Shifters After Dark Box Set: (6-Book Bundle)

by SM Reine

  “I have no idea. You are the one who lives here,” replied Gisla. “If we can just find one that opens out of doors, we can get to my father’s stronghold and he will send help.”

  “There is a man in the kitchen—” Aein began, thinking of Cook Bolstad. She prayed he stayed barricaded in the larder.

  “I am sorry,” said Princess Gisla, her voice kind but firm, “but we cannot.”

  “What?”

  The princess raised her hand to stop her protest. “We are under attack and everyone, not just your friend, will die if we do not get help now.”

  “But—”

  “I am not heartless, Aein. But if he is alive, it means he has found a way to stay alive. If he is dead, us risking our lives to find him will not change the fact. We must place the survival of the larger stronghold above the survival of just one. We must continue on to my father.”

  “But you are cursed, too!” said Aein, the words spilling out from her before she could think them through. “What if we infect your father’s kingdom?”

  Gisla stiffened and turned away to continue walking. “That is not true.”

  Aein raced up to catch her. “Princess, tell me what happened during the wedding feast?”

  There was a pause. “I don’t know,” she finally replied. “I can’t remember… But that does not mean anything.”

  “You can’t remember anything?” said Aein. “Doesn’t that seem strange?”

  “What are you implying, little girl?” she asked. Her blue eyes pierced the darkness of the hallway.

  The rage in Gisla’s eyes robbed Aein of all her words. Aein opened her mouth and shut it again, but then remembered Finn and the deep calm he seemed to always carry with him. He would do his duty no matter the cost. Aein had to be brave enough for the both of them. “We need to be careful not to place your father’s stronghold at risk.”

  Gisla kept walking, refusing to look at Aein. Refusing to acknowledge there was even anyone with her. The tunnel ended at a doorway. Gisla placed her ear upon the door and listened.

  “There is no sound beyond,” she said, placing her hand upon the handle.

  Aein reached out to touch her arm. “Princess, reconsider.”

  “This is a trick,” she spat at Aein. “A filthy trick of this stronghold. Did your traitorous Lord Arnkell put you up to this? Did he drug me at my own wedding feast? And then sic you on me to keep me prisoner here? To turn me into a madwoman? To get me to forfeit the lands I won by right?”

  “Our two strongholds are now one,” said Aein. “I serve you as well as Lord Arnkell. I am your servant, even more than I am his. And so I must put this question to you—”

  “Stop,” said Gisla, looking at Aein with hatred and mistrust in her eyes. “We are going to leave this cursed place. We are going to seek help. And we shall see, once the sun sets, what sort of curse has been laid upon this land. We shall see if it is indeed magic or just some invasion of wild dogs.”

  “You know these are not wild dogs.”

  “I know that you pushed me out of the room before I could even look at one.”

  “You slew one. You saw how big they were.”

  “Battle makes everything seem more frightening than it is. It is only in the aftermath of their defeat that we see how small and helpless our enemies truly are.”

  They stepped out of the door. It emptied behind a tapestry in the great hall. There were sounds of screams and fighting drifting into the room. The princess clenched her jaw in frustration and defeat. “We shall be back with my father’s forces.”

  Aein did not know how else to convince Princess Gisla of what was going on. Defeated, she agreed. “We shall.”

  They pushed open the front door, but that was where their luck ended. In the courtyard, circling and hungry were a dozen wolves.

  As soon as the creatures caught sight of the women, they began creeping forward, prepared to leap at any moment.

  Gisla pulled out her sword. “You must promise me that no matter what… no matter what happens to me, you will go to my father.”

  “I promise,” said Aein, not allowing her eyes to leave the brutes. There was one in front of her with a gash on his shoulder. She would go after him first. She would pick upon the weakest.

  And then the battle was met. Without any sort of warning, the beasts leapt through the air to take on Aein and Gisla.

  Slashing and cutting, Aein forced her way through. She felt buffeted by them, she struggled to keep her feet. She could not allow them to knock her over. To be knocked over would mean death. The front portcullis was twenty feet away. Ten feet. She could do it. She could get across the drawbridge. She could get into the woods where who knew what dangers might lurk, but at least they would be better than being trapped in this courtyard. She would get to Gisla’s fathers and there, his own soldiers could take on these monsters. She just had to not die. She just had to get away.

  She heard Gisla’s cry. She saw as the woman backed into the stronghold and closed the door behind herself, leaving Aein alone in the courtyard. The wolves leapt at the door in a frenzy, as if to be barred was worse than being able to take down the prey they had.

  Aein did not wait. She ran. She heard the wolves behind her, drawn by her footsteps. There was the winch which held the portcullis up. All it would take was one hit to the metal handle and it would go down. The dogs were closer. She knocked it as she ran and slid beneath the gate before it thundered shut. Inches behind her, it fell upon the wolves, crushing them beneath the weight of the iron, impaling them beneath the pointed base.

  Panting, she bent over, her hands upon her thighs. She thought her heart might burst open. More of the werewolves flung themselves against the gate, but until they learned how to work a winch, they would not be escaping through that route.

