to clear my head. “I wasn’t attacking you, I swear. It just sounded so real.”
Violet’s rubbing her arm when I look back at her. “Apology accepted, such as it is. Is this weirdness something that could help us?”
“Yes. I need bodies. Bones. Anything connected with the people who left those screams behind.”
Violet slips her coat off and hangs it on a nail that’s sticking out of the wall. “Give me a minute alone. I’ll see what I can do.”
The night is still and silent as I step outside, but I’m on edge. The place feels haunted now. Even if I know whatever’s been left behind isn’t going to hurt me, it’s still creepy as fuck.