  Aein looked up at the tower walls. Gisla stood in one of the windows and saluted her. Then the princess looked over her shoulder as if she heard something and was gone.

  It was all up to Aein now.

  She ran as fast as she could towards the northern road.

  She was not there to see that just an hour later, a single wolf with an injured shoulder was able to wriggle beneath the portcullis, a wolf determined to follow her and bring her down.

  Chapter Eleven

  She was exhausted. She had not slept since yesterday morning, but she knew she could not rest. Every moment she wasted meant someone inside the stronghold died. She had to push on to the Haidra kingdom. It was a day’s journey on fast horseback. She did not have a horse.

  And even if she did have the luxury of sleep, she did not think she would have been able to. The images of everything she had seen flooded her mind. The carnage. The death. In the quiet of the woods, it all kept repeating. It would not leave her. It would not silence.

  She leaned her hand against a tree for strength before continuing on. She knew it was the shock of what happened which made it seem like nowhere was safe. It felt as if there were eyes on her at every turn. She felt as if in every dark shadow something lurked. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. She knew the reality was that at any moment, the wolves might escape the stronghold. But she knew, too, that this impending sense of doom was her own paranoia, just her mind trying to keep her alive.

  She stumbled forward, placing one exhausted foot before the other in a half-hearted jog. If only she had thought to escape to the stables. If only she had thought this through, but there had been no time. Just survival.

  She scanned the road ahead. Perhaps she would happen upon some kind farmer who would help her. Perhaps there would be an inn. But she knew this northern road. Besides the bandits who inhabited the forest, when wars broke out between the Haidra and Arnkell strongholds, this was the road their soldiers marched. The peasantry had retreated long ago. It was a dead land. There was a single inn in between the two territories, reachable by a full day of walking. It was now noon. She should reach it before the sun went down… she would reach it before the sun went down.
.. The words became a mantra. …before the sun went down...

  Where had she heard those words? The phrase rang in her head over and over as her feet fell upon the ground. It was Cook Bolstad, she realized. He had said it in the kitchen. Was he even alive? Now she could not stop the wash of the memories, of the final moments they probably would ever have alive together.

  The pain of that realization gripped her like a vice and squeezed her chest. Her hand balled up into a fist and clenched her heart. She had to trust he stayed in the larder, she told herself. She had to trust that he was safe. She picked up her pace. The only way she could help him would be to get help.

  But as her mind went through the images and memories of him, something else wriggled in. A traitorous thought. An unwanted, unbidden thought. But once it was there…

  When she went down into the kitchen, he had been sitting there beside the fire without having made the next course. He had not been rushing around. He had not seemed worried about seeing to things. He said the chaos would begin after the sun went down. Was he just talking about the rhythm of the day?

  That unwanted voice in her head whispered otherwise.

  It was as if he knew… as if he knew there would be no need of his services. How could that have been? How could he have known?

  Unless… she thought. She did not wish to think it. This man raised her. He had taken her from the kitchen and sent her to training. She owed him everything. And yet… he knew something. He knew something was coming from the swamp… or did he know something had already been brought back from the swamp? A delicacy which was placed in the food of every man, woman, and child in the stronghold the night of the wedding feast? Finn warned her a cook wielded that sort of power. Aein stopped herself. She told herself that her mind was just creating conspiracies because the truth was too horrible to accept.

  She stopped and looked back towards the castle. Could Cook Bolstad have lived through the carnage? What if their very salvation, the one man who knew what was to happen, was still alive somewhere in the stronghold? What if the one person who could stop all this died before she returned?

  She looked north. She had promised Gisla that she would continue on to her father’s kingdom. She was half a day’s journey there, but there were at least two more days ahead of her. She had promised she would come back with reinforcements... but that same voice reminded her she promised Lars she would come back with reinforcements, too. She was always going off to get someone else to save the day. And they never did.

  Could she live through that again?

  She knew the answer was no.

  And so, Aein turned back to the castle.

  It would not matter if she came back with one-thousand soldiers if they had no idea how to cause the change to stop. It would not matter if they slew every wolf in the stronghold. Those wolves were people. Her people. People she had sworn to protect. If there was some way to prevent their mass slaughter, to somehow preserve their humanity. She had a duty.

  By the time she was within sight of the stronghold, the sun was dipping low in the sky. She stayed behind the tree line in the hopes she would not be spotted. It was silly, she realized. The wolves probably already scented her. They were wolves, after all.

  In the distance, she could see the portcullis was still shut, the beasts impaled beneath its weight. They were still cut in two and dead. With the way they shook off injury, she was surprised they were not still wiggling beneath the spiked gate. She saw wolves running along the ramparts high overhead. But she did not see that any had escaped outside.

  All she had to do was wait. When the sun set, all of the wolves now trapped in the courtyard would change back into people, people who could let her in. She tried not to think of all the others people trapped inside who would be shifting back with the darkness twilight brought.

  It was then she heard the leaves behind her shuffle and she knew she was not alone. Please let it be a squirrel or a rabbit, she whispered to herself. But she knew it was not.

  She did not even bother to look and see what was stalking her. She dropped her sword and scrambled up the trunk of the closest tree. She felt the jaws of the wolf clamp down onto her boot. She felt its teeth bite through the hardened leather. She wrapped her arms around the tree branch and kicked. She connected, knocking the werewolf in the nose. It made him release to try and grab her other foot.

  But that moment of distraction was all she needed. She swung her legs up. The werewolf snapped at her, leaping into the air, his teeth inches from her back. Her arrows fell out of her quiver and spilled onto the ground.

  She tightened her grip and gradually was able to work her way around the branch until she was finally on top of it. She paused, holding tight as she glanced up. The werewolf was now trying to use the trunk of the tree to propel himself higher. She had to climb.

  Or she could allow herself to die, the voice inside her head whispered, and then she would not have to fight anymore.

  The tip of the wolf’s whiskers grazed her hand. She could see in his eyes he had figured out how close that had been, too. She silenced the voice. She had made a promise to Princess Gisla she still needed to fulfill.

  She pushed herself up, balancing on the branch. She gripped the trunk and looked for the next handhold. The tree shook as the wolf hit it again. And then the tree shook and the bough bent. She hugged the trunk for dear life. The wolf had reached the branch. He was too heavy and it sagged beneath his weight. He could not hold on and it went flying as he fell off. Leaves and twigs sprayed her. Her feet scrambled to push her higher. The next branch was above her. She reached for it. It didn’t look strong enough to hold her but it was her only choice. The branch she was on bent once more, and this time, there was a great cracking sound as the wolf tore it from the tree, leaving her dangling in thin air.

  Her fingertips slipped and she fell.

  She slammed into the ground, her ankle twisting painfully. Her sword was where she dropped it, far from reach. She could not run. She could not fight. She cowered as the werewolf crept towards her, his teeth snapping and snarling the air.

  Closer he came. Closer.

  So this was how it ended for the two guards in the swamp, she thought. This was how she left Lars to die.

  And then, suddenly, the wolf stopped.

  His eyes became cloudy. His face became passive. He fell on his side as if in great pain. He whimpered and cried as he writhed on the ground. Aein looked up at the sky, now painted with great swaths of pinks and gold and realized what was happening.

  The figure began to fade until nothing was left but the body of a man, one who had kept her alive the first night.

  “Finn?” she whispered, kneeling down beside him and gathering his head into her lap.

  He writhed again in pain as the last of the wolf left and only the man remained. He looked up at her. His yellow eyes faded into blue.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “You’re safe,” she said, smoothing his forehead. “I have you and you are safe.”

  “I had the most terrible dream,” he said. “I dreamt I was chasing people. The entire dream was filled with fear and terror. The images…”

  She did not know if it would be cruel or kind to tell him the dream was not a dream. Was it better to let these werewolves know what they were up to when the moment of shift happened? Or better to let them live in blissful ignorance? There was nothing they could do to change their actions, only live plagued by what they become when the change came each day.

  He looked over at his arm and then sat up. He unwrapped the bandage that had been placed upon the great bite wound earlier that day. Beneath it, his skin was clear and soft without a mark.

  “How did I heal?” he asked, staring at her with fear. It was the first time she had ever seen him scared of anything.

  Aein hung her head. “I am afraid you have fallen prey to the curse of the stronghold.”

  Finn seemed to be at a loss for words, and then finally he spoke. “Am I o
ne of them?” he asked. “Is that the reason I have not been able to remember what happened between sunset and sunrise today?”

  Aein nodded. “It is true.”

  Finn, for all his strength, for all of the power he held as a warrior, at that moment he seemed to crumble. He jumped up and turned away so she could not see the tears which she knew were flooding down his face. Instead, she only witnessed the rise and fall of his shaking shoulders and a few muffled sobs into his clenched fist. She waited, allowing him the time to overcome his emotions.

  He wiped his face and then turned back to her. “Do you think that there are people who fell to me? Did I kill my own people?” he asked.

  Aein glanced up at the treetops around them, thinking of how close he came to killing her. How he had chased she and Princess Gisla through the stronghold. How they had barely escaped. Her silence was the answer Finn was looking for.

  “You believe I did.”

  “No!” she replied quickly. “No. I think… I think you escaped the stronghold this morning before you had a chance. You were out here…”

  The silence hung between them again. Finn looked up at the tree, at her sword, at her arrows upon the ground. “…I was out here stalking you,” he said, finishing her sentence.

  “You did not know what you were doing,” she assured him. She was making nervous flapping motions as she searched for the right words. “You could not stop yourself.”

  He came over and knelt beside her, taking her hands in his as the last rays of light faded from the sky. He could not meet her eyes, he was so full of shame. “I am sorry,” he apologized.

  She took her palm and let it rest it on his cheek, forcing him to look at her, just as he had forced her to live the night before. “I would not have survived without you,” she said, willing him to hear her, to understand her. “And I need you now to help me stay alive.”

  “I…”

  “It is your duty,” she said, throwing down the last card she had to play.

  He rose and nodded. He walked over and picked up her arrows and her sword. She stood to meet him halfway, hobbling slightly on her turned ankle. He caught the movement and she could see another wave of guilt wash over him.